For the kids of Smoke Tree Elementary School, 5th and 6th grade

I just want to thank you all for the wonderful packet of handmaid cards and letters that you all sent me for my birthday. I enjoyed them a great deal. I sat on my bunk and read them all through and said a prayer for each and every one of you, and your teachers.

I have some good internet at the moment, so I thought I would share some pictures and stories about the Philippines for you guys.
First off, if you don't know where the Philippines are, you should start there.

On the map you first find Asia, then you move southeast of Asia into the Pacific ocean, and in the middle of the Pacific ocean you will find a group of islands that look like this:

For security reasons I can't really tell you guys where I am in the Philippines, but I can show you some pictures I took.

I like sunsets. They look different in all the different countries I have been to. Actually, believe it or not, Iraq and Afghanistan had some of the most amazing sunsets I have ever seen, because of the high dust content in the air. I saw similar sunsets sometimes in New Mexico. Why do you think dusty air makes great sunsets?

This is a statue of Lapu-Lapu (yes, that is really his name, one of many names, in fact) who was a tribal king on an island called Mactan who commanded the local warriors in a battle on April 27, 1521. Ferdinand Magellan was killed in that battle. It did not prevent the Spanish from taking over the Philippines, but hundreds of years later Lapu-Lapu is regarded as the first Filipino national hero.

This dish is called "lechon," and it is delicious. The pig is stuffed with coconut leaves and all sorts of veggies and herbs I would not be able to name. It is then roasted slowly in an oven with the skin still on it. It is quite fatty, fully of cholesterol, protein, and other delicious things that growing soldiers require.

This dish is called "a tuna fish." That particular fish is approximately a meter and a half long, and weighs about 50 kilograms. There is an art to carving the fish like that. They slice it deep with a very thin, sharp knife in lengthwise slices, then again, parallel to the spine, and then perpendicular to the body, to create hundreds of little slices, each one about half an ounce in size. Then you eat it, raw, with chopsticks. I probably at about a kilo of it myself.

I took this picture while snorkeling in the ocean.

And this one. The clownfish likes to live inside the anemone, which has tons of stinging fronds that wave in the current. They don't bother the clownfish, but they sting any bigger fish that try to eat it. This is a symbiotic relationship.

What does the shape of this mountain tell you about how the islands were formed?

That's me.

These little motorbike taxis are one of the primary means of transportation in most of the cities.

This field is about 300 acres of rice. Rice is one of the most important foods in the world. It makes up 90% of the grain diet of many countries in Asia. It needs to be completely submerged in water for part of its growing cycle, so it is grown only on flat plots of ground. However, in the volcanic hills of southern Mindanao, and in the Himalayas in Nepal, I have seen rice grown on the sides of steep hills and mountains. They overcome the terrain by carving levels of terraces out of the side of the mountain like giant steps going up the mountain.

This picture is from Nepal, not the Philippines, but it shows how people grow rice and other crops on hillsides. All of those terraces were dug by hand with crude shovels. And you thought cleaning out your room was a tough chore!

The amazing thing about rice is that it is still planted by hand throughout much of the world! The fields (called "rice paddies") are flooded with muddy water, and then workers walk through the fields, painstakingly sticking shoots of rice into the mud, one at a time. It is a labor intensive, time consuming process. A lot of countries use migrant workers, including children your age, to do this work, paying them 50 pesos ($1.10) per day. It takes hundreds and hundreds of workers to plant fields this size.

 Baskets at a market, made out of palm fronds and bamboo leaves.

A market at a "Peace Village" promoting cultural sharing between Muslims and Christians. Most people do not know this, but there is a Muslim insurgency going on in the Philippines, but unlike other places in the world, there are strong peace processes in the works, and some legitimate reconciliation does seem to be happening.

Traditional wooden dishes, palm baskets, and work knives, with a couple of traditional swords.

This is what the mountains look like from the air. They are not very tall, compared to the Rockies or the Himalayas, but they are extremely steep and covered with jungle. They are left over from the volcanic activities that formed the islands. They are also beautiful!

I hope you enjoyed all the pictures. Thank you so much for the cards and the letters. Be good in school.

Yours Truly,

Ryan Kraeger

I Will Lift Up My Eyes

I sing the God of all things green and good,

Great and grand and gorgeous, things of wood

Of living things grown close in brotherhood

Of strength and beauty, of oil, wine and food.







I sing the God of stern and solid stone
Severe, austere and snow-capped, standing alone

 Amid their lesser fellows. Of beam and bone

Of earth on which green living things have grown.

I sing the God of reading, writing; the reign
Of rhythm, rhyme, and rectitude; the wax and wane
Of times and seasons; of wisdom slowly gained
In solitude, in book, in pipe, in rain.

I sing the God of doe and deer, of dove

Direct, diverse, diffuse, below and above

And in, around and through, like hand in glove,

In sunsets, stars and blazing sun in grove

In city, in time alone, in still and move

And in all things, 

                        I sing

                                 The God of Love!

Beauty Near and Far

In my last blog I explained how home has never been a place to me. Rather, it is the people who make home. For this reason I have a lot of “homes.” When I visit the farm in upstate NY, I am home. When I visit my cousins in VA and make goofy home martial arts videos, I am home. When I get to see my god-children I am home. When I wake up at 7:30 in the morning for two or three hours of leisurely conversation over a pot of freshly brewed tea with my aunt and uncle, I am home. When I sit in Panera bread in the Tacoma Mall, surrounded by other young Catholics, studying the readings of the day, then I am home. I am home when I smoke a pipe or drink a beer with my brother. I am home making pizza for my friends, or going for a hike up Mt. Si with them.

There even more places that are home to me, in a deeper sense than I have ever known, so deep that I cannot blog about them. But home is always the people I am with, never the place I am.

Some people have a hard time understanding this. Most people, I think, have a certain amount of nostalgia for place, whether the place they grew up, or the place they spent much of their time. Some people truly do love, say, the hills of upstate NY with a fondness bordering on passion. For myself, it is not at all that I am indifferent to place. Instead, I love places. I love them all. I love the crispness of upstate NY,


the lazy warmth of the deep south,

 the glory of entire landscapes changing colors in the fall, and the warm smell of sun-baked pinestraw on the floor of forests that will never change their hue.

 I love the ice and snow of a New York winter,

and the sun, sand and warm water of a beach in Thailand.

I love the fertile, windswept high prairie of Eastern Washington and of Colorado and Wyoming,

and also the cozy grey drizzle and precious clear days in the Northwest.

I loved the tangled fertility of the Tigris river valley, and the blinding, unlivable sands stretching away from it as far as the eye could see. I loved the wild, harsh austerity of the Hindu Kush,
and the glory of the Himalayas, when the sun breaks over the barely visible peak of Mt. Everest.

 Beauty large:

And beauty small:


I love them all. When I am there I soak them up and glory in them, but I do not miss them when they are gone.

I miss people. One of the consequences of this attitude towards place is that it radically alters my concept of adventure, and what adventure truly is (that is subject for another blog). No matter where I go I see beauty to be shared and I find stories to be told, but what on earth is the point if there is no one to share them with or tell them to?

That is the point of this blog. To share beauty and tell stories. Not just the strange beauty that it has been my great good fortune to see, but the familiar beauty that we, strangely, do not see. All of it comes fresh and whole from the heart of God.

*All photos in this post were taken by the author.

Weekend Pics

 

I felt like taking a break from my post series on man-woman interraction (it was getting a bit heavy) and instead share some pics from last weekend.





Usually it takes me most of the weekend to catch up on all the things I have left undone over the week. Working my schedule doesn't leave a lot of time for grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry, college, or blogging. These end up being weekend things.

This leaves me in the odd position of being nearly as busy on my Saturdays as I am every other day of the week. But last Sunday I managed to have everything accomplished that I needed to have accomplished, so I took a drive out to Sunnyside Beach.

I have seen Sunnyside sunny before. It is rare but it does happen.

Clearly the trash can is just too far away from the bench. Getting the trash from the bench to the can is definitely above and beyond the call of duty and the strength of mere mortals.

I like driftwood.

There is something awesome about gray days, when the wind comes whipping in off the sound, and no one wants to be out because it's raining. You have the whole place to yourself and you can just walk along the shore and listen to the waves.

It rains off and on all year in western Washington. Apart from the two or three months in the summer, the rest of the year is just one long punctuated shower. It can get dreary, but I don't mind it so much as long as I go out in it once in a while.

I love these poplars, so huge and majestic. They just stand so straight, like they are proud to be there.

I like trees in general. The older and bigger they are, the more I like them.

Perfect place for a pipe and a good book.

A pipe brings words to the lips of the wise, and shuts up the mouth of the fool. You'll notice I'm not talking.

Listen to the rain rain rain come down down down.

The trains go by pretty regularly. It's like they're on a schedule or something.

I love fog as well. And twilight (the time of day, not the book/movie). Foggy twilights have a special beauty all their own.

That ferry... Hmmmm... I might need to check that out some time. See where that goes.
Life is beautiful. Rainy days are beautiful. God is good. Sometimes it's important to remember things like that.