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| Saturday, July 24, 2010 |
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Let Summer Tilt You
By webmaster @ 12:01 AM :: 1114 Views ::
0 Comments :: Nina Frost
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In my last blog I wrote about the summer imperative to stop what you are doing, to pause, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
My husband and I recently paused in a special way by taking a cruise to Alaska, and both words were brand-new to us...both "cruise" and "Alaska."
A book I started on the trip is a memoir about traveling 25 years ago in rural China, and the author, a young college grad, writes about the chaos and impotence she feels upon being in a place where she can't understand a letter, much less a word of what is whirling around her. She muses about how "all power is contextual," in that confident, even cocky, Americans are reduced to pointing, jabbering, scared folk when suddenly unable to navigate life around them.
The new context called vacation does this, too, though in a gentler way. If power is contextual, so is what we notice, how we spend our time, how we talk to ourselves and to loved ones. Days of staring at the sea stirred my unconscious, and I both rested and dreamed at night in deep ways. One day we awoke amidst a fjord that led to a glacier, and the whole ship fell silent, transfixed by the context we call nature but usually do not stand right in the glorious middle of.
What about you? Where is summer not just calling you to stop, but to shift contexts? This can be an inner event, of course. I know full well I could radically change the context of my life if I prayed more, paused more, gave back more. Time away from routine, either a literal voyage or a new attitude, has a way of tilting our worlds. "Behold," says the prophet Isaiah, "I am doing a new thing... Do you not perceive it?"
May you have the gift, however it comes, of summer's tilt. It's still Pentecost, after all, that season of new life blowing through all our cherished contexts. Here's to blessed re-orientation. |
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