thoughts in the late afternoon

I’ve had just a few thoughts running through my head this afternoon and thought perhaps someone else should hear them.  It’s a break from studying and I just returned from a walk down past the local mosque to the edge of town to see the late sun hitting the Maluti mountains.  Hmm, there’s another peach tree in blossom; simply breath-taking…

 

Mortality fascinates me.  I think at times it’s more of humanity’s reaction to the realization of this mortality that confuses me.  In a land where graveyards are more frequently visited by mourners of new arrivals than those coming to pay respects; where faces disappear with alarming regularity; somehow the fear of a flu virus still finds a foot hold.  When Death is all around in far greater surety, how can the media still work to create a pandemic from a virus with a relatively quiet, death knell? 

 

I have shook the hand and looked in the eye of so many with a clock ticking inside of them.  The hoarse whispers creep around the corners of their houses and into their children’s ears, “more time, more time, more time,” but time isn’t a currency that can be banked and all the ‘rocking horse winners’ in the world couldn’t bet their way into old age.  It is a sad land where children too short to enjoy carnival rides in the U.S. look at you with a resigned, fatalistically blank stare; eyes filled with neither grief nor despair...both parents are already dead or dying.  Nihilism seems to rule the day, for the very sin that has brought on this Assassin continues to be the favorite vice of choice.  Even in a land that has definitively proved otherwise, the indomitable ignorance of youthful invincibility still reigns supreme. 

 

The days are changing.  Winter is losing her grip and the wind (though you can’t feel it today) is beginning to switch her allegiances.  The frost comes and goes now like an inconstant tenant and today’s icy blast is merely a desperate attempt from Sister Winter to exert her dominance.  How do I know this?  The first blush of spring has come…the peach blossoms have greeted us—the herald of lovely Spring—and it is a sight that no camera can replicate.  It is poetry.  It is beauty.

 

I’m living in town at the moment.  My days are filled teaching and my afternoons and evenings are spent at a cold, round, table reading the works of or about Chaucer, Dante, Plato, Machiavelli and on the list goes.  Of all I’ve read, from the histories of Islam to the rise of Western culture, I think I am most fascinated when I step out onto the street outside the apartment and from where I stand I see, in the late afternoon sun, the steeples of two Reformed Churches and behind me, rises the eerie, green, globular spires of a mosque.  In between the two steeples is a cell tower, formed like a tree, but topped by a constant, red light.  Here represented to me are three or perhaps four Gods.  I don’t think any medium better embodies modern secularism and the chasing of materialism or happiness than the cell phone.  Whether it is the man whose family has been replaced by an earpiece in the pursuit of money, or a teenager whose entire identity and self-worth is wrapped up in the tiny, misspelled bytes of data that stream in and out, minute by minute; each firmly place their trust in the transient, unfaithful god of the present.  The mosque is a sad tribute to a religious leader whose delirium launched centuries of blood shed that are more on the lips of the entire world than they ever were in Mohammed’s day.  A religion that spares no punches and takes no prisoners, all the time laughing at the western, “Christian,” idea that they are to be embraced as a peaceful, non-intrusive faith.  The young men in the courtyard have no problem wearing long green turbans and knee-length shirts.  They glory in their separation and would have nothing to do with any life that would speak to the contrary.  In juxtaposition to a church that has left segregation from the world on the dusty shelves of church storerooms, I wonder who has the greater conviction?  The steeples are relics of what once was a great reform, now swallowed up in the passivity of a church that wants a clear conscience without sacrifice.  They’d rather kindle the fire on the altar, extend one hand for warmth and pet the spotless lamb with the other.  Still, rules without reason, and service without love, even in Christ’s name leaves men most to be pitied and I would have neither. 

But now the sun is down and the history of Japanese No Drama is calling me, so I must go.  I think it will be rice and a bit of fried meat tonight…I don’t need anything extravagant.