One Monday Night in Belize...
Lacking the Rabbits of home, the dogs LOVE to chase toads. (Maybe young hounds have the zeal to chase the lightening fast Rabbit and old hounds like the slower pace of a good toad.) I try to keep them away from toads because they are poisonous here (so I hear). So, when I saw a Large Fat Toad was sitting surreptitiously Inside the patio door, in my home, a few feet from my computer, the dogs yet unaware, I needed to act fast. Like a rabbit. Or the whole debacle would go down on my tile floor. I catch spiders in a jar, slide cardboard underneath, and fling them through the wrought iron grate back into their ecosystem. The toad was too large for a jar, even the wide-mouth mason variety. I knew I could not abide him leaping around my house. Who knows how high a jungle toad can jump? Maybe to the ceiling where he can cling with suction-cup feet (or, that's jungle frogs.), teetering above me, dogs running amok below, no grip whatsoever with their paws on tile.
The toad saw me eying him. With considerably quick reasoning, I grabbed a small waste basket and just in time. He leapt for the sky and the green plastic basket-now-cage leapt too. I slid him across the tile to the open door and decided to simply flip him out the door grate with the bottom edge of the waste basket. He flew 8 inches out the door grate and simply sat. Really, toad? No leaping away? No mortal fear of the Americana in the jungle house. Nothing? Indeed, he is still there, 8 inches from the door, watching. Considering.
Tuesday Morning...
Meanwhile, ants in Belize are of cartoons proportions. Not large, but multitudinous. There are little ones (though not the smallest red Biting ones) that move only in the millions, and always in a procession like a river flowing over land or person, whatever is in their way. Local wisdom says that if they march into your house, your best response is to step aside and let them pass. If you try to redirect them, they may redirect all over your floors and walls and you will never ever know the end of the Small Ant for having broken their singular, collective, concentration.
I took the trash out this morning, walking the dogs down to the gate with me, maybe 200 yards from the house, down the steep hill, to the road. A dramatic River of Ant, TENS of millions of them, the most I've seen so far, poured across the driveway in a 6-inch swath, forking at one place, rejoining at another, splitting into other streams before they met the jungle grass only to meet back up somewhere off in the field.
I stepped over their flow to get to the trash barrel, but the Gute would not. He locked his knees and looked at me with eyes flung open. It's not the first time he's looked at me as though I were crazy. I took him by another route where the river was merely 3 inches wide. Still six feet from the teeming ants, Guthrie rooted his feet and hunkered his head toward the ground for maximum leverage against the leash. Under no circumstances was he, Guthrie, going to Cross the Ants.
I deferred to his judgement. It's no use convincing a lock-kneed pup to step forward. I tied him to a tree, stepped over the ants, put the trash in the barrel, opened the gate for the day, and headed back up the hill with him. He happily headed away from the Ants. Elias, who was not leashed, since he does not run away unless the Gute is party to it, was sniffing outside the gate. I called to him, thinking to say "Jump over the ants!" as though he might grasp some meaning from it. I thought it just as he trotted his little paws right through the swirl of them, no awareness whatsoever of the greatest peril of Guthrie's day. And apparently, also, no ill effects.
I don't fault Guthrie for leeriness of ants. Maybe he's been asleep on the grass when a platoon came through and poured over him. Maybe he leapt up and ran for a mile trying to shake them off. Maybe he knows something about the Ants that Elias and I do not. It is noted in my mental list of curious things that two creatures with the same genes and set of basic instincts can respond so differently to the same circumstance. Hmm. The Gute is his own person, in a canine sense of the word.
A Wednesday Hence
It's been a long time since I updated you on the adventure that is my life in Belize. I found this beautiful place to live in the jungle and the pups had the life of their dreams - running amok in the jungle 31% of the day and napping 69% of the day. (The statistics change with each retelling in case you're keeping track.) But then they went missing, and I thought they were gone from me forever. Elias returned home abused and wounded, but he has healed. The Gute was safely in someone's care, and also returned. They don't run at large anymore - the jungle life that they loved - it's too dangerous. Not the jungle, but the people.
I was falling in love at this time, with a friend I had met last summer when I first came to Belize. He was a balm to me, a peaceful place to escape when life overwhelmed me. He was compassionate and respectful to my dad, who was here with me at the time, and seemed to have endless patience and willingness to take us on adventures. I was glad for him because tragedy was about to swirl around us in Belize.
* * * * *
I lived in fear for a few days: were the dogs missing because my house was being targeted for a robbery? Right at that time that another expat, a restaurant owner's wife, was beaten by men with machetes in her garden because they wanted her laptop. Really. A laptop.
These were disturbing events and I was hearing stories all around me too, about fear, about robberies, about people who would leave if they could but their money had run out. They felt trapped in Belize with nothing to make a new start back home. My idyllic tropical escape was being rocked a little.
I went downtown to see Fabio, the aforementioned focus of my affections, where he has his gelato business.
"I am afraid I have bad news for you," he told me. He was the part of my life that was still paradisaical. What bad news could he have for me? I thought he must be teasing, but no.
"I think your friend is missing, Susanna. I don't know if it is her," he told me soberly.
I ran across the street to the Missing poster on a restaurant storefront. In her white dress, it was Jasmine.
My dear young friend, the beautiful jungle princess who you know from this blog, our companion in many adventures.
Jasmine had been abducted and murdered before we even knew she was missing.
Even while we buried her body in the jungle, on the site where I first met her and first became susceptible to her infectious sense of adventure and joyful laugh, it was too horrible and impossible to believe. In a human respect, it still is. In a spiritual respect, I think of Jasmine's glee added to the glory of heaven and it's such a fit. She is (still) such a beautiful creature and her joy is all the more for being face to face with her Creator and Savior. We are the ones who mourn our loss, still; and our time is short before we are back in her company.
Isn't that such a theme of God's last year for me. That life is short; don't delay what good you would do. Live now. Quickly, even, and much...
Today
So, it's been a circumspect time between February's post and today. I was back in the US for two months taking care of complex life matters, hearing good news from the doctor, missing Fabio, and then, as soon as I left, missing the friends and family I left behind.
Life has been hard, and extremely beautiful. I have been overwhelmed, but also carried. God has been present in it all.
Sometime in the coming days and posts, I will tell you more about these things. For now, I am just writing to break the silence that has been my blog!
God's reconstruction of me in this season, through these circumstances and the events of my heart, is...unprecedented for me. And all this when I thought I had been molded and shaped already. I thought I was in "refining" mode, you know, sandpaper and maybe a file to smooth me over. But no. (And what kind of arrogance it is to have thought so.)
This last year has undone me (in the best way) and surprised (and surprised) me. God is always the same, yet never quite who I was thinking, even after my thinking had already been revised. He is mysterious and complex and I am seeing that He is beautiful. Not harsh and unyielding or critical and demanding; not exasperated with me, not wondering when I'm going to get a clue. Not distant. Not oblivious of me. These are ways I may have thought of God at times through the years. Now, His beauty overtakes me; I can't catch my breath. Who am I to be given a glimpse of this? His love and compassion for me - His infinite patience with me. His tenderness, as though I am precious, is what has undone me.
For about the last 10 years, my life verse has been Psalm 27:4. (Now I'm going to have to change all of my passwords....) When a friend of mine shared this verse with me 10 years ago, he'd been given a grim medical diagnosis. I didn't understand this verse at the time, it was a foreign sentiment to me. And I remember feeling bad about that. Why, so many years as a Christian, would I not immediately connect to this and understand? Maybe you won't understand it either. Don't feel bad. God may spend the next 10 years making it clear to you, too.
One thing I ask from the Lord,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple.
(Thank you Tom Eickhoff for this blessing way back then.)
Sincerely and Gratefully, with Love and Adoration,
(and a promise for posts to come!)
Susanna in Belize
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