Words: I want to play with them awhile

I love words. From long summer days filled with book after book against the loneliness of school-break exile at Grandmom’s to the pleasure of writing letters and essay answers and college papers, to the intrigue of word permutations and possibilities uncovered as I studied English literature and journalism, to the mysterious potential for transformation through living deep with God’s Word: living Logos Jesus, and the sacred biblical writings, words have been my still-point, my anchor to truth, my self-expression and understanding of others, and my window into ideas and into prayer.

I spent my college years with old English literature, all the way back to Anglo-Saxon. This rendition of the hokey-pokey tickled me. But how few English-speakers without my background get anything at all out of it today.

This summer brought spacious time with poets and song-writers, wordsmiths who love Jesus, who make me want to shout, “This is my tribe!” Books and travels left me noticing certain remarkable words, and the ways meaning evolves and takes on fresh edges. A new thought, which immediately resonated as truth I experience, is that the metamorphosis of words can speak out loud a metamorphosis in human, perhaps cultural, self-perception. So that, whether we are reading a book from 50 or 200 years ago, or literature much more ancient, careful consideration of what words meant then can completely alter our understanding of just what is being said.

So much to unpack. But not all at once. I suspect these few paragraphs are an introduction to a season of play and posts to explore fresh brushes with words. At least I hope so. I have been the most sporadic of posters in recent years.

This morning a friend reacted to my use of the word “eccentric” to describe myself. “I looked up the actual definition, ‘unconventional and slightly strange,’’’ she wrote. This was thoughtful. She’d taken time to look up the word that bothered her. “It fits,” she said. Well, actually she used the words “technically appropriate.” But it “connotes weirdness…. It has a hard edge, I feel, that doesn't fit you.” 

The thing is, I love the word eccentric. It whispers to me that someone is a tad other-worldly, her inner self caught up in a realm of ideas and images that no one else sees but that spill over from time to time. She’s not overly concerned with what other people expect or with keeping up with the latest fads. I think of Judi Dench in the film Tea with Mussolini. Or, in fact, in just about any of her films. I think of writers and artists and the best university professors. I think of wild hair and flowing scarves, and of opening a book with a child only to ignore the words on the page and create some wandering adventure in which the child herself is heroine and the other characters are all named after her pets.

When I describe myself as eccentric, it is with hope tinged with humility. I want to be so free in my spirit that it delights my Father and blesses my world, that my life vibrates with curiosity and truth and depth. But I know those places where I cling to rules and the way things are done, where I color like a chameleon into subcultural surroundings without intelligent or prayerful examination of their presuppositions or my own heart.

It’s a conundrum, this aspect of words and their meanings that my friend raises for me. In addition to a dictionary meaning, words carry an emotional load all spikey and repellant to one person, and to another all warm and inviting. The same word means different things based on a person’s upbringing, worldview, subculture, and experience.  Differences lurk out there, and we don’t suspect their impact until someone reacts and clues us in. A few that pop up in my frame often: contemplative, prayer, Christian, missionary, spiritual director, monastic, Muslim, American. And others more under the radar: black, white, clean, rich, love, date, rules, discipline, death—to mention a few others have challenged in my speaking over the years.

Which raises the question: what do we do?

Recent months have been rich with word-lover experiences. Credit is due:

• The Kindlings, and their glorious KindlingFest held every July on Orcas Island; 
• Regent College and its offering of summer graduate courses. In particular, this summer’s course on the Liturgical Year, taught by Malcolm Guite and Steve Bell via their poetry and music; 
• JRR Tolkien and his academic work on words in his groundbreaking paper on Beowolf. A rich offering, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings, by Philip and Carol Zaleski, explores ideas about words shared among the Inklings.
• Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien, highlights, in their words, “what goes without saying,” that is, the nuances of meaning that are embedded so deeply in our gut that it would never even occur to us that one from another place or time would have an utterly different response.

The Tuesday Report -- the magical becomes commonplace

I started thinking about this on a Tuesday back in December. We were boarding a plane for Ireland to spend a week waiting with dear friends between two major surgeries. The following Tuesday found us in Dublin boarding a plane back to Istanbul. 

Curt with Ken Needham, after Ken's heart surgery, waiting together for cancer surgery

A month later, in mid-January, there was another plane, this time bound for Kansas City, to be with Cait, Josh, and Lia, and to help with our newest grandchild Skye. 

Three weeks later, this time bound for Dubai, I slogged through security checks yet again. Curt flew in from Turkey to meet me. We enjoyed ten days with Dan and Eda, visited dear friends in Abu Dhabi, and met some folks we look forward to knowing better through an invitation to come alongside them regularly in their lives and work in the UAE. 

Another "magic metal tube" carried us back to Turkey, and we arrived home to Spa for the Soul just two weeks ago today. 

Last Saturday, another plane trip. Turkish Airlines carried us to Albania. This week Curt teaches Nehemiah and I teach the first part of Genesis in the Torchbearer Bible School here. We spend time with friends of many years in this town we love, and with Eda's family. 

International Women's Day festivities, Erseka, Albania

Sunday morning early we fly again, home to Turkey. Where I think we will remain until our return to the US for the summer.

Kathy and Ross are dear friends in Sequim.
This photo represents our whole life there.

These Tuesday reports are an effort to demystify our lives as expatriates who live in exotic-sounding locations like Mediterranean Turkey or the UAE. To humanize the experience by sharing the mundane stuff of everyday life and wonder. But as I've embarked and disembarked over the past three months I've thought some about ways expat life is so different--so that what was once adventure has become commonplace. What once would have been rare, anticipated for months or even years, has become...well, just what we do. 

For some time now my private term for international travel has been "that magic metal tube." You climb into this chair-packed, tightly controlled space. A little card tells you where to sit. And who with. You have to sit there. Strangers pile in, almost on top of you, pressing shoulders and elbows into yours even as you can't avoid doing the same to them. All to the tune vast sucking engines, pitch now rising, now falling. You sit straight with knees confined for an hour, or for 15 hours. I have a special place inside me where I retreat and hide. I rarely speak, or even look up from book or sleep. 

When the tube bumps and rattles. The engine whine winds down, and a little light goes off. A chime sounds. You can stand and file out into spacious ceilings and real air. A little like Noah coming out of the ark, you find everything about the world all changed. The climate, the landscape, the language, the dress, the instruments and rhythms of music, the ceremonies of friendship and business--everything about where you were before the time in the tube evaporated and is replaced by new shapes and smells and sounds. 

I never get over the magic of the changed world. The Abu Dhabi airport, for me, is particularly visceral with its mushroom-dome shaped interior of bright blue and green tile, the clothing and chatter of a hundred worlds milling around, and me in the midst thinking, "Ahhh. Home."

But the act of constantly changing continents and countries in this way, the ability to do it, has lost its mystery. No longer is it a big decision, a shimmering dream, to cross the world. Nor does a new place strike me as adventure. I don't really care, thank you, to visit another museum or ancient site. I do still love landscapes and weather and exploring new territory by car, foot, bike or kayak. And sometimes the handicrafts in the shops and the food in the restaurants draw me in. 

Has overfamiliarity bred contempt? I don't like the experience of the tube. The list of places I still want to visit before I die is...well, is there a list? 

Nonetheless, I will continue to board and disembark, to pack and weigh and haul the heavy bags. I'll remove my shoes and take the laptop out of my bag, and stand in long lines at immigration, and submit to pat-downs and TSA rummages. Not for adventure, but for all those people I love who will be there waiting at baggage claim. 

The Tuesday report -- living the dream

Seven years ago we clambered around this house and land for the first time. Wide-eyed wonder; hearts pounding. "This is it!" We'd searched long, through several countries, not sure what we were looking for until we found it--a home for that nebulous sense of Divine invitation that has become Spa for the Soul. 

What did we see in that shabby, dirty villa with its overgrown weedy gardens and thoughtless design? The glorious quiet of hot August in an agrarian village perched on a mountainside. Waters and islands of the Mediterranean spreading to the horizon past rock stained rusty with the clay soil. The dusty greens of olive, carob and scrub oak. Five crazy stories so that every space had its own balcony from which to take in the sounds of children, chickens and doves carried on eucalyptus and jasmine-scented air. Sheep, cows, goats, olive trees; all laden with Bible images of sacrifice, Spirit energy, simplicity and prayer.

Cost-counting in many forms nurtured this undertaking. How to pay for it; when to leave career and what that might mean to ego and satisfaction; how to train and discipline ourselves for a life of spiritual listening and quiet offering; from where would come the resilience to live far from other believers; and what, in all of that, would be the cost to our family for us to locate in a place so far from parents, kids and grandkids. Dad is dead now, but his long silence that poured pain and longing, along with the courageous refusal to complain, down the phone line when I crushed his deepest hope that we would build this place near him still exerts its power in my deepest being. 

Yet in all the cost-counting and spacious imagining somehow we failed to notice that when one buys a small olive grove one becomes an olive grower. It is Tuesday and yet again we climb the old trees, pull fruit down with a hand-rake, collect it on nets, and sit on the ground to sort goodness from trash. We bend and stoop a hundred thousand times to collect fallen fruit from the dirt, the steps, the road. 

Everything we now know about olive husbandry, and it still isn't much, we've learned from our neighbors. We know now how to harvest, how to store harvested fruit on cool stone in the shade until the day comes to take it to the press, how much fruit will produce how much oil, how the press system works, how to filter and refilter the oil for weeks after pressing until it is perfectly clear and clean, and how to store oil. We've learned a little about pruning and tending our fourteen 60-70 year old trees. 

The two most important things we learned: olives bear only every second year; and the harvest lasts for three or more months. The first fact is cause for celebration because of the second.

So here I sit. My harvest wear is old clothes now stained with oil and the red of the soil. Most of the stains are on my butt because while I am on the ground sorting Curt is in the tree above me doing his olive rain-dance. As they rain down on me they smash on my hair and shoulders, roll around, and wedge themselves in against my sitting parts that are perched on the sloping ground. 

It is not that we never thought about the olive trees when we bought this place. The agent tossed off a description of how villagers would be happy to harvest our olives in exchange for half of the produce. No problem. And that is exactly what most of the smattering of foreigners and well-heeled Turkish retirees in this village do. We are an oddity when we turn up at the village press. Seems they don't see many foreigners.

We pretty much ignored the olives until after we finally moved here. Who knows what happened to them the years the place sat empty. When we did at last move into the neighborhood, well, it seemed natural to imitate our neighbors as they gathered from their land. They were willing to teach, and we were a community of tired backs and stained clothes. It felt like a piece of blending in, of identification, to reject the "rich foreigner" role and do the work ourselves. 

Using a siphon to pour off the clear oil and leave the sludge

But today I sit here, and as I reach and sort, I ponder yesterday's conversation with my neighbor. We were looking at photographs from last winter, from our Thanksgiving celebration. Çiğdem was sharing her memories and remarking on the various guests around the table. This one who is my age but attended with her much younger boyfriend, that one who covers to identify as religious, the British couple, and Çiğdem's own son Orkun sitting on Curt's lap. "It was a wonderful party," she reflected, "but so strange." "Strange?" I ask. "How?" "We don't do things like this," she replied. "We gather with friends to eat, but our friends are people like us. In this photo there are foreigners, and there are locals who would never be together anyplace else because they are all so different. And look at Orkun sitting on Curt's lap. A child might sit on his daddy's lap, or his mommy's, but never with anyone else. Orkun loves Curt. It is so strange, but all so wonderful."

Much to be thankful for!

We give a lot of time and energy to things we hope will make us seem normal and acceptable to the people of this place. Lately, though, I've had several windows into how, for all that, we are strange, foreign, odd. And we always will be. We play down our wealth, but with a neighbor who doesn't have firewood sufficient to heat this winter because of the expenses of a son's first year in university, another who goes to bed at dark because she comes from a time before electricity was here and so lives her life by the sun, yet another who...well, we don't even know when our basic assumptions about how life works are shocking to the rest of this hillside. 

And yet there is love, grace and wonder. Ayşe Teze, nearly 80 and with a village dialect so thick I almost never understand her, pops in to borrow our olive rake and chats away to Curt with harvest advice even though she knows he doesn't understand a word. Süleyman hollers up the steps from the front door because he needs to make another measure for the shelf he is building. Gets all excited at my wine-making paraphernalia, all hopeful for a sample. Commiserates when I explain in halting Turkish that we will have to wait a year to find out whether my experiment with pomegranate wine is success or failure. Hüseyin points out when we waste water or electricity. Çiğdem makes sure I filter the oil timely. Another Ayşe brines my olives, lending her expertise at just the right amounts of crystalized lemon, oil, and salt. 

Ali amca and Ayşe teze in happier times. He died last summer, and now she soldiers on with the help of neighbors and friends.

And so we live the dream. As with nighttime dreams, it takes weird twists; our understanding of reality is suspended; and things happen that, outside of the dream, would not be possible. 

The Tuesday report--that crazy mix of fruit and blessing, work and disruption, and just plain hard

Tuesday morning. November sun mild on the balcony. I drew the chair close to put a foot on the low ledge. It rested there, toes all browny-pink with the month-old pedicure. Nails so long that one had started to curve round the end of its toe. Polish remover pad in hand, I surveyed the distance and counted the cost to reach those toes and minister to them.

My 59-year-old back was tight. It aches with muscle spasms brought on by the bending, stooping, stretching and reaching of gathering olives. Lots of olives. I pulled my body forward, thigh pressing into the resistant fat of a soft, sagging front. Yes, I can still do this little work of self-care, but gone are the days when I could pull that foot easily to my face, or so contort my frame as to hook it behind my neck. When this bit of self-care was fast and effortless.

I scrubbed for some minutes to get through layers of polish. Then to the clipping. And the filing. And finally the application of oils and lotions. My left leg, less limber than the right, tends to cant sideways as if to plié. Hard to hold so that those toenails face me. Its broken little toe was swollen and protested the twist to clip and file.

As I labored, images of my dad’s crabbed feet with their thick nails and thin skin led me into musings around the self-care that is necessary to sustain a pouring-out kind of life full of people and laundry and food prep and harvest and laundry and language learning and ironing that fill the gaps of my contemplative life. That morning approaches when others will have to take up these matters of personal care and do them for me, as we did for Dad.

In the past week at Spa for the Soul we hosted guests; I gave time to spiritual direction, to listening, and to the preparation of tasty meals; we gathered 300+ pounds of olives from our trees and hauled them to a village press where they yielded up 27 liters (7 gallons) of oil; we continued that sometimes delightful, often amusing, and mostly downright confusing journey of language learning; and we prayed: for this place and its people, for those in our care, for concerns and obstacles, and for wisdom.

Ayşe and Çiğdem walked me through olive making

...the scent of sun-dried clothes and sheets...

Tuesday bore the whole mix.

Early morning prayer gave way to a clogged kitchen sink. Curt was testy-weary of maintenance things small and large. I hauled laundry from over the house, sorted piles over the kitchen floor, and got the first load in. No electricity. Power cuts: many this week, and several times for hours on end. Tuesday’s cut lasted until too late for anything to dry on the line. The laundry got put off until Wednesday. There we were, stepping over the piles.

After a string of disrupted days, I was determined that morning to return to my plan to write and study Turkish for four or five uninterruptable hours in the morning. As I settled at my desk, Curt’s phone rang. I heard him, “Sure, we need to bring a guest down to the bus station this morning anyway. Yeah, we can meet—say, 10:30 or 11:00? I’ll call when we get there.” The guy who sold us a couple of old kayaks was in town with the promised spray skirts and life-vests.

There went the plan. Again. I turned to my computer to at least pay a few bills in the short time I had. Humpf. No electricity, no internet.

As, under Curt's plan, both of us would go to town, it seemed good to take care of several “town” needs. We dropped our guest at the bus station, then wandered Kaş. Curt got new glass cut for a broken bathroom light fixture. I picked up groceries I’d forgotten the day before. We chatted with the kayak guy. I returned a lamp and paid for the one we kept. Curt picked up his prints. I hunted down brown paint to repair another broken light fixture. Then there is that other “what we need to do in town.” Errands are a social occasion—coffee with Halil, Gül and Dilek; tea with Paskal. Chat with Gafer, and with Ahmet. So much goodness, and it all takes time and energy.

Which brings me to the other thing. Self-care and sustainable living. We returned to Spa for the Soul after our summer break just a month ago. And I’m exhausted. Curt is wearing thin. By early afternoon we were home and all I wanted was my bed. With so much waiting to be done.

How to describe the weariness. Anything that needs doing, well, it feels just…too…hard. Mind and body together whine for mindlessness and for rest.

Why? Why so exhausted in the midst of goodness, fruit, and beauty?

We work hard. We do hard physical work. We pour into relationships. And we stretch our minds in creative work. We drain ourselves dry.

My back is all spasms, stiff with pain that saps energy.

To listen deeply and to pray with and for guests and neighbors, yes, that too consumes fragile emotional reserves. It is work that I love, and work that bears much fruit, rich with God’s movement and goodness. As an introvert I am wired for deep listening and interaction. Still it saps my energy and the exhaustion goes deep.

Who can account for the energy consumption of language learning, and living and working in a language we speak only poorly.

And we are aging.

Lately I suspect still another reason for the intensity of exhaustion. There is an enemy who prowls. His weapons are deceit and confusion. He is good at throwing obstacles our way. I’m tempted to go into details, but I won’t.

Tuesday afternoon I felt too drained for anything. Curt hung out with his olive trees while I rested. At sunset we played cards for a bit, then enjoyed a bit of TV with popcorn for dinner.

Now it is Thursday. Nothing has changed. Life continues good and beautiful and blessed. The day is mild. The laughter and chat and games of pre-school children at play wafts through my open window. Curt is out with his olives. My back remains fragile, and I am weary. Dear ones come and go, and they speak of ways they are blessed by this place and their time here. I notice enemy whispers about all the things I can’t do well, whether in the realm of self-care, harvest, creative process, or beyond-my-control obstacles.

I recall God’s promises. They cut through the haze. Whatever one can say about me, HE is strong—and able, and good. "His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man; the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love." Psalm 147:11

Evening with Curt on the water

Yet will I praise His name.

The Tuesday report--from a Friday perspective

The Tuesday report: an occasional meditation on the everydays of expatriate life. How many times has someone said to me, “Your life is so exciting, while mine is, well… I’m here in the same place doing the same things I always do.” Yet wherever you and I live, life happens in everydays. We gather food, do laundry, encounter friends and neighbors, find time for a shower, show up for prayer. Why Tuesday? Tuesday strikes me as a nothing-special day--routinely filled with whatevers, the mundane stuff of getting on with life.

I started this post last Friday. And so the days fly by....

I thought about how I might reflect on Tuesday, what I might want to write about, on the day. And on the Tuesday before last, and on the one before that. But now it is Friday. Again. I thought of what I would say back in March, and in April. But now it is Halloween, and tomorrow November begins.

All those small wonders, and those troubling bits, that shoot through every day. We returned to Turkey just three weeks ago after four months in the US.

After time away, normal joys, and the normal headaches, seem bigger. They vibrate in my inner places—mostly to tickle and massage, but sometimes to unnerve my soul. So that I stand in my kitchen all exhilarated by the bitty bits of normal. Things like:

• Scraping vegetable cuttings and food waste into used shopping bags. Later I will lean out a window to hang the daily offering on my neighbor’s fence post. Not waste, but chicken feed!

• The constant clucking, scratch, and crow of chickens. I walked outside early today, the sky barely tinged with pink light. All down the hillside cocks celebrated (or did they protest?) the movement from night to day. 

• Çiğdem calling from her next-door balcony, “Jeri-abla…. Mommy? Where are you?” She passes a message, or an invitation, or asks whether we’ll go into town today.

• A sunset picnic atop nearby Kyaneai. We sit round the cook-fire with Spa for the Soul guests. Flames cast their shadowy light on the ancient amphitheater and small house-like tombs. The moonless sky is milky with stars. Curt stands watch over grill and fire, and tosses a couple of foot-long centipedes into the coals.

• Dobby the doggy house-elf at play in the garden. Our most frequent guest, he came home with us on our arrival and will stay yet one more week.

• Work that begins before dawn and continues into evening dark--the work to make a four-months empty house ready to receive guests, and the work to provide for and accompany the several retreatants who came and went during our first days back:
• o   I hang load after load of sheets, towels, blankets and clothing on the line to dry,
  o   then gather in the sun-scented pieces,
  o   later to stand hours at the ironing board to steam away wrinkles as I pray over those dear ones that this work of love will serve.
  o   I write menus, rummage through supplies and then through shops. Finally those many trips up and down our 40 steps to the front door with bags full of goodness.
  o   I make yeast dough and bake bread,
  o   while Curt prunes, weeds, and blows debris from terraces,
  o   and pulls garden furniture from nooks and crannies of storage.
  o   We lay tables, pack picnics, wash dishes, and give ourselves over to listen to and pray for those dear ones.

• Retraining ourselves to make sure toilet paper lands in the bin and never in the toilet where it will so easily clog pipes and septic. It is a semi-annual adjustment of habit. 

• Sweat. Even when I’m still. Though summer heat is finished, it will be yet another week or so before I go about my work and play in comfort. With age, my over-sensitivity to heat grows extreme. 

• The casual friendships that define the life of this place. Business is not done without a glass of tea and generous inquires about family and life. We wander through our errands to the accompaniment of invitations to stop, enjoy a coffee, and chat. We greet and are greeted. Hugged, kissed, taken in.

• Rumor and gossip, especially the tales of the former owner of our house who has been wandering the town drunk and accosting our friends to tell them to tell us that he wants another $50,000 or he will sell our house to someone else. For us and others in this village where modern ways of deed and title are still in the works the concern rumbles in the background of life—now reawakened by this man who says such things to our friends and neighbors but never to us.

• Turkish. Chatting along barely realizing I’m speaking the language. And all those other times when the words garble and I have no idea what they, or I, just said. When I repeat a sentence three times before I get the grammar right, rewarded by the chuckles of my listener.

• Lightning bolts illuminating the horizon over the sea; slow-arriving thunder; all while stars glint in the blackness overhead.

• Camped up high and sleeping when the sky rips open with red-eye explosions of light, the roar and clap of air in the bolt’s wake, and crazy-heavy rain! Where just an hour before all had been cloudless starlight and gentle breeze.

And so much more. All to the accompaniment of that one-foot-in-Turkey, other-foot-still-grounded-in-the-US orchestra. Every time we jet across the world, there is this season where two diverse places inhabit my inner spaces. For a few days both feel tangible. I can hear grand-daughter Lia chasing after Curt. “Dede! Dede!” Round and round through kitchen, living and dining room in Cait and Josh's Kansas City home. All while roosters crow in Çiğdem’s garden and I sweat in Mediterranean heat, my nose full of the abundance of ripening olives and sun-drenched wash from the line.

Love those evening walks!