Finding small treasures...

Although I spent many moments with my tears blurring the yellow lines of the road as I listened to The Kite Runner, I think the saddest part was today when the words faded into music. I couldn't believe it was over. It was like losing a friend or moving away. I've spent only the last week or so with my friends Amir and Hassan in Afghanistan, but I didn't want to come back. I felt that this is the best book I have ever read. As I thought this thought driving to work, I realized, I think that after pretty much every book I read. And, when it ends, I miss it, yet I immediately get this itch for the next adventure. Where will I be next? It's as exciting as if someone put the whole of Outer Space in front of me and asked, where do you want to go?

When I was little, my favorite stories were mysteries. I loved the tales about the girl who moved into an old house in a new city and ultimately found exciting treasures in the attic that led her on adventures. I loved the part when she found the treasures best. I feel that same excitement every time I hold in my hands a fresh new book. It hides within it so many clues, but not to the character's lives, to mine.

I never had any interest in foreign affairs. In fact when it comes to politics and current events, I've always felt I didn't belong. But reading about Obama, reading about Kabul and Peshawar brought these seemingly larger than life issues into real life. I felt I now had a connection to these things, these places. In fact I felt such a connection that my life suddenly felt unfamiliar. I spent my days in this war zone where things beyond horror occur like rainfall, yet I had to shut my car door and walk back into my nice house and watch commercials about the Rachel Zoe Project. Everything I had known felt far away, as if in a dream. How do you connect these two worlds? A world where excess is tossed around like garbage and people refuse food and love for the mere case of appearance; and a world where people are cast off, beaten, starved, and served death by their very friends because of their social class. So different, yet so similar. Again, I am reminded of how I hate hate. Anyone who claims to be better than another, by race, religion, or belief, should read this story and really hear what comes from such hatred. Small children forced to pay for the sins of adults. Sacrifice made in the form of a prepubescent boy. An image not so far off from what we do to each other here in the States. One's superiority complex only brings another's pain. Whether it's mobile death units that kill thousands a day as their families watch, or a religious group humiliating a gay man. Hate breeds pain. Hate breeds stupidity. It holds others down from their potential, thereby holding us all down.

Using this book as a map, I searched my attic for some small treasure. And, what I found was that my fear of the unknown, of war, of other cultures I've never experienced, of situations I'd rather pretend don't happen every day is unnecessary. Shutting out any part of the world shuts us out from ourselves. There is a magnetic attraction I have to finding out about the dark side of man. I don't know why it's there, but I'm glad it is. I know it serves a purpose. It makes me feel closer to life, closer to God to acknowledge what is, all that is. I will most likely never be able to explain it, but in order to love life, I feel I have to love all of it. Even the parts that make me sick to my stomach with grief.


Snakes, for instance, as my girl Bree blogged about recently, are often seen as the symbol of evil. But snakes are as much a part of God's nature as a tree or a butterfly. I think the trick in appreciating nature, or life, is to appreciate all its parts.

This is a corn snake that someone banished from their home when they decided they didn't want a pet anymore. By the time Cornholio slithered onto our front walk he was so emaciated, his chances of survival are slim.