Short Calls.

The title is a euphemism here for going number one.  Nice, huh?

I don't have that much to write yet, and I'm also really bad at taking compelling pictures (suggestions, anyone? And if you blithely chirp "just buy an slr" your name is mud) but I want at the very least to record that I'm in a new place and it's beautiful.  I will get familiar with places and sounds and smells and people and that familiarity will bring its own pleasures. But just now there's a refreshing and fleeting purity to knowing nothing.  I can't get anywhere without asking someone, and this imbues humility.  But also there's the delight of quotidian living unencumbered by the web of associations that accompany experience.  I mean when I walk down a street, I'm not equipped to know what to think about my destination, or the incentives of people around me, or the interplay of social forces.  What's available to me to notice is sights and sounds and smells in their lovely and ostentatious intricacy.  Wonder itself, too, is available in great supply for the same reason.  And it's gorgeous to be coaxed onto that plane of existence, which so easily eludes us as we accumulate savvy.  That sounds a little zen for my habitual taste, but I feel like it's real.  The scriptures hint that God has a special place in his big heart for wanderers, and I think this is one of his tenderest mercies to them.