it's easy when you smile

"I'd like to turn people on to the fact that the world is form, not just function and money."

(Claes Oldenburg, sculptor)

Sara and I stopped the car to do a photo shoot in the bush, haha.

One day, I was lounging with Yvaniah (the 5 year old daughter of Sara's friend) on the comfortably old and broken blue recliner we have sitting on the veranda beneath our Christmas lights. She and I were making our way through a Portuguese children's Bible that Sara owns, and Yvaniah was doing a pretty good job at summing up what each story was about just from looking at the pictures. At the end, we sat quietly together for a moment. I asked her what heaven is like.

She replied, matter of factly, that in heaven there are many plasticos (plastic shopping bags), flores (flowers), and outra coisas (other things), which seemed fair enough. I mentioned to her that maybe in heaven people dance all the time for God. She was very pleased about that.

Sometimes people devise new, more efficient ways of doing things.

I learned how to scuba dive in 2004 in Port Elizabeth on the Eastern Cape of South Africa after an intense summer of Master's research in the scrubby Zambian bush. My instructor was named Minaar, an Afrikaaner with a bushy head of hair, thick blond curls all over. He was big like a rugby player, but a little more teddy-bearish, owing to a beer habit.

Back that summer, I wanted to love him because he had such an open smile and a charming Afrikaans accent, but mostly because he was making me so happy out there on the warm and windy South African beach, happy because he was making me into the scuba diver I'd wanted to be since I was 7 and writing letters to National Geographic. Also, he made me feel safe, which is a feeling as addictive as the need to feel wild and free, Safe when the cold black current on the bottom of the Indian Ocean was pushing me back into darkness and he reached out his great rugby-player hand across the opaque expanse and pulled me back. He knelt in front of me, bubbles flying around us, his large frame towering over my small one, blocking the current, his hand firmly on my shoulder, pinning me securely down to the sandy ocean floor while he looked out to find the other students.

Then he grasped my hand and we swam back together, up toward the sun diamonds dancing on the surface, 20 meters above us. Ah Minaar, maybe I could have loved you.

But then I found out he was only 18 years old, and I was 24, and I thought to myself: Oh dear. That won't do.

Joseph and Sara

“We are all going on an Expedition,” said Christopher Robin, as he got up and brushed himself. “Going on an Expotition?” said Pooh eagerly. “I don’t think I’ve ever been on one of those. Where are we going to on this Expotition?” 

“Expedition, silly old Bear. It’s got an ‘x’ in it.”

“Oh,” said Pooh. “I know.”

But he didn’t really.

(A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh)

"She sat, reflected, and finally wrote it out in a letter to him:

'This was all I ever wanted to do. It’s how I shaped my life, tried to, so that I could do it. And I do love it. I love walking out in the fields by myself, seeing the woodsmoke rise up and women carrying their harvests, hearing crickets and singing, the distant drumming, looking up in the sky, endless and blue, and thinking with immense satisfaction: I live in Africa.

'It’s kind of addicting. But it’s also really lonely.'"

"Zoyenka, how can you tell what part of the world you'd be happy in, and what part you'd be unhappy in? Who can say he knows that about himself?"

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward)