Relate to me

The sky is blue and a breeze softens the glare of the sun, the mountains are painted in a thousand shifting shades and the car horns seem distant, the trees burst with green and I absorb it in stillness. Maybe this is shalom.

And like an old woman with a faded photo album resting dustily in her lap, scenes from the past few days turn idly in my mind:

-A lunch of too much randomly ordered food in a restaurant with shockingly pink walls and two students who slurp noodles vigorously and announce that I am the only teacher who has ever had lunch with them like this, before using English as slippery as the noodles to explain their social woes and family stories to a teacher nearly as pink as the walls from stiffled giggles and the honor of being with them.

-A walk past the gate grandfather squatting in the bushes as he sheepishly points down at something unseen. Suspicious, and caught in a moment of not know quite what to do since squatting in bushes ought to be a private affair, a glance in the direction of the pointing reveals a small white bunny. It's mine, explains the grandfather holding it out, it's name is bunny. I will give it a better name, I offer, and promptly named it Tashi.

-A walk back from the closest thing to a quesadilla this hemisphere has to offer arm in arm with a colleague looks like the snaking conversation of everything from classes, to lilac bushes, to meals,to babies with the appearance of bread, to plans, to homes, to futures... all disappearing into the warm evening air leaving only the scent of relationship deepened.

-A tea on a sparkling afternoon with a girl who only recently returned to Lhasa after a five year stay in America met at a bus stop on a day too random to remember. Ourselves oddly reflective in that strange coming and going of life and she expressed her conviction that it was god who must have allowed us to meet then, alongside the certainty of my future return. I poured cooled tea on the ground and we hugged as we departed.

-A split second decision of whether to try to sneak by the tumbling beggar children or not decided by their impeccable vision and ecstatic shouts of "HELLO!". I scoop them up in open arms that didn't betray the possibility of avoidance as they demanded to see my recently printed photographs in hand. We crowded together over the photos and I explained the characters in them, but their explanations were better as they pointed at my face in the pictures "look, there's Hello, look, Hello, it's you." I wiped their cracked bleeding noses and bought some snacks in a feeble attempt to care for the woundedness of their filth stained bodies I have come to adore.

As the scenes shift... now dappled with shadows from trees, now obscured by dust, now crowded out by the throb of people, now dampened with tea, now covered in spice, now lost in the chaos of sheer noise... my soul shakes a little and steadies itself in the realization that these images are the who and the how of relationship. And in a mystery so profound I dare not contemplate it long, I relate to them. They relate to me.

The defense of such Incarnation touches a tender spot deep within me and I am awed by it as it appears before me in all of its wondrous agony and joy. 

And, like the old woman with the photo album whose pictures sting with memories so vivid as to be recent, I am loathe to lay it aside.