One Thing: Contentment
About a week and a half ago, my friend Josh and I drove out to a Karen village for a visit. I knew I wanted to take some of my kids, but not all of them. I picked Kenya, Solo, and Isaac, and we went to meet our friend Sarah and her husband and baby, following their truck out to the village. They had told us about a little family who needs a new house, since theirs is falling down: just a simple bamboo hut with a leaf roof. We at Shekina get to help with it, and this was the initial trip, time to meet the couple and the elders of the village.
We drove for an hour and a half on roads that disappeared and reappeared at will, switching back, becoming dirt, then inexplicably concrete for a few meters. Up steep, teak tree-covered hills and down. Josh played music that I didn't know I had on my phone, snapping photos out of the window. The kids bounced around in the back seat and we all gaped at the views that we could barely see from the haze.
There were so many things from that day, the meeting with elders that we were privileged to attend, the way that I really made an error in judgement, picking Isaac to come, but then it didn't turn out to be such an error after all, since he eventually settled in and decided to enjoy himself. (He's at an age of strange, inappropriate announcements, and I'm often glad the people around me can't speak English: "I don't want to be in this horrible place! I don't like this house!" Ack. Kill me! It was a day of bribes.)
There were even tiny pigs, but the one thing, just this one moment, happened after we went to a surprise church service (I have been in situations like this before, where I don't really understand what is going to happen, and then we walk into a place and I realize that we're going to Karen church and also that I'm going to pray at the front. Oh! We're doing this now! It is the spice of life. They also asked Josh to sing several times, and he tried to throw me on the bus by telling them I was a good singer, which is not even true.) So we had finished with that and then we ate together, mixing the food we brought with the food Sarah's parents made, in a loose grouping on the floor, which we sat around, filling our plates with rice and bites of other deliciousness.
And then Sarah said, "I think we'll take a rest before we go out to the other village and see the house. You can sleep downstairs if you like."
Josh went for a walk to photograph the village, but I knew what I wanted to do. I used to be a snob about naps. Now I love them. I lay down on a mattress on the floor, downstairs, and after a while Sarah's mom came and offered to take my kids out to feed the fish and go to the store for snacks. And that was when it happened. This moment.
I lay there, downstairs in the wooden house, and looked at the afternoon light streaming in the windows. A fan oscillated, and little breezes came through the open windows (no glass, just wooden shutters). I heard koel birds and roosters, and thousands of cicadas. There was about 45 minutes where I was the only one there. I don't know what it was, maybe just being invited to lie down in this simple wooden village house, the cool of the underneath of the house on a hot day, or the mother who had fed me and taken my kids for a walk. I could hear murmuring, those cicadas, and distant birds, and I felt a contentment that seemed to soak into every molecule I had. I drifted in and out of awareness, and I smiled every time I realized I was still there, in that room, in that village. Content.