Be Here Now.

After a brief three-week hiatus or something like that, it's hard to know what to blog about when a lot has happened but I'm not really sure how to describe, explain, or summarize it. I mean, there's always your basic: I went on a mission trip to New Orleans and then went straight to a family vacation in Pensacola (sans oil-spill mess!) and straight from there to a mission trip to Jamaica. Now I'm back. C'est tout.

For some reason, I've been feeling generally distracted all summer. I don't know what it is. Whether it's that I'm always thinking of next week or always thinking about something in the past. Whether it's questioning or just not paying attention or just the way time passes and I've never noticed it so much before. Of course, there's always the obvious explanation that I've been back and forth between a dozen different places (countries, states, cities, continents) over the past month-and-a-half. So maybe I'm just understandably a little discombobulated.

At the same time, all this travel has turned into an exercise of "be here now." Because I've been flung far and wide, I am having to make a focused effort not to think about last week or next week, but only RIGHT NOW.

In Jamaica, I felt more focused than I had all summer. More present in my life, I guess, because I never really knew what time it was and even if I did, it didn't matter because it was Jamaica and time doesn't really exist there. You just experience time as it passes and everything just flows into everything else. "No worries, friend. Soon come, man, soon come."

Now that I'm back, I feel more aware of the things I'm doing. Pouring my morning coffee, painting my nails, all those summery things -- I soaked in the lovely extravagance of them for what feels like the first time. It's wonderful -- sitting in a Barnes & Noble, sipping a white mocha, reading whatever book I want, talking to Collette and Sarah between pages. It's luxuriant, rich, delicious. I'm so thankful for the pleasures of my life, and so thankful that I've seen with my own eyes many times what a rare blessed life I lead. But it's not an insulation.

Here's what I'm thinking about today:

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears / while we all sup sorrow with the poor. / There's a song that will linger forever in our ears. / Oh, hard times, come again no more.