Update

In futurity I prophetic see... more interesting content and maybe even a few readers! Since we crossed the Rubicon a while back and purchased plane tickets, sold the car, and decided on the first few destinations, all that remains are details that will fall lightly into place along the way. However, not being one to deny the mutability of the best laid plans o' mice and men, I thought it'd be fun to post them now, and see just how accurate they prove to be. Thus:

August 8, 2008: last day of work, trek back to CT, say goodbye
August 18, 2008: celebrate our 1-yr anniversary with a glass of champagne on our flight to Lisbon (by way of Paris, where we may have to procure additional champagne supplies =)
August 20-October 3, 2008: peregrinate from Lisbon to Santiago de Compostela (by way of Fátima); adventure enhanced by the presence of fellow pilgrims of friends and family along the way
October 6-31, 2008: Complete our CELTA course at International House Barcelona
November ... - 2009?: Stay on in Barcelona, taking almost free Spanish classes and enjoying the "cultural capital of Europe" (this one is open ended, as we thought it prudent to leave a month or two of unplanned time to follow whither where the Spirit leads us! Lourdes, Andalucía , or a return to Portugal are all tempting)
January 2009: Stay with Matt & Laura in Melbourne, Australia, for an extended visit after what will by then be over a year living on opposite ends of the earth
February 2009: Spend 2 weeks in Thailand before heading to South Korea in the last week of the month to settle in for the beginning of the Korean school year on March 2

Ok, that's as far as this seer can prognosticate. See you August!

Sick-Day Reading

I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. ~ C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Psalm 120

A Song of Ascents.

In my distress I cry to the LORD,
   that he may answer me:
"Deliver me, O LORD, from lying lips,
   from a treacherous tongue."

What shall be given to you?
 And what more shall be done
   to you, O treacherous tongue?
A warrior's sharpened arrows,
 and fiery coals of the broom tree!

Woe is me, that I sojourn in Meshech,
 that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
Too long have I had my dwelling
 among those who hate peace.
I am for peace; but when I speak,
   they are for war!

There Is No Meantime

A while back, a very dear friend said to me, ‘there is no meantime, there is only now.’ This was on the verge of his departure, and came at a particularly apt moment in time for me. Shortly after he left, a number of things happened. Rooster & I bought our plane tickets (for August '08). We took hold of the monthly budgeting, determined to make this happen. We began getting rid of the stuff that takes up space, physical & mental, and generally paring down to what we’ll take with us on our backs.

But like the fable of the grasshopper & the ant, there’s a potential trap in all this planning and looking ahead: namely, what sort of life does the ant lead for all those months of toil? (Bear with me on this one =) It reminds me of a sermon I heard not so long ago about being preoccupied: if we allow ourselves to focus so intensely on some future event that it occupies our time & mental energies in the present, we sacrifice the present (real, happening, now) to the future (potential, uncertain, then). As our language suggests, we let something of the future occupy ourselves before it is even realized: we are pre-occupied by it. An acquaintance once described to me how in Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, one of the uncle devil’s most sage pieces of advice to his nephew demon (for securing the souls of human beings) is to trick them into living in the future, in focusing on the not-yet realized, into a pre-occupied existence that relegates the present to a transit, a necessary getting-your-house-in-order, a meantime. “In the meantime, I’m…”

Paradoxically, we (generally) exist in a world where we do, in fact, need to get our houses in order. An excess of exuberance may lead us to forget crucial necessities (it’s theoretically acceptable to live in a hut in the woods, but how exactly are you going to eat? Even Thoreau had a marketplace nearby…), yet a dearth of exuberance is premature death for the human-more-than-being: I could never quit my job & move to China...

Ok, so one needs to maintain a balance of practicality and spontaneity. Sacrifice the one completely to the other, and life can be very short-lived indeed. However, sacrifice the other to the one, and the grass is confined to the cracks in the pavement: an over-worked, under-appreciated, un-lived-in life.

Which leads me back to my initial question: if I had to assess the greater danger, whether we suffer or are threatened more by an excess of practicality or of spontaneity, it’s clear to me that we live in the shadow of the everyday death more than that permanent shuttering of eyes. Amid the present resurgence of pragmatism, all recent gains of the imaginative soul by way of reaction against efficiency seem so many miniscule sandbags against a rising flood. Confronted with the pseudo-scientific evisceration of even love & romance, the heart must flee the neurologist’s nano-scalpel & the psychoanalyst’s probing presumptions for the wild regions of an untamed world where death may come in the form of a cougar attack or an overlooked pricker-cut but the moment is full and unhindered by drugs or magazines or worse. As the poet lamented, we "would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain," and I say in reply, better to walk barefoot across the desert & cast your watch into the raging sea at its end.

---

Somewhere not so deep inside me there still lives a young boy who is completely taken with life; who climbs the backyard apple tree to chat with a wise old friend; who battles orcs & ogres with what weapons he finds or fists & cunning if need be; who sees castles in banks of dirt-encrusted snow and an endlessly thrilling game against death in the crashing of waves on the sand; who loves & cries without thought or man-made reason; who trusts implicitly; who flies like a particle of light across the vasty deep in the hours between gloaming and breakfast; who has seen the Great White Tiger that stalks the woods behind his house, the glimpses of which are enough to stick his sneakered feet to the ground in fear mixed with dread excitement.

I still know that feeling, a trembling like a high-voltage current of electricity charging beneath my skin, raising all the hairs on my body and sounding alarums in my heart:

Springtime is a-comin in,
and summer's soon to follow.
I must live all I can today—
I've never lived tomorrow.

Of maps & globe, lists and itineraries, stories & pictures I've read and looked at all I care to. In the only important ways, I’m ready. This waiting may be the worst part and most dangerous.