Walk with me.

An ode to the semester so far and those who have dared to walk with me...

Walk with me and you may be surprised

at the hopes and the fears that sparkle in eyes

of students and friends and the odd stranger too

ignored by the many but heard by the few. 

Walk with me and your shoes may grow thin

the stories they stop and they start back again

and each step we take begs another appear

as freedom and rest replaces the fear. 

Walk with me, let your story be heard

speak every line, don't leave out a word

laughter and joy and heartache and pain

escape from shy mouths like a shower of rain. 

Walk with me and don't mention the time

the mountains before you together we'll climb

as we walk on, the route harder still

we'll know the glory of the King's realized will. 

Walk with me and you'll walk by His side

and step by step we'll align with His stride

then we'll feel the pulse of His unending grace

the peace of His presence, the light of His face. 

Walk with me friend if your journey is long

if your soul cannot rest or remember its song

because I walk with a Savior who's been good to me

and in His steps alone I have found myself free. 

The garden

Three bananas, two oranges, some ham, and some alfalfa sprouts sat patiently together at the bottom of a black plastic shopping basket. I rubbed my eyes in the fluorescence of what I still have to convince myself is an appropriate place to buy vegetables and listened to the conversation between the cashier and the customer in front of me. 

Are you giving me change again? (some mumbles) You're still sixty-two cents short so it's not enough. (more mumbles) You want me to take something back? Alright. 

The customer's shaky, wrinkled hand reached into the unforgiving plastic bag at the end of the check out to remove one of the two bottles of soda that were in there. I fumbled in my own bag quicker and pulled out a dollar. Here, I said to the cashier, I've got it. The cashier smiled and asked You sure? before finishing up the soda purchase and moving on to my own restless fruit. 

The tall, somewhat stooped black man with a few crooked teeth and a terrible habit of mumbling looked at me with round, sepia tinted eyes that had obviously seen a lot of not very beautiful things. His lips quivered and he nodded a thank you that I didn't do much to deserve and slouched away into a world as graceless as a cash register. I wondered who the second soda was for. 

*************************************************

In the beginning the Father created a place for man. A garden. Filled with trees and fruits and flowering plants and nourished by clear rivers it was a home that was pure and perfect. It abounded with beauty and was saturated with peace. A garden of exquisite detail and harmony. The Father was there with man and man interacted in utter freedom with the Father and all that was in the Father's garden. Sometimes the Father would scoop up a handful of dirt and make a living thing out of it and ask man what its name should be. Man would name it and it would fly, or crawl, or swim, or walk, or wander away. The Father didn't want man to ever be lonely so he put man to sleep and took out one of his ribs and made woman. When man woke and saw woman he knew that she was part of him and his heart beat in the rapture of completion. 

They did not know guilt. The garden was theirs. It was the beginning. 

*******************************************************

I walked with my plastic bag through some dingy automatic doors out into a dingier parking lot that was as gray and gravely as any I'd ever seen. Nothing about the dented metal shopping cart holders or the rows of dusty, tired looking cars bore any resemblance to a garden. But the sky was blue. I had almost forgotten to look. 

The overlap

I sat around a table of friends as the clock measured out time and told a story that came out too long and and ended with a sigh. I knew they were my friends because they listened, with rapt attention, to the entire thing though the food got cold in front of us. It was the first story I had told since I've been out of Lhasa.

I got lost driving around on a too warm Sunday morning and walked into a tiny room filled with sparsely populated pews with just enough time to marvel at the attention the people sitting there paid to my dimples before I took a seat, trying to catch my breath, up near the front. I told them a story too, a story about a Spirit like the wind and how He's blown around for three years and I couldn't tell them where He came from or where He's going but the story was too long and I ended with a heart that was full. Afterwards I was led by the arm to a plate heaping with wonderful things I'd almost forgotten like butter beans and cornbread and chicken salad and was amazed at that all of these strangers had entered so overwhelmingly into my life and made room there as the dearest of friends. We are given so many things we don't deserve.

I pulled together a few strands of time out of nowhere one precious morning and sat on the bed and dialed phone numbers into the computer. Voices that were as familiar to me as breathing echoed out of the screen and I took deep breaths desperate to memorize every syllable that came out. I can hear you like you are next to me! You must take care of your body. I am same old. Kelly teacher I asked all the foreigners if they knew you. It is so surprise to hear you! Today is my happy day! I am wait for you. You must come back quickly.... so the melody of another life played on in the room of this life now quite different. When time, that rascally thief, ran out... only pinpricks were left in my soul.

I walked across a university campus I had once known and am now slightly shocked and disgusted by into a dining hall to appear before a cashier whose care for all who come in resounds with the deep care of a Shepherd for His flock. In a moment of tenderness and tears I was caught up in a hug that numbed me by the resemblance to another tearful embrace from another cashier in another land now far away. This dear woman gushed with praise to our Father on my behalf, and moved me with the totally undeserved depth of her joy. She introduced me to everyone in sight, demanded that I be given anything I wanted from now until eternity and the phantoms of free vegetables and calloused hands scratched achingly close to a place I hadn't let myself return to yet.

Later I found myself around a table with a Mexican girl whose heart mirrors my own and a Kenyan girl who I discovered was actually a long lost friend telling them a story that brought me to and kept me in the land of darkness for three often long though now seemingly short years. It was too long, as all my stories are these days, and ended with a flicker of hope amidst a burning flame of trust fulfilled. When I later revealed that I was only to stay one semester at this university the girl from Kenya's face suddenly transformed into all the faces of all the people I had to leave behind in Lhasa. Grief looks startlingly familiar, and I begged her not to take me back to what I had just left so soon.

The overlap of the life I had and the one I now live is messy, often painful, and precious to me. Memories like so many transparent pictures fall on top of and into each other. Everything looks like everything else and what I have never seen before. I am caught up in a tearing sensation of going forward too quickly and going backward too suddenly and I know that at some point I need to take some steps in the reverse in order to move ahead. I am sure that moving on means rummaging through all the boxes of memories and experiences that I never sent, unpacking all the things that I never really packed to begin with but instead left scattered all over the land somewhere at 13,000 feet. I'm going to have to pour out the cups of tea I left cooling up there on the rooftop of the world, and wash them, in order for them to be filled with everything that this next moment might hold.

Soul, do not be taunted by that old gypsy man Time, be still and soak up the overlap.

Like jellybeans...

I have been in airports and needed nothing less than the strength of my Holy Heavenly Father to lift my feet towards the security check and on toward my gate. The constant motion of life is making me seasick.

I have been in classes where the professor said, in a statement of quite basic reality, most of life is saying goodbye. It made me lose my breath and grit my teeth. I'm over goodbyes.

I have been a foreigner in many lands under a sky that is far too beautiful for this earth and wondered why it should be content to hang there above us while we go about in dirt and business ignoring it. All this wandering is making me homesick.

I am finding that America is a land where time passes quickly because no one honors it. We speed through our days the way we gobble down food and make quick work of our checking accounts. Nightmares come true when my peace is shattered on the alter of things to do and jealousy for time, unnumbered and uninterrupted, alone with my Father stalks like an angry giant around in my soul. We weren't made for this American dream.

Lhasa weighs like the stillness of many mountains on my heart. It is a slumbering beast; I can feel it's heavy breathing. But I can't wake it, not yet.

And I move step by shaky, curious step along a pathway of grace that my Father has laid out for me. Friends seem to appear just at the moment I feel that I'm falling, conversations and laughter and phone calls and meals and emails and benches in front of fountains appear like a magic walkway over an abyss I dare not contemplate long.

...and I know I can trust that Lion of the tribe of Judah for another day more... even if it's only with a heart that feels like a jar of jellybeans that someone has thrown so carelessly to the floor and shattered. Sticky jellybeans lying amidst shards of glass and dust.

May He be honored by so broken and confused an offering.

The ends...

In English we talk about frayed ends and loose ends. We talk about them as if they were broken, or we need to tie them up, or they ought not to be that way. But the truth is, that's the way that all ends are... and there's nothing we can do about it.

*** *** ***

It had been raining. Rain made the sky low and the earth seem fresh. I walked through a mist up to meet my friend at the nearest monastery. The uneven street up to the gate was slick with moisture and my friend stood in his deep red robes waiting for me in front of a tea house. We got cups which were filled by a grinning man with a dented kettle. As we sat chatting, the rain played a song that only it can sing on the roof and ground around us. The mountains were velvety green in the misty dampness and the monk reasoned Lhasa wants you to remember it beautiful so that you will come back quickly. Another monk friend joined us and we moved to a bench under a tree to eat lunch. Rain drops splashed in my cup and reminded me of all the tears I couldn't cry. My first tea in the rain and my last tea with monks.

The nunnery had been recently painted and I breathed deep in the cool air and stopped often to admire the purple flowers like jewels scattered on the ground amidst yellow flowers like flames licking up from the rocks as I walked up the mountain towards it. I made a phone call and my friend came out wearing a towel over her closely shaved head. The city looked like a sleepy child waking up in the cool morning and I sat in a room occupied only by statues of idols as my friends came and went and held my hand and laughed with me and handed me small gifts. Leaving them to the busy work of cooking for the rest of the nuns was a little bit like walking away from a bustling and familiar home scene. My first time sharing a nun's tsampa bowl and my last entirely Tibetan conversation.

I and two Chinese students sat around a too small table in a too new Chinese tea shop trying to suck our too chunky tea up wide straws and laughing about the way that the chairs were too small and made us feel fat. The shop was really just a counter with a table and chairs available mostly for decoration as sitting at it nearly forced us out the door and onto the sidewalk outside for lack of room. I stared past my students out into the blue Lhasa sky onto the dirty, periodically, crowded Lhasa street. Suddenly, a small Chinese boy appeared in the door with a little baseball cape cockled on his head. He stared at me and with hand raised he moved as if drawn to our table and left his hand suspended in the air until I instinctively shook it. Then he grinned and disappeared. When we got back to the school my students asked me if I would give them each a hug. My first small child handshake, but my last Chinese milk tea.

Recovery from a night and a day of vomiting horrors was slow and time was exactly what I didn't have. I delayed a dinner with a quirky neighbor for a day and then we went out with a group, greeting my mostly empty stomach with a tray of chicken buried amidst kilos of spice. The rain poured down around the outdoor eating area where we spat chicken bones on the floor and decided to accompany my neighbor to his room for tea later. As the hour drew late and I emptied my tiny glass cup for the last time making it quite certain that I wouldn't sleep well later, my neighbor picked up his electronic dictionary up and handed it to me. I want to tell you this he said. Yi luo ping an was the entry: have a good journey. My first dinner at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the Potala and my last interaction with an odd man transformed into a trusted friend.

I went to her room because I had been to her room nearly once a week for years. It was exactly the same as it always was and she perched on the nearly shredded stool exactly the same girl she always had been. We made sha momos that were exquisitely delicious in their simplicity and familiarity and words spilled from her slightly quivering lips. It was as if she felt compelled to tell me all of the story of her life thus far lived in order to impress upon me the weight of my entrance into it. Your hair is different, and your eyes and skin, but my heart thinks you are the same to me, as my sister she confessed. Something caught in my throat and I could only hope that my eyes could speak everything that my mouth failed to in that moment. My first compliment of such tender depth and sincerity and my last sha momos.

Immediately upon meeting her on a busy street corner she grabbed my hand and led me around the slanted and bustling allies of Lhasa running errands in a last minute rush that demanded our tea be slow and untroubled. We arrived in a tea house and ordered a thermos as though there was nothing different or final about this day. The owner sat down on a bench next to us and suddenly the entire room wanted to know everything about me. When they learned that indeed my hours left in Lhasa were numbered the owner said Don't leave with enough force that perhaps the words would generate reality from the very act of speaking them. They only managed to make my friend and I blink back tears which appeared quite suddenly to both of us. She rubbed my finger as we waited at the bus stop and watched my face slide away from hers as the bus jerked away. My first time seeing tears in her eyes and my last Tibetan tea.

I had begged for sleep. Instead I got dreams. Upon waking to my last morning on my mat which had been my bed for three years to a sky that has become like a confidant and friend to me the only thing that was sure was the clarity of the voice in my dreams which had commanded me to read in the Psalms. I sat up and opened my Book to the first section of Psalms I randomly came to. Psalm 65. Praise is rightfully yours. My first easy breath in days and the last scripture I read underneath that sky.

I sat alone in an empty apartment and felt only slightly sick to my stomach from travel anxiety. A knock at the door. Then an entire class, which I had first thought troubled beyond reaching turned dear, filed into the apartment. We sat and stood around in silence, then one student took my hand. Really we thank you teacher and we love you. My head bowed and silent hot tears filled my lap, filled the room, and the only sound was thirty two sets of damp eyes and heaving chests. My first time seeing all of the students of that class together that semester and my last.

Another knock on the same door and a different small group of students filed into my apartment empty of all except a growing pile of kadas. They wept with me, they sang to me, they laughed with me, they sat with me waiting for the car. In Tibetan we say that tears hold all the words that our hearts can't speak said one. I nodded and tears made rivers down my face. One girl stood up, thank you teacher she said as she slipped a ring off of her own finger and onto my trembling one, she usually wears this one, the other girls affirmed. Into the room walked two Tibetan teachers, one who had been like a father to me this whole time bearing kadas and gifts that only made the tears hotter and deeper. Think of seeing your mother and father said the teacher as he held my damp face and please be happy. My first gift from one finger to another and my last time weeping on the shoulder of this father figure.

Outside students were milling about in teary groups and teachers stood solemnly next to each other and we waited for the car and wept quietly. When it came roaring around the corner, the tears came harder and mouths opened to speak and instead only moaned. My students rushed toward me, one who was particularly close to me who had remained relatively composed until this moment rushed throwing her arms around my waist and laying her head on my shoulder to sob convulsively and I became sure that dying couldn't feel worse. Handshakes from teachers I could see only through a waterfall of tears and hugs and kadas and tears and I was gasping for a breath that wasn't damp from inside the car. My first time holding broken students and my last time offering any kind of consolation whatsoever.

The car made a quick stop at the gate and the sweet old gate grandfather who had forced me to sip his home brewed barley beer at new years, a request I had submitted to only because he is my friend, ran out calling my name. He flung the car door open and I leaned forward tears lashing my lap and hands as he reached in to present me with a kada. My first gift from him and my last time to look deep into his discolored, aging eyes.

I sat in the car heading dizzingly quick towards the airport with three Tibetan teachers who had become like sisters to me. We held hands and laughed about memories and watched the Lhasa river float lazily by the window. I believe we will meet again I believe it, I feel and I believe it was the chorus of our trip until my eyes became painful with dry redness and puffy from emptiness. At the airport we dragged one hundred pounds of luggage over to the check in and found out that I would be charged for half of it. Nothing could be done, no excuses were good enough, no amount of begging compelling enough. We walked over to the cashier counter who calculated the bill. As I threw bills onto the counter the cashier looked hard at the ticket. Nevermind she said this plane is big enough to handle the extra bag, you don't need to pay. My first free luggage and my last moments with dear friends.

The flight out was perfectly on time and boarding had never been less stressful. I leaned my throbbing head and heaving heart against the plane window and winced as it left the tarmac. The mountains just underneath the plane were painted in a thousand beautiful patterns and colors, green and brown and purple and orange and white and I gasped at the beauty of this place that seemed to be somehow more vibrant, more brilliant in this, my last vision, of it. My first time to see the mountains with such a clarity of their awesomeness and my last glimpses of a place that had wounded and taught me repeatedly for three years.

These are my ends. They are loose and frayed. There is no fixing them and no tying them up. That's the way all ends are.

Good-bye Lhasa, until another time... if hopes and tears add up to anything substantial at all.

Did you get the message?

My last text messages from Lhasa...

Ok, don't be sad, I know, we will can meet, you need take care of your body! Jigme and me never forget you!

Surely I will contact you! yeah, I am sorry not to see you off at the airport. It is a pity! and it is lucky not to go for I am afraid I can not control myself. I am moved by the students. We will miss you. No one talk to me in the office. No one will enjoy tea in Mr. Liu's.

Where are you?

Ok, hope everything goes well~best wishes, my forever friend~

I already miss you.

Teacher: Good luck. Have a good and successful future. I will miss you. God bless you.

Dear Kelly, I know you will leave for America. But I can't meet you. I thank you for you are my teacher. I'm glad. You will go back. I must miss you. I will send message for you usually in the future.

Do you remember we are first meet at beside our school door and conversations I will don't forget forever. I hope you will keep touch in me and take care of yourself.

Dear Teacher (Kelly) what a pity you are leaved our. I don't know you are leaved our today, I feel very sad because I love you very much and I will miss you! good luck to you!

I hope make laugh with you forever! Goodbye my best teacher!

Ms. Kelly I am so sorry. because you are about to walk tomorrow. I shall miss you. Wish you a pleasant journey.

Ms. Kelly. I will go on writing poems. I believe we can meet again. although you will go back. a friendship between you and us.

Ok, I wait for seeing you in Tibet again someday.

Damp things...

It's raining again and the ground will be mushy tomorrow but that's not what I mean.

I sat on a broken chair at the front of the classroom on my last day inside it and asked the Father of grace to surround my students and bring them safely to His side while they poured over their books and notes searching for answers for their open book exam. I blinked hard and the knowledge that this might be the last time I see them all together became a damp thought threatening to spill over my face. I turned to the painful brightness of the sky outside and breathed slowly letting the dampness sink into my stomach.

Sometimes they, my colleagues in the office and around campus, look at me too hard and I can't look back lest I be overcome with thoughts too damp to hold inside.

I had lunch with a student and tea and sadness sloshed around in my stomach and stayed right there because when she asked about one more time together I knew it would be so. Only when our eyes met did they glisten with some damp thing.

There was no chair for me in the last classroom in Lhasa I will ever be in, so I stood. I stood behind the desk I've stood behind nearly every week for three years and looked out on a roomful of students that taught me how difficult love is. I asked the Father of mercy to continue in His patience with them until they are brought safely to His side. I told Him that the next room I wanted to see them in all together again was His throne room. Dampness made my face heavy and weighed on my chest.

As each student finished their exam I took it and handed them a good-bye letter and a photo. One student, in the front sitting alone put her head on her desk and let the dampness run down her face and cause her eyes to redden. I squeezed my fingers, hoping that my damp thoughts would pool up there instead.

After class, a roomful of students made slow and silent with so many damp things walked out to the football field. They handed me a gift of handmade, beautiful Tibetan shoes that I have often seen on the feet of nomads and envied, which only fit when I'm not wearing socks. They took turns and heaped forty kadas around my neck. By the time they had finished whispering their wishes and gratitude to me it was my cold hands that had to stuff all my dampness back into my eyes.

I went to dinner with two girls who had been my students until this semester and who are consistently brave enough to overcome their entire culture's worth of shyness to speak to me. We went to the teahouse we always go to because we know the owner and he's funny. We ordered the same thermos of tea and three bowls of noodles we always order because it's delicious and the predictability is comfortable. We sat down at a dented ma jong table in the quiet tiny room, just the size for three, upstairs. The tea came and they pulled out their gifts: incense, jewelry for my family, a jar filled with paper stars, a purse...


Oh these are very perfect, I gushed, I'm so happy to have them, I assured, I will take them back to America and remember, I cracked.

The world became watery. Dampness can blur even the hardest of crumbly teahouse walls.

A teacher and two students sat at a dented ma jong table and didn't look at each other because the table was slowly becoming stained with splotches of dampness, damp drops splashed in our tea, tissues were turned into fortresses which melted in the damp. When the student sitting across from me put her head on the table and sobbed openly, in a way that is uniquely not at all Tibetan, all my hot damp thoughts from the day ran down my face like streams. Our meal was eaten through sniffles and seen through eyes of glass.

This is my last week in Lhasa. All my things are damp.