Running

A Saudi National was running from a bomb that exploded in the middle of a crowd and he was tackled and questioned for it.  He is cooperative and scared and tackled.  I saw a photo of a man who was injured.  I was warned, by the Atlantic twitter feed, that it was graphic and I am haunted and horrified for that man who was being carried by three others because his legs were gone, one of the merely injured.There is one official feed of the explosion that keeps running on the air.  It's the one where the 78 year old man falls down just before the finish line.  I had seen him 30 minutes earlier on Beacon Street.  I cheered for him from the street.  I smiled at his speed and his commitment to the work of it.  Now I can't stop watching him fall.

Marathon Monday

I like to celebrate Patriots' Day in Boston.  I hop off the T at Park Street and avoid the crowds and chaos of the Green Line by walking through the Commons.  Today, like every year, there was a hint of Spring in the air.  55 degrees, after this winter, felt like a promise of summer.  There were buskers playing Lady Gaga on violins.  At the foot of Boylston, there were busses well organized by numbers with BAA bags inside, numbers like 9500-9800.  Numbers that identified the runners so they would be able to reconnect with their stuff and their people when they were finished running. The kinds of numbers and organization that had my sister remark, "It's almost like they know how to do this; like they've done it before."  There were smiling police officers, college students who were unfortunate enough to be fashion concious in a retro-80s time warp, there were people in unbelivably good shape, smokers, people who had drinken too much beer, and folks who were jogging in training for something else. There were students who greeted me by name, families who were seeing Boston for the first time.  I felt that joy on Boylston, on Comm Ave, on Beacon, that kind of joy of bearing witness to the grit and determination of 78 year olds running easily at mile 25, of people who worked through blizzards all summer just so they could still be standing at mile 26, marines who ran carrying an American flag with its heavy pole still hupping at mile 24.  There is a relationship between the runners and the watchers.  I watch and yell, I applaud and appreciate and I get to feel, somehow, like I have helped him or her take that difficult step and make that difficult decision to keep running.  I watch them and am amazed to the point of yelling, and that yelling seems to bring a smile, a pep in the step of gratitude.  There's a buoying of spirit that seems, somehow, mutual.  There is something we like about being able to help.  Of knowing that our presence might just have made a small difference.  I like to think, and somehow I know it's true, that my small voice in the crowd of half a million does help the runners in front of me keep on keeping on.  It reminds me of how many likes I got on facebook when I typed the simple sentence "The Smith siblings are safe and accounted for." Four of us watched the runners together, and one kept us all informed about what was happening, and one gave me a ride home, south on 93 and we watched 20 staties driving North on 93 to the city and it made us feel safer and unsettled simultaneously. And there are all of these people who like that we are safe and accounted for, and there is  a buoying of spirit in the way that we witness and appreciate each other that keeps our hearts from hardening even if the images of the day are gruesome.

To see, to capture.

It hasn't been since playing countless rounds of the alphabet game on the drive up 95 as a child stuck in endless Connecticut somewhere between Q and X that I had to work so hard at looking as this week. We drove around our first game park in Tanzania and at first, every termite hill was an elephant and every wayward branch, a giraffe. I wasn't sure where to look, how to look, what were the signs that would tell me what was what.  And. I found myself seeing mostly trees, everyone of them seemed like the tree of knowledge- acacia, baobab; and every one, everything screamed, 'see me, make sense of me, capture me, meaning his here. ' And sometimes all I could really see were other people's elbows supporting lens more expensive and skilled than my own. What was I looking for? Was it okay to use only my eyes? What if I didn't capture it well enough for later,  how could I make this moment a memory? Blink harder? Think deeper? Connect more fully? And then we did see a crooked branch become a herd of giraffe listlessly and gracefully galavanting in the open plain.  And then an elephant appeared in the middle of the road and became one of at least 13, they played together and grazed and blinked their long, long lashes and that seemed enough for them.  We drove off, looking for more.

It is right and just.

Day Two and Three: Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine's Day

We travelled outside of Harare to Chisawasha, through lush green fields on red dirt roads.  Our guide, Fr. Phiri, began the journey by describing, briefly, his almost abduction, how his brother was taken for collateral whole he was in hiding for 4- 5 months. The issue was cleared up only after a Jesuit with political connections was able to call in a favor to the State House. 

We arrived pulling up over the hill to the singing voices of 400 young men and 50 young women playing mirimbas and dancing choked me with overwhelmed ness. The celebration and the beautiful sounds and views were echoed hours later, at Mass when the deep resonance of the boys singing hymns in Shona and the girls in wraps dancing the cross in and then out of the church. Ashes were spread, Eucharist was shared, and when it came time to say, 'It is right and just', they didn't.  They clapped five deliberate times in unison.

We've had a lot of interesting conversations about farms being taken, about the white farmers having 24 hours to pack up and leave, and then the hundreds of black farm workers who had also worked that land for generations being left on the side of the road.  We have seen the housing for the riot police who are kept separate from the rest of the population so that their violence is kept at bay.  We have seen women kneel in front of men simply because they are women. And we have seen the work of the Jesuits, at schools like St. George's and St. Ignatius  where the future leaders and academic elite take great pride in their work ethic and success at the highest performing and most academically challenging schools. And we have seen the Jesuit schools that serve the most poor who live in the highest density areas with overcrowded classrooms, very few computers, most with floppy disk drives, and endless hope that they can get out of Bari, smiling.  Our experiences and observations and conversations here in Zimbabwe are woven together with this desire for what is right and just.

The Jesuits are working for justice through education with the poor and the wealthy. Their work inspires, the sounds of hymns sung and danced in Shona inspires, the beauty of the landscape waiting to be functioning again inspires us to work for what is right and just. There is so much to learn here in Zimbabwe and so much goo

In medias res

All true epics begin in the middle of things and so I am hopeful sitting in the airport in Amsterdam. I am somewhere between blizzard and safari in a place that would normally be my destination but this time it is just a stopping point. I watch in awe at the arrival and departure lists noting places I can't place.  En route, I watched the midnight blue of home peal into the piercing white then bright pink of dawn.  With a ten hour flight to a continent I have yet to know ahead of me, I continue the beginning of this epic, chasing dawn and chasing sleep.

Unkindness

An unkindness of ravens visited New England this winter and though there were also gaggles of geese and herds of happy pub crawlers afoot, it was the unkindness that struck a chord when they struck the region.  Sometimes unkindness can become a habit on grey days.  When the sun is short lived and the tasks at hand seem burdensome and overwhelming, it is easy to desire a hunkering down, alone.  People can weary you.  Kindness can seem a tax on the already costly price of doing-what-needs-doing. And so it has been for the past few weeks. And so I wait for the first whirls of a promised blizzard to remind me of a dole of doves. And I hope with minutes more sunshine each day that my task list stops mastering me and my barbaric yawp finds its sound.  To Africa.