Smell the Onion

I’ve been thinking a lot about being a responsible consumer
recently.  My continuing quest to live frugally keeps bumping up
against my desire to put my money where my mouth is regarding ethically
produced products.  For instance: meat.  I can buy a couple
pounds of chicken at Wal-Mart for about 8 dollars. However, if I want to
eat a chicken that wasn’t pumped full of hormones to make it
unnaturally big, fed seriously questionable feed, or squashed in to a
shoe box sized crate for it’s entire life, I have to pay nearly 9
dollars a pound.  Here I am faced with a dilemma–ignore the part
of me that says “my stewardship of my resources extends to the choice
of whether or not to support disrespectful (if not unethical) treatment of part of God’s
creation” or… eat less chicken.  For some reason it surprised me
when I realized that I’m not really entitled to affordable meat. 

Or affordable anything really.  My choices as a consumer are a
reflection of the values I hold regarding many things: the ethical
treatment of animals (and I’m still going to eat them, so don’t think
I’m going all PETA on you) , child labor, slave labor, unscrupulous
business practices…

Man.  It’s 1 am and I can’t type anymore.  More later. 

I am feeling very grateful and very overwhelmed right now. 
Gratefully overwhelmed, maybe.  I can’t shake the presence of my
African summer and that is so achingly bittersweet.  Then of course,
there’s the girl whose very existence is in me a wellspring of joy and
gratitude.  And the sheer excitement in the knowledge that God has plans to prosper
us…to give us hope and a future…What kind of joy is it that the
creator of the universe has decided that even in my (vast)
unworthiness he will a) save me from myself b) allow me joy and
c) let me “help” be a part of what he is doing in the world through his son?

 Ahh.  A picture:

and A poem:


There are days when breathing is too much–

when air is so clear it dissolves you from the inside

when the grass is too green–liquid green

and the sky is too big and too far;

days when your soul stretches past the horizon–

past the fixed spheres where music began

and outruns Atlas.



There are days when pices of your sould dig clear through the earth–

and end up in some Tibetan saddle bag,

the tin mug of an Indian orphan,

or pour down on Korea in monsoon rains.



There are days when your soul alone

bears witness to the last scream of a pterodactyl

or the birth of a star.



There are days you feel the scent of flowers

days when the sun catches your skin the right way

and rips you wide open.



There are days you can swallow the sky.

An online acquantience has recently returned from some weeks working
with orphans and children in Ethiopia.  Reading her blog is like
reliving a little bit of my returning.  There is nothing else like
it.  Something she wrote reminded me of a poem-like thing I wrote
after I had been back awhile.  Here it is:

Before I left Africa,
I tried to wash the mud off of my shoes
(I was going home, you know, and it wouldn’t do to have such filthy shoes at home)
I accumulated quite a bit, my six weeks on Kilimanjaro.

Some of it was everyday mud–from the to and fro of everyday walking over mud-filled potholes and patches:
Past the temple–
the beggar with the blue umbrella,
the “house of music”–
the Golden Leaf Bazaar
and the Masai Medicine man.

Some of it came from Kili herself–
from hiking up and down the mud-slicked arteries that criscross her slopes:
from the roads between the banana coffee fields,
the log bridge over the river,
the steep path to Soun Orphanage,
the trail to the base of the Merangu waterfalls.

My shoes are covered in my African life:

Saturated with sounds of Arabic prayers,
Pentecostal church choirs,
Diesel engines,
Asking and giving,
    buying and selling,
        shouting and laughing
in the jumbled song of Swahili.

Saturated wtih images of green and blue horizons
little boys and girls in castoff clothes,
locusts the size of my hand,
laughing pink tongues on brown lips,
and vibrant cloths in Chui’s shop window.

Before I left Africa, I tried to wash Africa off of my shoes.
I scrubbed and scraped,
and washed brown rivers of memories
down the open drain.  I never found the blue of my shoes again.
Africa, it seems, is more stubborn than running water,
and I still walk on memory soaked feet.