Spiritual journey notes

On Friday we chose a place to live. It’s a telavang – a tall, narrow apartment (or townhouse), three stories high with a  rooftop suitable for an urban garden. It’s a concrete box with high ceilings and smooth tile underfoot. It was cool inside as we entered, a good sign that it’s lined up to avoid direct sun. The “quiet” street outside is lined with similar apartments on both sides. It ends at a wall, so cars can’t pass through. A few children played outside. The street is wide, creating a community space that feels open and inviting: room to make friends, laugh, play, and bounce thoughts and prayers outward and upward.

We settled the deal yesterday morning. A trusted Cambodian friend-of-my-friend found the place and handled all the negotiations. He did a great job and earned a commission equal to one month’s rent.

Our requests included: air conditioners in three rooms, small water heaters for two of the showers, screens on windows and openings, and a boost in the electric circuit for the unit (15 amperes to 20 or 30). The owners agreed. We paid six months rent up front, and they will use that money to make the upgrades. This is a great system for renters! In Japan, we would have paid lots of money up front and gotten nothing in return, and we would have to install (and uninstall) air conditioners at our own expense.

It’s standard for owners to pay a commission, even if a friend is helping another friend find a place to live. Some sensitivity is called for if multiple people are helping you find a place to live, because the commission is a significant amount of money for most Cambodians. As a general rule, I learned, it’s best to work with one person who has some experience negotiating with owners.

We can move in any time, starting from August 1st, if we don’t mind them working around us. First, we have to buy the basic necessities. Yesterday, we made our first purchases: a good rice cooker, a pound of coffee, and a coffee press. Next we need: beds, rice, etc. If all goes well, I hope we can move in by Wednesday. The kids start school the following Monday.

The school, by the way, if a five minute walk away. We have to cross one large street (the Dike Road), so we’ll become experts at doing that.

If we walk another five minutes, we’ll come to the Khmer School of Language (KSL).  We like KSL, because they offer a balance of conversational Khmer and basic reading and writing. We’ll probably study there for an hour a day, plus practice time and homework.

On Friday, after showering off the dust, I settled down to read a book I’d found laying around: Twelve By Twelve, by William Powers. It’s another man’s perspective on living simply.  A former development leader and activist, he wonders if his efforts were all futile. He longs for healing in a hard, flattened world oppressed by greed and despair.  He comes from a different faith and perspective, but I can relate with his story and learn from him.

Our new apartment is a world removed from the twelve foot by twelve foot house where William Powers began his journey of renewal. We’ll have a lot more square footage, electricity, and concrete in place of nature…with a garden on top. But I echo his desire to live in a way that truly signals change, with hope that won’t be crushed.

Sorry about the lack of a picture. I’ll post one soon.

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We’re leaving for Cambodia tomorrow. I haven’t written much about the move on this blog, but I suspect the transition will bring new life to my posts here.

We’re going to get our hands dirty. This is literally true for me, because I’m bringing thousands of seeds for gardening projects. For the record, I don’t have a green thumb, but I was well coached by a true expert (and I’m at that age when men strangely take to growing things from the earth). We’ll be plunging into new relationships, learning language and culture together, and continuing to share our journey with others searching for “a better way to live.”

You may know I’ve been taking groups of Japanese to Cambodia since early 2008, and last year our family went there for Christmas. This year we completed the process of founding Project Friends, a Japanese non-profit to help sustain and organize these efforts through a learning community in Japan.

We have a small but incredible team of volunteers in Japan. We met with many of them on Sunday. As several of them shared reports of the work they’ve done, I thought about how the scene might appear to an outside viewer. He or she might ask how we did it, pulling together such gifted people and inspiring them to participate, and I would reply: I don’t know. You can’t get such people to do that; they have to choose with freedom.

I do give credit to Hitomi, and to other leaders in the group, for facilitating relationships that people want to be part of.

Here is a video that we made to publicize Project Friends for potential participants. We made it in Japanese, but I’ve added subtitles to this version. The music is the chorus of a popular song about love and life that quaintly but hopefully repeats: Your smile will show me the way.

We’re a diverse community.We dream of a learning community in Japan who truly seek a “better way to live” as they work out the mystery of what it means to love.  We also dream of Japanese living alongside Cambodians at the margins.

We come to this work with faith in Jesus, yet we come open-handed without power in ourselves. We share freely but will not push others or expect them to respond to us. If people are made in God’s image, and God is calling them, why would we want to manipulate them and disrespect their journeys and choices? Rather, we can work and learn together with anyone who hungers for love, because we believe that hunger can only be satisfied by encountering the God who is Love, who became love in the flesh and lived among us.

With that parting thought, we cast off of our this new leg of our journey.

Let the adventures begin!

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Seth Godin keeps writing things that challenge me to live to the fullest, not settle for life in a small story.  He writes:

…a never-ending cycle of optimization can become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the endless unknown, not the banal stair step of incremental optimization. While Yahoo was optimizing their home page in 2001, the guys at Google were inventing something totally new.

There are so many ways we settle for less. Another is competition. “Winning” is supposed to have value. Demagogues are people willing to “wreck the system” to win. Demagoguery seems to be on the rise. What is the bigger story? Godin writes:

What happens when you define a win as getting closer to someone who wants the same thing? Or when you define it as improvement over time? Or in creating trust?

I don’t know Seth Godin personally, but he’s talking about love, at least in part. Winning is nothing if the story ends there. Movies that end with the cheers of the crowd at the end of the game conceal that point. Victories in the big and small games we play recede with time into nothingness, and so do we if we attach ourselves to them. Love creates big stories that ascend and expand as they go.

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Today I’m going through old boxes that have been in storage for years. Most contain books, but I’ve also saved loads of memorabilia: pictures, letters, journals, trophies, medals, ribbons (from when I ran), 40 year old pennants, gifts I never threw away, etc.

I found two poems in a pile of letters. I haven’t written that many poems in my life. I wish I was a great poet, but I’m not. But when I write a poem, it’s because ordinary words aren’t enough for what I want to say. For that reason, these old verses still move me.

I may regret this, but I’m going to post them, in case the originals never come out of the boxes.  The first is about my youthful experience of nature, and the second is about losing in love (naturally).

Back to nature

Go to the woods
in the mountains
where light plays
through pine needles

creates lurking shadows in the bowls between hills
puts warm spots on the tops of jumbled boulders

Lay on a boulder, on a hilltop,  looking up
while grayness becomes a red glow
Then darkness, then full night

And observe the lights
of the city glow still
‘neath a myriad of stars

The moon presides

Dream of she dies

My arm on her shoulder, we
rode a churning boat, which sent
mist dripping from smiles. We exchanged
words and subtleties; conveyed
a decision. Love
was an illusion

We separated. She
rode on with friends. I
pitched pebbles, whose
bubbles sought the surface. My
friends, between paramedics, bled
on white beach towels. Missing her,
bruised expressions failed
to comfort my pleading.
I wake up crying.

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For the past few years I’ve been mentored from afar by Wayne Jacobsen. He’s known by some for his work in getting The Shack published. If you flip to the back of that book you’ll probably find a couple of his books recommended. The phrase “Living loved and loving others” is how Wayne states his life’s desire. He’s always fleshing it out what that means, whether in a book, blog entry, podcast, or in person.  I trust Wayne to be real and to write or speak what’s on his mind without hidden expectations, and I feel very grateful for the couple of times we’ve met and the countless times I’ve benefited from his wisdom.

He hasn’t died or anything. I just thought I’d mention Wayne and post this short quote that caught my attention from his blog today:

Until you know you are loved you will be sucked into every religious activity and performance treadmill that exists, hoping against hope that you can do the right thing to merit that deep affection from the heart of the Father. But you already have his affection! The great lie of the universe is that you are not loved by the Creator of all. The question is only do you realize how loved you are?

If you’re interested in hearing more, Wayne has a wonderful series of audio teachings called Transitions. I’ve told several friends about this series lately, so I’ll go ahead and add some links here. You can get them from his website in the audio library section, or from iTunes, or I’ve uploaded them all in one zip file that you can download here.

I’m one of the very LAST people (trust me) to download anyone’s “audio series” and walk around listening to it. The very thought of downloading teachings or sermons makes me want to turn in another direction immediately. But this is my big exception. It’s just so good that I can’t help suggesting that others check it out. That goes for the podcasts, too.

For those who may worry I’ve fallen for some guru, Wayne is not a guru. He is a down to earth guy who knows and teaches from the Bible as well as anyone I’ve ever met, and he’s one of the most liberating, out-of-the-box thinkers I’ve ever learned from.

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