forty four

You know how people have lucky numbers? Well, I have two, of a sort, 11 and 44. Sometimes it's 444, but most of the time it's 44. They're not so much lucky numbers as numbers that have special meaning to me. Sometimes they're just an encouragement, they say, "Keep going you're on the right path." Or they'll say, "Pay attention to this." They've even been used to help me make some course corrections. Anyway, 44 popped up in countless ways this summer. Here are three of them from a few of the books I read:

'"Go, dogs. Go! The light is green now."' - Go, Dog. Go! pg 44

'"I am sure," she said, "that every one of us here will be gratified to learn that after four weeks of unremitting effort and patience on the part of our friend the goose, she now has something to show for it. The goslings have arrived. May I offer my sincere congratulations!"' - Charlotte's Web pg 44

"She glanced back. For a few seconds they look silently into each other's eyes, and the distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable. . . . . . . ." - War and Peace pg 1144

On August 4th, I received an email from the British Consulate letting me know that my visa had been issued. It arrived the next day. I'm leaving for Belfast on August 23rd (Monday!) and I know that I have two years there...

All that seemed distant and impossible suddenly became near, possible, and inevitable.

I can hardly stand it (and I can't wait to be done with the packing, although I wish I didn't have to say goodbye to so many wonderful people) and waking up in a plane over Irish fields on Tuesday morning cannot come soon enough!

timing

"When God plants the seed of his word in your life he is not asking you to make it happen as soon as possible. He is asking you to have faith." - Matt Helmsley, associate pastor of my church on Sunday.

Germination of 2000-year-old seeds

In the 1970s, during excavations at Herod the Great's palace on Masada in Israel, two thousand year old Judean date palm seeds were recovered. The cache of seeds was found contained in an ancient jar, and had experienced a very dry, sheltered environment, which helped to preserve the seeds. Radiocarbon dating at theUniversity of Zurich confirmed the age of the seeds at 2000 ±50 years. After their discovery the seeds were held in storage for thirty years at Bar-Ilan University.

On 25 January 2005, the Jewish festival of Tu Bishvat (Arbor Day), Dr. Elaine Solowey, a specialist in rare and medicinal plants at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies pretreated several of the seeds in a fertilizer and hormone-rich solution. She then planted three of the seeds at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arabah desert of southern Israel.[1] One of the seeds sprouted six weeks later. As of June 2008, the tree has nearly a dozen fronds, and is nearly 1.4 m (4 ft) tall.

The plant has been nicknamed "Methuselah," after the longest-lived person in the Bible. Methuselah is remarkable in being the oldest known tree seed successfully germinated, and also in being the only living representative of the Judean date palm, a tree extinct for over 1800 years, which was once a major food and export crop in ancient Judea.

Date palm trees are dioecious. If Methuselah is female, it may produce fruit by 2010. Methuselah's seeds could then be used to cultivate additional Date palm trees.

When compared with three other cultivars of date palm, genetic tests showed the plant to be most closely related to the old Egyptian variety Hayany (also Hiani, Hayani), 13% of its DNA being different.^[3] They may have shared the same wild ancestor.

In addition to its honoured place in Judean history, the palm may contribute useful characteristics such as environmental tolerance and disease resistance, to modern date cultivars.

Dr. Sarah Sallon, the head of the project, wants to see if the ancient tree has any unique medicinal properties no longer found in today's date palm varieties. “The Judean date was used for all kinds of things from fertility, to aphrodisiacs, against infections, against tumors,” she said. “This is all part of the folk story.”

"On Quiso, the Tuginda used to teach us that real and actual trust in God was the whole life of a priestess. 'God can afford to wait,' she used to say. 'Whether to convert the unbelieving, to reward the just or to punish the wicked - God can afford to wait. With Him, everything comes home in the end. Our work is not only to believe that, but to show that we believe it by everything that we say and do.'"

- Richard Adams in "Shardik"

a long awaited update (perhaps I flatter myself too much!)

So, I guess the last significant update into my day to day life was written way back in the beginning of July. (Was that only a month and a half ago???) So, I figured it was about time for another!

I was in Florida for just under six weeks. I went down to be a summer nanny for the wonderful girls I used to care for before I left to do Transit and their wonderful baby sister who was born while I was gone and their wonderful cousins who live in Jacksonville. I think I can safely say that everyone involved had a great summer.

We were right on the beach, as you can see from this picture. This is the spot where I did quite a lot of reading when I was "off duty," not bad, huh? The summer was full of sand and water and sun and origami and reading time and ice cream and the dynamics of little girl relationships and naps and trips to the park and trips to the girls' Papa's tree farm and good food and all kinds of other fun things like getting caught in the rain almost every time I went out for a walk in the evenings. And big, beautiful rainbows.

No summer would be complete without a trip to the zoo and this one included petting and feeding sting rays. (Their "stinger" had been trimmed, apparently much like you would trim your fingernails.)

We drove back to Charlotte on the 29th of July, I think. It was definitely a Wednesday. And that evening I booked my flight to Ireland. I fly into Dublin on the 12th of September and will make my way north to Belfast where I will be living until I find a job or run out of money which I project will be sometime in December! No, seriously, I'm heading to Belfast to job hunt and make connections and do some volunteering and have committed to stay through December, which hopefully will give me enough time to find a job so I can stay forever, or at least two years which is how long my visa will be issued for.

So, naturally, I'm excited and nervous and thinking about packing way more than I'm actually doing the packing. And I'm sure to run out of time to do several of the many things I have projected to finish before I leave. So it's all rather exhilarating and tiring.

On a sort of side note I saw movies 24 and 25 of the summer this week. Time Traveler's Wife with my sisters, Laura and Emily, and Nights in Rodanthe with my mom.

I feel a bit like Clare in the Time Traveler's Wife. (If you haven't seen the movie or read the book I'm going to be giving away plot here...) In the scene where Henry travels to and from the bathroom. She's very pregnant, but has tried to keep herself from hoping about this baby because she has lost so many before. Henry comes back from travelling to the future where he meets their daughter, Alba. He tells Clare all about her and she says, "You mean it's all going to be all right?" It was such a moving scene and I feel like her. There's this thing that I've been dreaming about and hoping for and working towards for so long, but because it's been so long it's so very hard to understand that it's really happening. That the dream is becoming reality. I think it can't be true.

But in three weeks from today I'll be sitting (well, sleeping actually) in Belfast. And I'll never again have to cry when I leave Ireland because I don't know when I'll be coming back. It's all rather overwhelming.

So anyway, that's my update.

dear Jesus

I'm here, not to speak or ask, but to listen. Only to listen because I value what you have to say. But if you want to just come and listen too that's all right. That's all right because I value you.

just thinkin'

I think that I would like to marry the kind of man who, if we lived in a small community, would be in the volunteer fire department.

weird dreams and good books

I have really weird dreams. When we were growing up all I had to do was say that phrase and my siblings would start groaning. Sometimes the Lord speaks to me through my dreams. Sometimes I can just see how I'm processing the day's events while I'm sleeping. Sometimes my subconscious imagination just runs away with me. I think Thursday evening's dream would fall under that classification.

I was running late to the meet kids and their parents at the drop off point for a kid's camp I was helping to run. I had half an hour to get there and I had forgotten my bag. My mom was supposed to bring it to meet me and she had not left the house and there was no way that she was going to make it before we had to leave. So I had to go to "Target" and just buy clothes and toiletries for the week.

I was in "Target" (which seemed like Wal-Mart meets Tescos meets Sam's Club) searching through the clearance section for enough clothes to put together mix and match outfits for a week of camp. (The prices were in pounds and the other girls in shopping in the section were British.) I wasn't doing too bad having found a 1 pound rack when my cell phone rang. It was Billy Connolly. I was surprised that he had my number but we apparently knew each other.

The conversation went something like this: "Hello?" "Hi Rebekah, this is Billy." "Billy, hey!" He asked me when I was heading to Ireland and I replied with my standard answer, trying to find a job... etc. He said I needed to hurry up and get over there because he was opening a new comedy club in Dublin and he wanted my help managing it. I was only half listening because I was still shopping so the details are fuzzy. He was telling me about how he was going to use the club as an outreach tool, I was murmuring along as if I was listening in spite of the fact I was really trying to decide if this skirt would go with that top or not.

So when he paused I said, "That really sounds exciting. I can't wait to hear more but..." Then explained what was going on and we made arrangements to speak later in the week. And that was pretty much it.

Now I can see where some of this came from my subconscious working through things I've been thinking about... working with kids, getting to Dublin, even the shopping. But Billy Connolly! That was completely random. To prove how rarely I think about him I had to google his name to make sure it matched the person I was thinking of.

In other news I just finished Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. It was a beautiful collection of short stories. I really enjoy short stories, but one thing I've noticed is that they are much more likely to be without hope than a fully developed novel. I wonder why that is? My favorite story in this collection was The Third and Final Continent, the finale of the book. The familiarity of feeling left me in tears. I loved this closing quote:

"I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."

I guess my thoughts have been caught in this tension of leaving and staying for a while.

I am, besides, the only one
Who can be bright without the sun.
~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

genius!

I'm currently listening to my first iTunes Genius playlist... love it!!! I'm a pretty big fan of random playlists in general and now I don't have to do the work of making it myself! Brilliant!

So, I've just gotten home after being in England for a week and Ireland for a week. The new iTunes isn't the only thing that changed while I was gone. Charlotte has majorly cooled down. Hurricane Ike hit leaving no gas in his wake. My car decided to be broken. I have a new job starting the first week of October. My sister set a date for her wedding.

Highlights from the trip:
1) time spent with old friends in Guildford, Southampton, and London
2) spending a day in the National Gallery with Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Cezanne, Monet, and Van Gogh... (I never knew that Van Gogh wanted to be a priest/missionary but was rejected by the church. Or that he taught himself to paint.)
3) meeting lots of new friends in Belfast and Dublin.
4) acquiring a new CD "Sea Sew" by Lisa Hannigan.
5) buying a pashmina in China Town in London.
6) actually really liking one of the five movies I watched on the way home. (Not four as previously stated on facebook.)

When I got home it was to discover that my car (which had already had a flat tire while I was gone) had a dead battery. So I had to charge it back up with my sister Emily's car. (Yes, that's right, did it all by myself.) But it's dead again today so I'm stuck at home and can't go get a new tire or run a couple errands for the new family I'm going to be working for. (I think I've already posted about cars and how they always need more work on them than you expect. Of course buying a new tire and battery couldn't have waited until I was working again!) Oh dear.

Anyway, I had a great time away and now get to start the exciting and tedious job of planning an international move to happen at an unspecific time to an unspecific place! Good fun!

a wasted day

I've been wasting this day trying to make decisions. Trying to be productive. Trying to be creative. Doing nothing of significance. I tried to write a poem... This is how it starts:

Time is passing as I sit here
I can measure it by the scars on my hand
As they gradually fade
As they become a part of me

It gets worse from there...

I had a conversation with a friend this week about life and waiting and how we spend so much of our time waiting for life that life is waiting. I guess that was what today was. I wouldn't call it a life-filled day, but nevertheless I lived it.