~the sky has high tea with life~

As I drove to Ekta Vihar (slum area) today we passed two men diligently cleaning two large tall glass window doors. They stood on one teetering bamboo ladder as they skillfully wiped the windows to nonexistence. The sky met the glass and both faded into eachother. It was such an amazing illusion, as if the sky were stepping in for high tea. I lost myself in the clear blue reflection of the glass and the sky, the sky and the glass, mind began to rewind to about seventeen or eighteen years ago. Michaela and I couldn’t have been more than five or six. Her and Tesse were moving away, and I was so sad….Uncle Joel and my dad were moving boxes down the stairs of the house to the moving van while Michaela, Tesse, and I raced up and down the stairs. “Hey, you guys, stop that!” uncle Joel yelled, but we were too busy competing to beat eachother that we weren’t paying attention. Tesse, stayed back while Michaela and I raced at a dead speed to the doors below. A large tall door at the east of us was clear ahead, and on the last three steps we both vaulted towards it….As we sailed for the open air outside to claim our rightful first place, we both collided with a solid unforgiving surface…The glass on the large tall window we so hastily mistook for a door threw both of us to a crumpled ball of legs, arms, and aching bottoms. The pain and surprise from the contact of unrelenting glass made my head spin, I think I saw stars. I can remember us both looking at eachother and without words communicating, “we shouldn’t have run down the stairs.” We both sat there contemplating if we were going to cry about our injury, but instead, we joined our hands and pulled eachother up. Perhaps it was fear of retribution from our parents for acting wild, or perhaps we didn’t want to hear “I told you so,” but regardless of the reason, Michaela and I never told anyone. She squeezed my hand as we slowly walked back up the stairs to where Tesse stood. I allowed the aching pain of the accident to course through my body without allowing it to voice my body’s aggravation…. Yet, I wanted to cry so bad because it hurt, but Michaela, always the brave one, shook her head and pulled me unceremoniously past our parents. It is now almost eighteen years later that our simple folly has some great learning potential, even if it is a little later on in life. As in all my experiences, this one has just another marker on my life’s journey. At five, the concept of pain is something associated with bandaids, warm arms to comfort you, or a spoonful of the yummy pink syrup kept on the top shelf in the frige. Now at the ripe age of 22, pain has taught me that sometimes the wounds are too large for a bandaid, or worse not able to be seen by the eye, warm arms aren’t always close by, and the pinky syrup was more sugar than medicine. Yet, as I held a three month old baby today in the slums of Ekta Vihar, I realized that pain as so many other things in life, is relative, for when God has made the miracle of life, no matter how bad something hurts, one can’t deny the beauty of life, it has high tea with us everyday regardless if there is any tea to be had….Life can’t be perfect, it was never meant to be, but it certainly can be amazing, painful, fun, boring, happy, and sad, all at once, and frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am thankful that I wake up everyday, and I am even more thankful that the most obscure things remind me of my childhood, of family, and of love. If ever lonely, I have those small treasures to hold close, it is what keeps me going and allows me to never feel too alone….May all us find the doorway that meets the sky~K