Punctuating our days

This is something, a fellow student, Nora, wrote about our trip to the West Coast last week!

Over the course of our West Coast terrestrial ecology trip, the rain has provided a nearly incessant rhythm punctuating our days. Sometimes light and misty, other times heavy and relentless, its persistence as the backdrop to our journey remained constant. When overcast skies poured forth precipitation we were compelled to don our raingear, effectively turning the group into a multi-colored rainbow snaking its way steadily down the trail. I have come to recognize my bundled up, brightly clad, hooded classmates by the color of their rain jackets: Bri in deep purple and Rachel in bright yellow, Kelsey in light green and Colin in bold blue. The list goes on, but it seems that the variegated raingear we wear visually captures the dynamic vibrancy that forms the essence of our group. Trudging through the rain day after day, we may look drenched and bedraggled, but this sorry state passes away as we shed waterproof layers, leaving them for the drying room to work its restorative magic. This afternoon, our perseverance through the rain paid off in a visually striking reward. Upon completion of our research for the day, we walked to the road and encountered a rainbow arching across the sky just ahead. As the day progressed and we hiked further, we found not one, but two additional rainbows. This extravagant display of beauty, made possible by the rain, was a feast for the eyes and nourishment for the soul.

We, like the trees

Students, clad in stubbies and flannels

From all across the states

Fond of this new place we call home

Hands labor in the kitchen

Bodies sloppy swish in a line

Harlem Shake like mad

Minds discover the difference between cnidarian and annelid

Arms toss sausage to the eels

We come alongside

Preserving the peach.

Richelle accompanying the Doxology with beautiful harmony, and sharing with fellow friends the mystery of appreciating this place entirely

Janine taking delight in the rich black sand of the seashore and marveling at the hand of God

Katie’s melodic voice narrating the life we live here while thoroughly treasuring the time that remains

Bri throwing her head back as she giggles and doing life through an artist’s perspective

Rose Ellen waking up in the cool, dark of the morning to brew coffee and delight in a time of the day that most of us do not yet understand

Kate joyfully skipping, bopping, and dancing to the harmonic music blaring as the background noise of our lives

Colin carefully hand-making bread dough to preserve the earth we inhabit

Kaelyn crinkling her nose when she smiles and silently being a warm, encouraging presence in any room she inhabits

Emma vigilantly acknowledging and granting every person the facility to be who God created them as, asking caring questions, and making dandelion chains with little girls on Wednesdays

Megan memorizing poetry and acknowledging and appreciating that who she is exactly how the Creator molded her to be

Kelsey taking delight in the simplicity of clothing passed through generations and the orange glow of the sun setting through the windowpane of the classroom

Regan celebrating life from an aerial view and creatively collaborating in the kitchen

Ruthie, so happy-hearted, tasting and seeing God in the euphoria of standing on her hands even just for a brief moment of time

Becca sliding her fingers across the keys of a piano and attentively living and listening to everyone

Hannah teaching me how to have siblings, and teaching us all to defensively live in a house of 18

Nora surreptitiously flowing across the floor in dance, in full knowledge that her passions can be left for only herself to praise God

Rachel running as a form of worship, fully knowing that she’s using her body for what it’s meant to do

We, like the trees, worship by being.

This is something I wrote for my class, God and Nature, acknowledging my fellow CCSP friends who worship just by being, as the trees do.

Handstand Land

Spring Break, otherwise known as Fall break for us here in New Zealand was just two weeks ago, and I’m finally catching up.

Ruthie, a fellow friend here, made it her goal to teach everyone at CCSP New Zealand to do a handstand by the time flying out of this country comes around. Luckily, being a long-ago cheerleader, I get along with handstands just fine. However, the other two traveling with us on Spring Break were successfully taught by the one and only Ruthie Sutherland. Naturally, there is a clear exhilaration associated with the feeling of standing on your hands. And conclusively, our trip was made up of handstands anywhere and everywhere. We tasted God in the act of performing them in the center of the mountains.

 Handstands at: Tekapo Lake, on the Routeburn Track, in Milford Sound, Dunedin, Wellington, and obviously at almost every roadside stop. This is where we traveled: the southern portion of the South Island.

At Tekapo we climbed around a ridge to see the sun shine through the corner of the mountains. As we returned, we engaged in a sort of horse manure fight, leading to rivalry, laughter, and residue. Much to our surprise, we arrived back at our tents to discover that another group from the Convent had set up camp right next to us. We grabbed our leftovers for dinner and ran to the top of the hill to eat with them. We explored, did some tim-tam slams in handstands, and flew a kite on the beach that night. The next morning, we said goodbye to the other five, not fully knowing how many times we had yet to see them on the road.

In Wellington, we ate at the ever-famous Fergburger, the biggest burger I’ve eaten in my lifetime. We continued our travels to Kinlock lodge, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Rain slapped on our windshield as we deliberated whether or not we were heading in the right direction. We arrived at the lodge, set on the front of the circle lake encircled by mountains (which seems to be a theme of New Zealand). We checked in, hopped in the wooden crate hot tub, picked from the blackberry bushes aside us, and then ran down to the lake to skip rocks atop of it. Once we were drenched in water of all sorts, we gathered our towels, wool socks, and fleeces to huddle in the kitchen with our lemon lime bitters and dinner.

The next morning, we were off to start the Routeburn.

Since the Routeburn would of taken us several days and loads of money to get all the way through and turn around again we organized a scheme with the other group of 5, planning on doing the same track. We each started on one end of the track On our second night of backpacking we met at a hut for the night, to eat dinner together, bang each others knees with tin pots, sit on the tall rocks by the river, and finally, swap rental car keys. We then went on our way to the opposite car park that we started in and finished at our new car for the rest of the trip, Rosie.

The Routeburn was astounding. Colin gawked over every miniscule piece of creation as we giggled behind him. But I had eventually come to the recognition that God had touched each and every stone that we set our feet on. He set his hand directly on the weather, which worked in our favor. The rain stopped fifteen minutes into our 5 hour hike on day one. And because of the rain, we had the pleasure of gazing at rich, green forest and bush flowing over with waterfall. Our Father had his hand on our drained legs and weary backs. He blessed us with the ability to have everything we needed to survive strapped onto our vertebrae for a few days. It gave us a wonderful sense of life.

We had the pleasure of sitting less than two feet away from a beautiful kea bird on the peak of a small, off-the-trail mountain, where we ate lunch. Ruthie and I sneaked a few extra pears during Key Summit and goggled at a dear little girl on a day hike with her mother and father, looking back at us, her eyes overshadowed by round blue glasses. We crossed paths with two friends that had visited the Convent earlier in the semester: a wonderful, familiar surprise. We relished in barley soup, community huts overflowing with people from all over the world, sunrises, and towers made of cards.

We came back to civilization after a few days away from it to find smelly, wet clothes in the trunk of the car, pay 38 dollars for dinner at the only restaurant in town, see glowworms fill the forest of the hostel we stayed for the night, get a wee bit of internet, and take a boat out onto Milford Sound, getting soaked by a waterfall above us. We woke up the next morning feeling as if we had been hit by a bus. That day, we drove to Dunedin, absolutely adoring life. We were back to a crammed car spotting countless mini coopers and antiques, drying clothes out the windows, and observing how the sheep outnumber us 4-1 here in New Zealand.

We made a few roadside stops: Mirror Lake, a beautiful field made for handstands, Gore, and the Chasm. We arrived to Dunedin around 7 and aimlessly drove around the town as the sun was setting, blinding us from seeing anything in our path. We arrived at our reserved room in the hostel “Hogwartz”. I was a bit skeptical, not fully acknowledging Harry Potter’s film, but it ruled. We sat in a loft strung with lights and furnished with suede chairs to eat supper. Our room had a plant growing in its sink, a beautiful view of Dunedin through large glass windows, and plenty of space. In Dunedin, seals sun bathed directly on the beach.

Tunnel Beach, in Dunedin, was debatably my favorite part of the trip. The tide came in through a tunnel naturally carved in the faded white rock that extended onto the water almost like a cliff we could stand atop. We climbed through a small tunnel to do more handstands and watched some Kiwis let off a paper lantern above the cliff.

That night, we sat in a penguin hide on a beach bringing me back to my Michigan home: sand dunes and high grass galore. We heated up soup on our portable stove and watched yellow-eyed penguins, skip, jump, and hop up the hill after feeding in the ocean all day long.

I could write paragraphs more on my break but to share all that is to bore everyone except we who experienced it. We returned home to the Convent to swap stories during our Live Word Community night and to begin two weeks of the course God & Nature with Cory Beals. Now, four weeks left here with CCSP and we’re all anxious to discover what’s next. 

Susan

Rejecting all geometry

Abandoning arrogance to stand in awe

 

Wild is God, the gardener

Overcoming the absurdity of wilderness

 

Bowing often to creation

In discernment and humility

The Lord God walking in the cool of the evening

 

A five-year-old in love with chooks

A woman watching the wings of a moth enflamed in a candle

A child clad in shorts and a t-shirt and high topped sneakers

A man learning the licorice smell of pine stump

 

The place where we learn this love,

If we learn it at all,

Shimmers behind every new place we inhabit

 

Looking through a new lens

To take time, sit on the porch

To walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs

A chance to count the chickens before they hatch

Insouciance

 

We cannot unpeach the peach

My wonder in the face of it is bottomless

 

This is a found poem that I produced via sayings of Susan and readings that embodied our week with her. Susan taught us our second week of Environmental Literature. This poem encompasses many of the passions that Susan stirred in me as well as several others during class.

We learned during our week with Susan, about the concept of evil in the face and presence of God. We read a poem about God being the gardener, carefully choosing and plucking plants from the garden for the greater wellbeing of its growth, just as He does with us. He overcomes the absurdity of this earth in its present state.  The fourth stanza embraces the topic lines of various essays and poems that we read. Additionally, I learned the importance of taking away the calibrated meter on the camera lens glued to my face, and seeing things by merely being in their presence. Susan repeatedly mentioned the apprehension we were feeling towards Spring Break the following week, challenging us to live insouciantly (care-free) and to acknowledge several ways of experiencing.

“We cannot unpeach the peach” is a quote by Dillard, simply meaning that we cannot forget what we’ve learned in certain instances, and Susan is a chief representation of that quote. We all thoroughly enjoyed her approach to teaching, reception of her students, and joyful individuality.

stuck in the mud

I bruised my tailbone at kid’s club today, attempting to slide my whole body in between the legs of an 8 year-old to “unfreeze” them in a simple game of tag. The grass was slippery from the rain that sprinkled it ten minutes before. It was worth it. I laughed and cried as the wind was knocked out of me and 3 or 4 young boys and girls popped their faces in my line of vision from above grasping their small hands on my arm to help me back up to play. I adore serving in Kaikoura. 

the mountains await

The last two weeks has been stitched together by contrasting classes: the first, Marine Ecology, and the second, Environmental Literature.

The week of Marine Ecology was demanding and hectic, but such a blast. My mind works something like advocating for those less disadvantaged, not like determining the difference between cnidarian and annelid. I eventually got there, learning the difference between those dang jellies and segmented worms. I learned through identification of intertidal creatures in the cool, lush tidepools of Kaikoura. All week we participated in field work, treading lightly over the delicate tidepools carpeted with seaslugs, aneonomes and crabs snagging my attentive eyes. I explored, discovered and shouted with delight upon the discovery of a bigger sea star than the person next to me. On one particular morning, we woke up to the golden light of the sun rising over the deep blue water, in search for sperm whales. The boat sped toward their echolocated sounds beneath the boat. They boasted their flashy tails at us to plunge to deeper depths in search for food, again, for 45 more minutes. At the end of our journey we discovered over 200 dolphins, flipping in the water on all sides of the boat. We screamed and laughed with delight and we examined the wonderful blessing it is to see these marine mammals joyfully releasing their energy for their audience to gawk over.

Environmental Literature 1 brought us back to a normal day at the Old Convent, which is nothing less than inexplicable. A typical day is not actually typical. It could look like biking to class at 8:45 at an Irish Pub down the street or huddling in front of the glow of the fire on floral mattresses to discuss remarkable literature. We talk about things like honoring this earth by even acknowledging the lack of language that we can match with it.  We make homemade salads and eat Emma’s raspberry coffeecake.

One particular afternoon 4 of us headed to SLAM (which must be bellowed when mentioned). SLAM is a kid’s after school program that a couple from the Presbyterian church started in Kaikoura. It’s a program to teach the kids that attend about God, let them be themselves, and let their energy run wild for a few hours. This past week I listened to a 7 year old tell me that he hated God and start defending evolution after hopping a fence to run away from kid’s club. He was in a tad bit of trouble and frustrated about it. Allister, a volunteer approached Yascha with a determined heart to have some sort of meaningful conversation with him. As we sat on the stone wall, I watched this 7 year old explain why he hates God. It was simply because his father doesn’t love him. We sat in the sorrow of these uncontrollable circumstances and prayed that these children would come running to their creator. I was awakened with the joy of being a part of something bigger than myself.

Following kid’s club, we swiftly biked to the elderly home down the street to catch the end of a few other CCSPers singing “Eidleweiss” to the residents there. We ran into the home, interrupting a song and started singing along with the others. Tears ran down Ruthie’s face as the noise of Regans guitar and Rachel’s violin left the room looming with joy upon our departure. Wednesday is service day.

I come home to tea on the table and help the crean-up crew dry dishes while we violently dance to Lecrae. Once all the dishes are clean we hurry outside to digest by standing on our hands for a while.

During night class, we analyze our poems and Kelsey stares at the sunset outside, dominating the window pane. We laugh, as we always do when she’s distracted by the glow of the orange light at dusk. Drew, our professor for the week affirms that we must get up and gaze out the window at the picture painted in the sky around, just as Kelsey always does.

We finished the week with a Rugby game, my new favorite sport to watch. The game started with horses ridden by knights in shining armor galloping ‘round the field. Sunday morning, after waking up late, I had “church” with a fellow CCSPer on the front porch of the Convent. I made my first batch of homemade wheat bread and was summoned to a campfire in the grass outside. I left, my clothes drenched in the scent of campfire smoke, to bike in the dark to the Irish pub on St. Patrick’s Day to get real sweaty dancing to some Irish jingles.

I’m half-way through my time here at the Old Convent. This is our last week of Environmental Literature with Susan, our sweet professor for the week. We’ve finalized our plans for Spring Break, coming up on Saturday and are anxiously awaiting the mountains ahead of us.

rhythm

I feel most at home in the kitchen of the Old Convent, where love flows heavy. The smell of pumpkin, sweet potato soup lures me downstairs to assist Emma is cutting red peppers or roasting walnuts.  The music either blares loudly or lulls serenely in the background of chatter. We work together as a community to bake bread, prepare tomato sauce for homemade pizza, or roast pears in honey for pear tart.

Being in the kitchen feels like home not because it’s how home felt growing up, but because it captures the essence of home at the Old Convent. The kitchen is a realm of learning, collaboration, fellowship, creation, and singing at the top of our lungs. These are things that I adore.

It makes me feel like part of a big family, with chores to do and cooking to achieve. I absorb innovative, sustainable ways to eat tasty food from the affluence of various people with vast amounts of knowledge in the preparation of our scrumptious sustenance. We’ve been taught by our cook, Emma, that the kitchen is a place to make mistakes. It’s a place to laugh and talk and learn skills that we can proudly bring back home to our mothers. I will take pieces of the kitchen back with me, to more fully develop my home in Michigan, where I’ll congregate with my housemates to make our own tea from herbs in indoor pots, and to grow our own lettuce from seed.

It’s not only a place of joy but also a place of rhythm. It’s a place that we gather around, three times a day. We come to the kitchen to nourish our bodies and commune with the quirky people that surround us. Here, I can abide in gratefulness of the daily bread that our Father has offered us three times, every single day.

It’s a place that reminds me how Jesus has intended us to live. He’s intended us to live in relentless song, serving others, and in thanksgiving of the blessings He’s presented to us. The rhythm of our lives should have our Father at the center and the kitchen is a place that reminds me His unending love.