Verwandte Artikel zu Home by Another Way: Notes from the Caribbean

Home by Another Way: Notes from the Caribbean - Softcover

Benson, Robert

 
9781400071722: Home by Another Way: Notes from the Caribbean
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1400071720 ISBN 13: 9781400071722
Verlag: WaterBrook, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A lovely Caribbean island and its people awaken in author Robert Benson a sense of place and home. The islanders’ warmth and welcome prompt a new understanding of ideas of beauty, community and spiritual belonging.

“We live in a world where such welcome and gentleness and civility are increasingly rare. Most of the conversation between strangers is terse and quick and far too often, it is cold and rude. It can even be that way, more often than we care to admit, among people who are not strangers. And such is the way of the world that we live in that we are almost stunned by welcome whenever it breaks out around us, and we are certainly drawn to the people and to the places where we find such welcome in abundance.”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Benson is an acclaimed author and retreat leader who writes and speaks often on the subject of prayer and the meditative life. Known for his warmth and creativity, in very accessible terms he invites readers to think meditatively about spiritual things and better connect with God. He lives with his wife Sara in Nashville, Tennessee.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The first time we came to this part of the world, the man who was supposed to meet us at the airport was not actually at the airport when we arrived. It was raining and it was dark. Our luggage was trapped in customs because it was so late. The customs man had evidently gone to get something to eat. There was a person or two trying to be helpful to us in a language the guidebook had promised was going to be English but turned out to be unlike the sort of English we had heard before. We had been traveling for fourteen hours by then, and the fifteenth hour did not look promising. Especially to a couple of folks who were trying to celebrate a wedding anniversary. - We were married in the month of October on a bright and sunny afternoon. To celebrate our wedding, we made the long drive from our home in Tennessee to the coast of Carolina. We spent a week together in a cottage on an island in the Outer Banks, doing not much more all week than reading books and taking naps and lying in the sand.

When our first anniversary came around, we talked it through and decided that rather than buy each other gifts every year to mark the occasion, we would give each other the week off and head for the beach again. It has been a dozen or so years now, and the amount of time has gone from a week to ten days to two weeks, more if we can pull it off. Travel times and weather and last-minute business that had to be done have weighed in on our carefully laid plans from time to time, so we have had to change beaches a time or two over the years. But whenever late October comes around now, we are ready for the beach and the company of just each other. We still do not do much while we are at the beach–we eat, we read, we take naps, we play cards, we watch the sun set in the evenings, we sit in the water and have long conversations, except for when we sit in the water and do not say anything for hours at a time. We do some other stuff too, but I will not mention those things here. My kids might read this, and the thought of such things with their parents involved is enough to drive them screaming from the room. I have learned over the years how easy it is to empty a room of teenagers at the drop of a hint. They are happy with the concept of their parents being in love; they are not happy with the thought of their parents expressing that love in certain ways. - Because of the kind of work we do, our summers can be too busy for a vacation. Vacation is the term applied to a trip that involves just the two of us. Family trips are not really vacations, except in the strict sense that we have vacated one set of premises and moved the general hullabaloo right along with us. When we can squeeze in some time for some time away in the summer, we take the children and several of their friends, and sometimes even other folks we know will come and join us. It can be difficult in the summer months for us to get all of the planets aligned so the two of us can go somewhere alone together and actually vacation in the full sense of the word. So in the way that such things sneak up on you, a particular rhythm has come to our house. About the middle of August or so, we each begin to shape up our schedules and our workloads so the calendar and the to-do list can be abandoned for a couple of weeks in October. Then we start lining up all of the logistical things–airplane tickets and car rentals, somebody to take care of the house and the cats and the mail. When the children were younger, we used to hire someone to stay at the house, but they are old enough now that we no longer need to do so. They are happy to collect the house-sitter fees anyway. By about two weeks before the day we are to depart, we are reduced to staring out the window, waiting for the signal to go and pack and head for the airport. All around us the rest of the world thinks summer is long gone; it looks a lot like autumn, in fact. I need a sweater in the morning when it is time to go and get the papers. The big maple trees by our house start to turn color and then lose their leaves. The sounds of the neighborhood travel farther and can be heard more clearly in the cool air, as can the sounds from the train yard a few miles away and the church bells from a few blocks away and the talk and the laughter of the children waiting for the school bus at the corner. But no matter what the calendar says, it is still summer for us, and it will be summer until we come back from the beach at the end of October. - Our propensity for playing fast and loose with the calendar is something we have come by honestly. “Your life is shaped by the things that you desire,” wrote Thomas Merton. Your calendar ends up being shaped by those things as well. Our life together has its own sense of the passage of time, a rhythm and structure born of the things that we love. In the first place, we are baseball people at our house, and baseball’s calendar has always been a little skewed. Pitchers and catchers report for “spring” training in February, a month when most of the country is still under wraps and not completely convinced that winter will ever end. If you want spring weather for spring training, you have to go to Florida or Arizona. The first day of summer, according to baseball, is not in June but the beginning of April, when the ballparks open up and the official first pitches are thrown. Baseball summer is not over until the World Series has been played and won and lost in late October. In baseball, there is spring and there is summer; November, December, and January are referred to merely as the off-season.

We are church people at our house as well. And according to the Church, the new year does not begin on January 1; it begins on Advent Sunday, which is exactly four Sundays before Christmas Day and five weeks before the big ball drops in Times Square and Dick Clark announces that New Year’s Day may now be celebrated. The beginning of the rebirth of the world– springtime as it is known by some–is celebrated on January 6 at the beginning of the season of Epiphany. Summer is known as Ordinary Time. Church tradition also maintains that the beginning of the end of the year is marked by All Saints’ Day on November 1. There is an old name for the next few weeks before Advent– Kingdomtide–an old name that many church people do not use anymore. I, for one, think that anything that hastens the end of a season known as Ordinary Time is a good thing.

Because we are people who work in publishing, and because we are people who have had schoolchildren at our house, and because we are also people whose schoolchildren were athletes, we have long had some annual calendar adjustments made for us. When other people were making arrangements for their summer holidays, we were making arrangements to attend the rounds of the book shows we needed to attend. When some folks snuck out of town for spring break, we stuck around town because the high-school softball player in our house had preseason practice every day. When others went off for a Thanksgiving getaway or a winter vacation, we went off to wrestling tournaments with the state-tournament-caliber wrestler who lived upstairs. Some folks celebrate Valentine’s by going out to dinner; we spent some years celebrating Valentine’s Day by watching wrestlers at the state tournament in Chattanooga.

Not only is our calendar a little skewed, we do not even operate on what others would call a normal workday schedule either. In the first place, we both work at home, and our workday does not begin with a traffic report. My commute is about thirty-five steps to my studio in the back garden. Sara does not even leave the house; her office is in the little parlor at the end of the hall. I try to be in my studio before first light and finish my writer’s workday before noon. Sara starts her workday a...

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Verlag
WaterBrook
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400071720
ISBN 13 
9781400071722
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
208
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