Connecting Mandarin and English,
Chinese and
American,
people
with people
As it Ends, it also Begins
(August 24, 2008) (return
to Homepage)
-----
This
is the end.
As I sit here in the great room in our home
In Oregon, the sun peeking over the horizon and sneaking through the tree
into my squinting eyes, I realize that it will be more than four months
before this happens again. By this time tomorrow we will be on a plane starting
our journey to China. We will have stepped out of our box of comfort into
a world of unknown.
A trip is not leaving one place to arrive
at another. A trip is a cascade of emotions and feelings, feelings of excitement
and joy, of growth and a freshness, feelings of loss and separation, of
anxiety and uncertainlty. A trip should be a journey in life.
I already miss through anticipation the walk
to the barn where Joe, the minature horse, watis for my attention and the
fowl cackle busily doing nothing but watching for a unweary insect to feast
on or for the ranking fowl to take the feast away. I miss the new flowers
and the branch overgrowing its limits imposed by my standards. I miss the
abstract that tells me I'm home.
Yet I would not reverse this decision to visit
and work in China. Never! Never! This is the reason for living; to stretch
and grow, to model for others to stretch and grow, to interact and share
with others on this planet which is quickly becoming our backyard and community.
We are blessed with more than we could hope for.
A note about Chinese leader
Hua Guofeng:
How do we react when a
former president of the United States dies? How do we envision that
people of other nations would react? Did the world even know that
a former chair of the Communist Party of China, and therefore its
leader, die last week? Hua Guofeng was a leader in the late seventies
when China started encouraging education and stimulating economic
growth. While his place in history may be small and this death virtually
ignored, he may have been more instrumental the changes in modern
China then we can envision. |
The next entry will be the next time we find
an Internet connection, maybe in an airport enroute, maybe with the sun
streaming in my eyes in an apartment on campus in Nanchang.
.
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