Somewhere in Wyoming

JUNE 2024

This newsletter is more personal and reflective. In the States, I drove for 8 weeks, covered 12,000 miles and made about 63 stops at presbytery offices, churches, restaurant/coffee shop meetings, and homes. I just returned to Ukraine.

I live in two worlds, one with people displaced by the war in Ukraine, the other in a Ford Transit Connect, traveling to speak in churches, offices, coffee shops, and living rooms across America about our work in Ukraine.

Scientists of creativity say that when the mind is occupied with a simple task, it frees the imagination. Some things came together out there alone on the highways, somewhere in Wyoming. I would call it a confrontation between imagination and reality, like what Wallace Stevens said of good poetry, “Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself,” what he described as, “The actual landscape with its actual horns/Of baker and butcher blowing.” It is the expression of, “life in its lived fullness.”

I’ve often thought of my time in Ukraine as the “thing,” and time in America as time I share my ideas about the “thing.” But in reality, time in America is an extension of time in Ukraine. I am still nurturing and facilitating trusting and supportive relationships and community.

Every night I stay with friends, share a meal, and conversation, every church I visit, every gathering I attend in a home, coffee shop or restaurant, we are all enriched. All churches, all families, all who support this work in Ukraine, share in this communal effort. When you support financially, by hosting or by encouragement, you share in this effort. It is why I speak of our work as the work of Presbyterians (among many others) in Ukraine. Time in America is also life on that “actual landscape.” It is “life lived in its fullness.”

And yet, reality goes deeper. We are not the lead characters in our own drama. We are not living a dream. We are not the hero of a thousand faces. We cannot escape. We are actual people, there is actual bleeding and emotional bleeding (thus the saying: “One bloody foot in front of the other.”) There are the maimed and dying. There is a war. Parents weep for their spouse or child. Children weep for parents, sisters, brothers. Rage and hate are real. Love and compassion are also real. Everything is real. Whatever our belief in God, our basis of faith, our source of hope, we must accept and live with the realities of life.

I’ll close with a story, and leave it for you to interpret.

Albina is 30 years old, her son is 7. They survived Mariople which now looks like a lunar landscape, littered with twisted metal and broken concrete. She and her son lived through several weeks of the war. Explosions and gunfire almost daily. Apartments on both sides collapsed. Theirs remained.

What was that like? I asked her.

We were afraid, she said, all the time, you never knew when bombs or artillery were going to come. You could be killed in your sleep.

What did you do?

She took me literally. I had potatoes, she said. We ate potatoes for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner. We had water and gas to cook but not often electricity.

What about other people. I mean, how did you get along?

There were people you liked and trusted, she said, and some you didn’t, but you had to get along. You had to do what you needed to do.

I was pushing her to get to the deepest places of how she felt, looking, like I was, for some answer to how people survive within. She has braces on her teeth, you know, and at this point she smiled, and she said something that surprised me….

She almost shouted, ”IT’S YOUR LIFE,” she said “YOU ARE LIVING YOUR LIFE.”

Albina, pictured below.