Thoughts on Vocation and Transition, Part One

The Aiyura Valley, shrouded in early morning mist.  Photo Credit: Alan Halbrooks

(Written 19 May 2015)

Yesterday the calendar marked a momentous day for me: one month until departure from Ukarumpa.  One month until I’d leave the place where I’ve raised three sons and found true joy in vocation and ministry.  One month until the day I’d lift off the Aiyura Airstrip for the last time until . . . who knows?

In my AP Literature class right now we’re studying sonnets . . . and, as usual, I’ve assigned students to write an original sonnet of their own.  That’s no simple task: a sonnet is 14 lines of iambic (or not so iambic) pentameter with a complex rhyme scheme, which speaks through metaphor and examines the relationship between two contrasting ideas or emotions, beliefs or actions, generally coming to some sort of resolution by the end.  It’s a “dialectical construct,” to use academic language.  Sonnets speak briefly, compactly, wittily (they often include wordplay) and have a shift in tone, perspective or point-of-view before the end.  In class we’ve read wonderful sonnets by poets such as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Longfellow, Tennyson, the Rossettis, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Gideon Burton—and even some of my former students.  But I really want to model the writing process myself.

So for the last week I’ve been wrestling with writing a sonnet on my upcoming departure from Ukarumpa, about which I definitely feel contrasting emotions!  Today, with fear and trembling, I read my own sonnet to my students.  (Boy, is that scary!  It's one thing to recite a Wordsworth sonnet, but another to read one's own diffident words to an audience of 24 astute AP Lit students . . .)  I also explained my writing process and handed out photocopied pages from my notebook, documenting the messy ordeal of repeatedly revising word choices, seeking crisper, more concise phrasings and the ever-elusive end rhymes—and in the process refining and honing my poem. Writing is a process—rarely does a poem leap full-grown from someone's brain, despite Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility": he revised his poems, too.  (I'm glad we can still see his writing notebooks, full of cross-outs and edits!)

“A sonnet is a moment’s monument,” according to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  So here’s my metaphorical monument to last night’s reflections on my imminent departure from a land I love. The sonnet's central image is one I’ve seen many times in my years here: from the vantage of point of a hill in Ukarumpa, I watch a light airplane (Cessna 206 or 402; Kodiak) lift effortlessly from the red dirt airstrip and into the sky, cutting through the morning mists and reflecting the sun, glinting silver against the vast green backdrop of the magnificently lovely Aiyura Valley.  I wish I had a photograph of that particular image, but these photos of the Aiyura Airstrip and Valley will have to serve to set the scene.

The view we'll have just before takeoff: across the red dirt airstrip, up and over the mountains, then out of the Aiyura Valley.  Photo Credit:  Tim Scott

Airplane above the Aiyura Airstrip

Photo Credit:  Gweni Hetzel

One month from today I leave this land of Spring:

across, up, over, out—no strings, heartstrings

holding me to verdant earth, quiet glade.

In my mind’s eye I see a silver blade

reflecting light, cutting through clouds unfurled:

manmade machine dwarfed by the vast might

of the Aiyura Valley—resting on air—

too light to be carrying so much care

and memory, so many tears that tear

faces facing futures far from this green world—

thoughtlessly scattering early dawn light,

lightly winging past this passing thought-flight.

     Oh Truest Blade of Light, cut deep to heal,

     and may my face reflect a Home that’s Real.

                                                --May 18, 2015