Hello again… I have a few things on my mind… Spirituality, praxis, and laundry.
Ill start with the most painful…LAUNDRY. Just a little piece of knowledge to keep with you… those things we call laundry machines. THOSE ARE MIRACLES AND ANGELS AND EVERYTHING WONDERFUL. I just finished doing a load of laundry, I remember how I used to complain about this at home.. oh what a pain to put my clothes in the machine press start and wait 30 minutes to put them in another machine. Here we do all our laundry by hand. Soak, soap, scrub, rinse and rinse and rinse, ring out and then hang to dry and wait ya know just a quick 4 days. The thing is this would be totally worth it if my clothes felt super clean afterwards… but for some reason it just seems really hard to get them clean. Ill hopefully get the hang of it eventually, but for now I will struggle with my laundry. But I will do it laughing. Its silly… sometime Ill take a video so you can watch. Also, dirty is the name of the game here. Sticky, smelly, buggy, ya know… all those beautiful things that remind you that spending hours getting ready in the morning SO is not worth it. And you are much more than how badly you smell ;)
Ok enough for the whining…
Last night we had our first spirituality night. Spirituality is a BIG scary thing. Everyone sees it so differently, and sometimes it totally scares people away. We talked about what breathes life into us. Oh could I go on for days. I really love this life, people, nature, meaningful conversations, writing, kiddos, exercising… so much more. Then we talked about what faith tradition we were born into and where we are today in our spiritual journey. I guess you could say I was born Catholic. I mean I was, I am baptised and I think when I was itty bitty we went to church a lot. Life was pretty scary then and I know my parents found some solace in church. Then slowly life kept happening, and church became a Christmas and Easter event. I know so little about the bible and all of those things you learn if you are “born into a faith tradition”. I toyed with Young Life for a while but got scared away real fast… A lot of that knowing little but kinda wishing I knew something happened for a long time.
Senior year came along and life decided to send me on quite the ride during the spring. It seemed pretty scary. I remember days wondering how it was ever going to work out. Crutches, lots of time in my house alone, scary college money questions and scary things happening to people who matter more than I could ever understand. People helped me through it and that’s a totally different conversation. Something happened then on my spiritual journey though. Last day of senior year I went to Walter Byron during a free period. I remember exactly what I was wearing, the people I was texting, the thoughts I was having. And the colorful elephant journal I was writing in. The sun was beaming down and suddenly I realized… life is REALLY good. Im about to graduate, I am going to the school of my dreams, everyone is alive and kicking and we are making it through this scary rollercoaster. It just hit me that things work out, in crazy crazy ways. Something changed in me and since then I have just had this deep faith that things work out. I cant say 100% what I believe. Some part wants to believe in the God, some part just cant quite commit. For now… I am a believer in the Universe. I have faith that somehow things work out, that painful moments have deeper meanings of learning and growth, and that every moment is right in some way shape or form as long as I have the right attitude about it all. I believe the Universe puts things on my path for specific reasons, I believe life makes more sense than I sometimes want to believe. I believe everything will turn out somehow. And I also know I have a lot of learning and exploring still left to do. But for now.. I am a Universe person.
Now I am here in this place where struggle is so common. Poverty is life. The community I am spending two days a week in is full of people making $3 a day, close to $100 a month… and yesterday I learned that for a family of 4 to survive on the minimum that we in the U.S. consider necessary, they need about $600 a month. Sometimes two people in a family work but they often have more than two kids. Try as you might that just doesn’t equate. So things like electricity, water, phones, clothes, shoes, healthy food, education are no longer necessary or possible. Kids as young as 3 have seen their fathers killed because of gang involvement. And their peers already know how precious every kernel of rice is. High school is a dream that many cannot fulfill cause of money and distance, not because of intelligence or dedication. The struggle goes on. So what in the world is faith and spirituality in a world like that?
Having faith in the universe really means something totally different for me. I have a roof over my head, food to sustain me and an education that keeps me learning and growing, All that will in itself make everything turn out all right. What about with out those things? How do believe that everything will work out, and that things happen for a reason if you have never experienced a moment of complete comfort and fulfillment. That is what I am here to learn. I guess it’s about being comforted and sustained by different things. Family, love, sunshine. Really the same things… but without some of the basics I feel like so many of us wouldn’t be sustained by those things. Its like the needs pyramid.. basic comes long before self fulfillment (or whatever the correct words are..ya know)
At the end of our praxis days we drive out of the community honking and waving at the dozens of people we see walking back to their homes. All with such joy. But I wonder how it feels for them to see us leaving. They don’t get to drive away at the end of the day to their comfortable beds, running water, fresh cooked meals and big laundry sinks to whine about. That is home, not just something they are coming into to learn from. I feel ashamed driving away smiling and waving. We live such a different reality where we can drive away at the end of the day. Where faith in the universe becomes a little easier. With time I will ask these questions, I will search for a whole new meaning of faith, rooted in something so much deeper than that which I hold onto.
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