Homesick

Our family really enjoyed our safari to the Maasai Mara last week.  Pictures will be posted soon, I think.  We've just got a lot to share right now!  This picture is just a teaser for a more extensive photoblog to follow.

I share it because it was on one of our evening game drives with this view that I suddenly felt like I was back at home, not so much because of the view itself which IS quite a bit like a western Colorado summer early evening, but more because of the way it felt.  The cool air of evening replacing the heat of the day, the mingled smells of dust and animals; I've heard that memories are often most closely tied to scents.  Smelling the moist, cool air rising up through the grass I was suddenly a kid again, sitting on a tractor in a hayfield at the end of a long day, thinking.

Most farmers are philosophers; Some are theologians.  My Grandpa is both.  Much of farming is sitting, watching, performing some simple task over and over again; it gives plenty of time to wonder and ponder.  Most of my theology was reasoned out on a tractor, first as my Grandpa or Dad sat on the fender, teaching me to drive, then as I was driving on my own.

For a few minutes, I was alone with my thoughts on the Savannah contemplating man, his condition, MY condition.

It has been a while.  I've been too busy, with too many things to take care of.  But it's not busyness so much as the fact that everything is so removed from life and death.  I'm on the computer doing research, writing, or Facebook.  I'm reading a book or cleaning up the house; Everything is so far removed from the actual business of living.

I get stuck in ruts where I go days or weeks without thinking about my life, my death or my place in the world; stuck in a plastic, pen and paper, electrical, networking, virtual world.  In our virtual worlds, we're big men: always in control, in charge, gods.

Looking across the Earth it's easy to see one man is no big thing.  I needed to look out at this view, needed to smell the smells and feel my own smallness, to see the big picture.  It's then I recognize my place and my need.  I miss home.  I want a 'real' Christmas with cold and snow and clear starry nights but in the scheme of things, thinking of eternity, home is much bigger.