Where Kosrae Meets the World

You know that indescribable feeling you get when you experience something so beautiful and you know that no matter how hard you try to describe it to someone, it just ends up sounding average?

I am having one of those moments tonight.  I am going to try.

Its a HOT Saturday night here in Kosrae, and Tyler is ill on the couch and Ryan is in bed already.  I was about ready to hit the hay myself when I decided to get some fresh air first and attempt to cool down.  I grabbed my Nalgene and pushed open our spring-loaded screen door, walking down the sketchy, way-too-steep stairs to the dark road.  There was fresh air alright, but it was HOT fresh air.  Dodging frogs, I walked down our muddy jungle driveway to the black Pacific Ocean, and this is where the scene hit me.  I stood on a rock on the little sea wall where Kosrae meets the world, and was all of a sudden bewildered and speechless at the surreal beauty before me.  The tide was coming in, and I could hear the low rumble of the breakers far out on the reef.  Every now and then there was a flash of white when the waves would break and foam.  A warm, equatorial breeze hit my bare chest, filled with the smell of salt and ocean and hibiscus.  The dark, cloudy sky had broken to reveal a clear patch of the thickest stars I have ever seen, hanging brilliant over the ocean.  They seemed to illuminate the clouds around, and the sky was pitch black and ablaze at the same time.  Looking up, my view was introduced to a swaying palm frond high above me, carelessly playing in the ocean breeze.

Even as I type this I am getting frustrated, trying to depict this scene like I felt it.

I was almost overwhelmed and was left with a sense of yearning.  I couldn't take it all in, and I wanted to exist forever in it.  Something.  I don't know.  It is unexplainable.

I realized that I was living in a scene that everyone dreams about.  Those long winter nights in Walla Walla studying for some nursing test, or warming up your car on an icy morning just to drive to clinical, or those folks sitting in a cubicle wearing a tie and working the same hours every day, or the kids who spend all of christmas break in their basements playing Call of Duty, or those who wonder if all the madness of society is really worth it in the big scheme of things.  Is there something better than chaos of life and the expectations of others and esteem and all the effort it takes to feel the illusion of success?

And here I was, feeling somehow undeserving of the beauty.  The quiet.  The simplicity.

I was taken by it.

How lucky am I to escape the race of society, the madness of modern life, and the dirt of the city and be standing on the peaceful shores of a tropical island somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?  This is the dream of the weary, to feel the salty, humid air blow across your skin, standing under a palm tree and trillions of stars.  To all of a sudden shift from cramming in 6 tests in three days and writing research papers under the clock to waking up, teaching kids, swimming in the ocean until sunset, making dinner, doing the dishes, bidding "fung wo" to the kids walking back to their homes, and pulling back the covers to sleep for another night in paradise.

The beauty has always been here, it just took me a while to see it.

Tonight I feel rather blessed.  God continues to astound me.






Thanks for putting up with my relatively philosophical and "thinking-out-loud-ness".

Peace from the beautiful tropics,


-River