2014 Review - Diversity of Place

Good-Bye 2014

Experiencing Diversity of Place

Written By Dan McDonald

 

            I am thankful for 2014. I felt it was one of the best years for me. An online friend asked me, a couple of weeks ago, what my keyword had been for 2014. At the beginning of last year, people were choosing keywords around which they hoped to focus their particular personal development. I replied that I never chose a keyword for 2014. She told me she wasn’t asking what word I chose at the beginning of 2104 but what word best summed up what was the theme for my life in 2014.  It wasn’t difficult for me to answer. The word was “diversity.” I learned to embrace more diversity in the last year of my life than I had probably allowed myself to embrace in all the other decades of my life. I embraced diversity of both place and perspective. In this blog I want to remember how my embracing diversity of place helped change and shape my life.

            It was sometime in the year 2013 that I made a decision to begin to use at least one vacation time a year to visit a place I had never visited. I decided I would go to California, for the first time in my life. I would see the great tall Redwoods, the massive Giant Sequoias and visit the city of San Francisco. It seemed like the trip of a lifetime when I visited. I was able:

                                               To walk across the Golden Gate Bridge                  

 

And see tall Redwood trees north of San Francisco

 

 

Or stand inside a hollowed out Giant Sequoia and photograph the sky above

 

Or sit behind home plate and watch a San Francisco Giants’ baseball game

 

            Many great writers and thinkers have testified how travel broadens one’s experiences and allows an expanded horizon from which to contemplate life. I believe such a perspective is true. I also know it is an experience of privilege. I would estimate that more than a billion people in our world will never be able to leave a space surrounded by the narrow boundaries they have been given in life. I would like somehow to share my travels with them to help them see and appreciate what I have been given to see and appreciate. I dream of being able to be for a moment their eyes and ears to a world vast, astonishing and beautiful.

I had never seen where our continent slips beneath the Ocean’s expanse

            My visit to California was both a humbling and uplifting experience. To see sights I had never seen before reminded me that all my perceptions of the world in which I lived were based on a miniscule experience of the creation in which I live. I have sometimes imagined myself full of wisdom, but I had experienced hubris. There was something life changing as I looked at the border of continent and ocean and saw seals on the rocks and smelled the distinct aroma of the salty ocean as the waves crashed against rocks and tossed foam into the air. I was small and that was a joy to experience. I began to realize in my journey that we are held in the hands of our Creator and truth is not what we are given to know, but in who it is in whom we are held. It is not that I know him but that he has known me. That is my comfort and my serenity in a world bigger, stronger, deadlier, and filled with more life than I can imagine. I returned from California having my horizons expanded.

            In August of 2014 I traveled once more. This was a hurried and unexpected journey. My oldest brother had died of a heart attack. Any person knowing him knew his smile. He had turned 75 years old only days before he died in his wife’s arms. They had been married for almost 46 years.

 

            His funeral was a time of sorrow and discovery. Remembrances were expressed of kindnesses and deeds done by him that none of us in his own family knew anything about. I had no idea I could know a brother all my life and not know of how he proved helpful to others without anyone ever seeing these deeds. In the midst of sorrow others found a way to encourage ways of finding some relief from the grief.

A nephew had me feed one of his calves.

            Finally in early December I had one last unused week of vacation remaining. I decided to take a journey to New York City, another place where I had never been. In New York City I experienced the diversity of:

 

Seeing the Paramount Building within Times Square

And Central Park as evening darkness fell over the city

 

And a bit of street art in a Brooklyn neighborhood

 

 

            I discovered there was more to the world than I had experienced in my little piece of what is sometimes described in America as “Fly-over country” in the interior of the United States. I found myself at home, in time for the first snow of the winter. It was a quiet snow; the trees glistened and a thin cover veiled the ground that will again bloom in spring.

 

            It was a year when visiting places I had never visited before gave me a sense that our world was much larger and magnificent and more beautiful than I had before experienced. The things I saw in 2014 have helped shape in me a deeper appreciation of life, creation, and the many-splendored works performed by our God.

I have experienced a great privilege to be able to make these journeys. Many in our world can only dream of visiting a place outside of where he or she lives with family, friend and community and carries out the deeds of the work to which they are called. I trust that such persons may often see more of the blessing they receive in little than I often have seen in much. But also I ask that I might increasingly see how I may be a channel of blessing to those who are in need.