Casa Blanca, Independence, Learning Again (and Again)

 (This post has been waiting in my drafts for months, and here I finally post it. Much more has transpired since this...a jaguar licked my head, I swam in the aquarium that is the Caribbean Sea, I returned momentarily to these United States, and I have a big return trip by Land coming up. Soon you will hear about these, but for now, the post from Sept. 10...)

It is 5:45 on Saturday morning. My room at the Casa Blanca Hotel has a curtain and a drape that is never closed because then there is no air circulation. So I leave them open at all times and it means that there is no sleeping much past 5 a.m. when the sun comes up and - of all of the region of Cayo - hits my window first.

Yesterday was the anniversary of St. George's Caye. This was the battle that lead to Belizean independence, so they celebrate it first and then 11 days later celebrate Independence Day. This allows a double celebration using only one round of street decorations.

I was here at my hotel on the balcony facing the main street when they hung the pennant flag streamers, zig zagging between buildings and when local artists penciled in a Belizean Anniversary Mural on the face of one building and spent three days painting it. This meant that for one Thursday night there was no outdoor movie (which is hosted by one of the mural artists). We wandered down and watched them painting the mural instead.

My time for this Belize segment is coming to a close. I need to go home to close up my house or rent it or sell it, get passports for my parents, tell my pup dogs I am still alive, help my cat to forgive me for being gone so long, buy US clothes that fit my lesser weight (a side effect of this peckish vegan diet) and pack one more suitcase of Things You Can't Get in Belize.

Then I plan to come back. I hope it will take me just a month at home. No snow for me this winter, no great ice skating rink of a driveway for my parents to fall and break hips, no compulsion to tuck into bed at 4 p.m. when darkness falls. I will spend this winter in the Tropics - Lord willing.

I revisited my "Cancers Ethereal and Tangible" post this morning. I thought I had something there that would inform my heart, which today is troubled.

We have something circular about us, in a good way. You go through something trying in life and you learn and you grow and you have this sense that you shoot forward in a straight beautiful flight toward who you were created to be, like a bird freed from entanglement and set loose. But though the bird appears to fly straight, if he were to fly endlessly, he would meet his starting point again. We live on a round planet where things that are straight are ever so slightly curved. And we don't learn lessons once. We learn them again and again. Not because we didn't learn the first time, but because we did and there's a greater depth to go on the same topic next time. I wonder how many times we circle our own personal globes...

I did not learn about Cancer of the Spirit to know it and be done. I learned about Cancer of the Spirit to slough off the first layer of callouses and embedded debris. On this topic, I think I will be learning til I see Jesus and He can pronounce me Cancer Free on arrival.

It still feels like going backwards to see the same terrain below me (as I shoot off as the bird in flight, if you've lost me in my metaphors).

I remember thinking geometry was it. The pinnacle of math. Then came advanced algebra. What? More math. Is there no end to math? No, Susan, there is no end to math. One could conceivably study math one's whole life and still learn more. It's good that I make the analogy to math, which is not my forte, because it makes the realization that there is more to be learned about Cancer of the Spirit seem less daunting. It's surely better than having to learn more math.

All of my 5:00 a.m. mornings with God (which are fewer now that I am not at the Keller's with the wake-up kitchen noises at 4:30 a.m.) anchored me. Now, six weeks later I wake up suddenly adrift. Did storms just flood where I am anchored and I should wait for the water to go down, or did someone pick up the anchor in the night and I've drifted off? This morning I am not sure. All I know is that life and its circumstances have taken a mighty twist, and I am pausing. The lessons are all on the same topics as before. Character issues, I'll say. But the landscape has changed. How do I apply what before was transformational to Now? I feel like someone has turned off the radar and I need to read the elements manually. Where is north? Where is the wind coming from? How fast are we moving? Is it friend or foe who just jumped on deck from another ship? Does our mission ever change midstream? Am I really in Belize to fight cancer, or are there other battles here that need to be fought, and what if they detract from fighting cancer by being, say, stressful?

Even when you drop everything and go to the tropics for two (plus) months with a singular purpose, you might find out you're there for something else. God uses all sorts of things to get us where He wants us to be, to accomplish in us what He really wants to accomplish. None of this is anything to Him - He didn't need me in Belize to deal with the physical cancer, but He knew it would be Pleasant for me to do it that way. He didn't need to allow Melanoma to afflict me in order to get me to look at Cancer of the Spirit either, but it certainly worked.

Awaiting and Interested and not so troubled as when I started writing,
with lots of love,
Susan