Pietro

Sunlight is drawn over my frame like a sheath,
Wind firmly holds my weight.
Lemonbalm, Lavender, Fresh Water around my feet.
You Have Known everything that makes me strong. You Have Known what weakens me.
You put me in lasting comfort, in real safety. Without building up stories You console me.

Excited For ideas that find me in the middle of the night, the ones that wake and grip me equally with concern and intrigue. Without illumination, we can sense the joy on each other's faces, building and planning and decorating dreams - journeys, mechanisms, surprises.

I searched every corner and thread of You, every ripple and scent,
for me in You.
I looked with all of my strength for some sign in You that I am worth all of this, that I deserve.
I look for You to show there is good of me.
Forgiving this, You stay.
All I know is You Are Here with me.

moment.um

The first time I remember a fancy party, I remember I danced. A boy asked my dad if he could dance with me, and my dad told him to ask me. I said yes, and we made the shape of a sunburst on a hardwood floor with our feet, waddling purposefully to the music with adults towering over us. Looking up, I saw tall women with simple earrings and their bouncing hair tethered by pins. The boy ran away when he was older. He used a new name. His parents split and they had a tough time understanding him, and he hid on the other side of the country. He runs and runs and runs and runs and runs and I want to learn the words he would pick to describe how running makes him feel. His animation, his welling up. I pray his bones are thrust into forward form by joy and by knowing how much love his father showed him when he flew out to one of the marathons. I pray that it doesn't stop or still, chilled by doubt, regret, or anxiety. I pray that they fill each other with warmth, that the perception of unlovableness is set aside for the thawing, stretching, moving, pressing on of love.

The families I know who are most defined by living joyously have suffered greatly. Heartbreak that is not permitted to become bitterness can become a sensitivity that reveals how much we long for something whole, and there's not much that is. We can find what is.

We know that in this very plain way the power of what is actually whole is accessible and perfected in weakness and we are driven out of grief and into some form of celebration, which is in itself a finishing, completing place. I'm glad to live there. It is finished. It is restored. It has a vastly different quality than the never-quite-bliss that comes from guardedness or deliberate insulation from the broken things.

These families invite the outsider, the potentially bitter soul, the thing with a wrong appetite to take comfort in the truth and to celebrate what is whole. They feel and break and hurt and celebrate and celebrate and celebrate. And host and host and host.

Passive Voice Existance

Though I hardly have the mind to appreciate it fully, today's technology is astounding. Most of the people I spend time with make a living inventing ways to detect specific aerosols and pollutants of any kind from miles away using just light. How these people are not moved to awe and gratitude to a Creator who is very clearly beyond anything we could ask or imagine is beyond me, and the more I consider that the less naive I feel for it. We are very excited that we can count photons. We overlook that photons were created. It's not hard to say we live for a God who already knows everything, but when we celebrate our "discoveries" (and we should!), perhaps we could do so with a feeling of revelation over our feeling of accomplishment. Whatever we know - photon counts included - is revealed, and only in very small part by expensive lasers and sharp minds (and those, too, to the glory of God). I am surrounded by concepts that prompt enthusiasm... honing that feels effortless today, maybe because I am not the one directing it.

A week ago, I woke up dark and early to the sound of newborn ducklings requesting breakfast. Attracted to the warmth here throughout the winter, their parents must have decided I could be a hospitable nanny. Beats being a cat lady.

I made a bowl of oatmeal, accidentally dropped it into the briny blue (first time for everything), threw on a green Miss Rachel tee, and drove to West River to meet a gaggle of eleven-year-olds on their first field trip to one of my favorite places. After a long day of great questions and tried patience, several of them together asked me to make sure they could come back in the summer.

Sweaty and sunburned, I enjoyed cruising straight into downtown DC traffic-free at 6pm by way of Suitland Parkway to meet visiting friends. I walked the couple to Eastern Market, stopping to hear them identify the plays sculpted on the side of the Foulger Shakespeare Library and enjoy perfumed gardens, brightly painted front doors, and terrible parking jobs.

We nestled into the bar at AA2 tripping over our ital-yano and I had to stop Kieran from sending out my favorite dish. Sampling salad and pasta until Saji snuck us through the speakeasy upstairs, the sun retired behind North Hall, silent before the storm of a summery Saturday flea market.

Walking back past the Capitol, the sky had clouded up, partially veiling the crescent moon, and pigeons circled the well-lit dome gliding and then darting after moths. My friends talked about tilting Greek columns and the subtlety of security detail. They took lean-to pictures in front of fountains and found their hotel a few miles up the road.

I'm not sure anything is as comforting as making someone else comfortable or as enjoyable as being enjoyed.

Earth Day

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. 

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. 

-Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1927)

A Belgian entrepreneur talks to Ewelina Kawczynska about flying planes into war zones for charity

These days he flies for pleasure, but twenty years ago, Leon Didden risked his life flying food and medical supplies on a voluntary basis to stricken countries in Africa including Chad, Sudan, Mozambique, Somalia and Ethiopia. After ten years of flying into some of the world’s most dangerous places, Didden was grounded by a nasty bout of malaria which put him into a coma for five months. Yet the illness didn’t put a stop to his enthusiasm for a little known charity Aviation sans Frontières (Aviation without Borders), providing voluntary air transport for NGOs and charities taking medicine, food and clothes to the victims of conflict, and transporting people from dangerous regions to safe places.
The seeds of ASF were sown in the late 1960s by a group of French pilots flying mercy missions to Biafra with humanitarian assistance, and evacuating malnourished children, shortly before the renowned French charity Medicins sans Frontières (doctors without Borders) was set up by a group of French doctors and journalists.
Didden, the retired proprietor of a well-known carpet business in Brussels, now run by his daughter Nathalie, was instrumental in setting up the Belgian wing of ASF, and was its president for ten years.
“We fly where others don’t fly,” he says. “It is the most beautiful and fantastic experience you can have, but you have to be a ‘bush pilot’, the man who can do everything,” he adds.
 Pilots on these missions need to be stress-resistant, unafraid to fly in dangerous conditions and need to think outside the box, according to Didden. Unfortunately, he says, there are nowadays not many pilots willing to volunteer to fly to conflict regions for free. He says they either simply don’t have the time or are not mentally strong enough.
“Twenty years ago it was different,” says Leon Didden. “There were more pilots than there are today, a lot of things have changed.”
With ASF providing air transport for organisations such as MSF, Caritas and the United Nations, the organisation’s planes and fuel are funded by voluntary donations from individuals as well as larger sponsors such as the Rotary Club, the European Commission, and the UN. With sister organisations in France, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, ASF-Belgium currently boasts 20 active pilots qualified to fly the rugged single engined six-seater Cessna utility aircraft most suited to their missions.

Source: http://www.togethermag.eu/articles/leon-diddens-commitment-aviation-without-borders