So, I am laying in my bed at a hotel in the Hague, a small hotel but clean
and beautiful. The rates are slightly cheaper because I am surrounded
by cafes, using the term cafe very loosely as a place that doesn't sell
coffee but other more illicit merchandise. But it is gorgeous here... I can see why they think world peace is possible, sitting in a sunny Dutch city square taking coffee and a warm croissant just fifteen minutes from paradise or a beach called Scheveningen. We went to Delft over the weekend, which is the birthplace of both Hugo
Grotius, the father of international law, and Vermeer, my Vermeer.
It was so strange to see my own two professional worlds collide:
art and logic... at the culmination of an incredible summer. So I thought it might be a good time to reflect:
Two
days after the most horrendous set of finals I have ever taken, I boarded a flight from Seattle to Seoul. The
journey was cramped and dark. There was a fat man sitting in the seat
next to me, and his body spilled over into my seat, so I sat there, with
an enormous, sweaty heatpad for the 20 hours or whatever ungodly duration it was. When I arrived, I met my
mother, moved into an apartment above a row of bars. The room was entirely wooden, void of
running water and perhaps 100 years old and perhaps 10 skeletons past
its remodel date. I promptly moved out, found a liveable room, and
spent the next ten days with my mother - sleeping in a twin-sized bed
with her, talking about her childhood, arguing with her, repeating that I
couldn't drink anymore rice wine, laughing, crying, yelling, whispering, eating korean
steamed ribs at 1 in the morning, talking about my father, about their
love, about their restlessness, about music, and law, and art, and art, and art, and counting the dead bugs on my window sill until the monsoons threatened to sweep me from my small first floor
apartment just a couple of months later.
We all learned Korean together, a group of about 15, all college-age students. In a sense, they trained me for my job in Europe, and they each taught me something different; but above all they taught me how to treat everyone
like your equal, how to treat everyone as the person they can be. Shared stories of
families, of friends, of lovers, of Asia and history all
remain sketched in my journal and will always have a place in my memory.
And here, where my parents were born, I met my Parisians, three boys and a girl who changed my life. Nightly runs together, midnight talks, daily lunches - they rekindled more than my love for the French language, they reminded me of a different way of life and thinking. Franz, in particular, taught me how to see potential, and how to cultivate potential - both in myself and others... he taught me how to love him. Bong-sou showed me humility - he was never arrogant, he defied almost every French stereotype... yet fulfilled them at the same time. Tugdual and Kelicia were light. They were passion: loved each other and argued; lived honestly, earnestly.
In a sense, Seoul
could be chalked up to a pilgrimage to my parents' home - to not only
see where they came from, but to really walk on the
ground they walked - the topsoil of blood, poverty, and suffering
buried 70 years deep. On the surface lives a lush but somewhat crooked
tree that has sprawled out viciously over its history. This can only be felt by spending more than a vacation in Seoul.
On the last night, I took a long walk with Franz. We saw half the
city. As we did almost every night for those three months, we talked
about the different gods we loved and found a bridge between us called
humanity. I saw it that way:
he and I
were once the same species of spiritual creature; and if I could still
see that in him, well, I could love him - no matter what things he did in secret.
Korea, also then, was a test that I wouldn't recommend to my loved ones. It
was a heavy test. I am not stronger than my darkness, only God is. You can see evidence of this all over the world. War was the answer to ideological conflicts between Israel and Palestine,
even between the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, not to mention all the other ethnicities and religions that do not come from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
You
see, my God will never be reconciled to his, because his book calls my god false and my book calls his god
false. To be fair, his god is a Korean billionaire who requires money
and a strange forfeiture of rights from his followers. To be fair, I spent half the time
reminding myself not to resent the man for making a business of souls. To
be fair, the early Christian church did the same. To be fair, that was
not Jesus, but a result of human decision making. So it went, back and forth, our spirits
conversing ahead of us on the Han River. So, the tension in loving all humanity is real, and the solution (though I cannot be sure
yet) is not legal. I think it's as simple and as difficult as recognizing our
own humanity and the humanity of our neighbor, and to love in verb form. To love, to be active in love, and
to be smart about it. Blind love almost inevitably leads to destruction.
To be fair, his god died a week ago. To be fair, I love Franz and my heart is heavy that he is mourning.
...
But
I said my goodbyes to the Parisians, to Kelicia, and all the other lovely students at Seoul National University and moved on to London. London. With Elena. London was magical. Remember the light
Tugdual and Kelicia had pointed me towards early in the summer? London
was the end of the tunnel. London was grace. London was joy. London was
love. London was an old friend named David. His face had aged three
years from sun and work, but his laugh was ever the same; his love for
others was ever like it was, amazing. Honestly, if you want the answer
to world peace, ask him. He knows what a quiet thing it should be. He
had chased what he loved, what gave him pleasure, gave light to what he
touched and he had only grown -- yet after three years, we were able to
talk like we had only left each other yesterday. This was a different
kind of pilgrimage. I visited the day shelter that I worked in. I
discovered that the new director of the day shelter is an old friend who, regardless of all my darkness and stubbornness and pride, brought me to Jesus. I'm
pausing now for dramatic effect, to let that coincidence turn to a
chuckle.
London says to me that God laughs. A lot. Elena and I played like little school children; and London was our sandbox.
...
And
then Galway. I climbed a mountain called Croagh Patrick, a vertical hike.
I came back down slowly and carefully and as I soon as I saw the cow fence that
led to civilization, I became so excited that I fell off a rock and
scraped everything I possibly could scrap. I almost died. Not quite, but
almost.
I lusted after a silver fox that looked
like Colin Farrell but was honest to God a "UN Peacekeeper" - literally,
a keeper of the peace... telling us his story about a successful mission in Kosovo. So, he was: a military Captain with gorgeous steel
eyes and more than a note of conviction without the airs -- because nobody likes the self-righteous hero, but everyone loves the humble one even if you have to search under bravado to find it. I wrote about the Irish military and compared it to the U.S. military here.
Over a few beers in a pub, I asked him: "Where is the best place you've ever been to?"
"South of France"
"Yeah??
I'm studying human rights law right now which is terrible, it's full of
suffering and people dying. But my real dream is to go open a
bakery in the south of France."
"Shit. Well. Cheers."
He pauses for a minute, his gaze not leaving mine - I think he's trying to think of what to say.
"I like the finer things. Don't get me wrong - I get in the shit when I have to."
He wasn't a genius, but he really lived - which is more important than anything. He gets in the middle of things and in his way prevents nations from fighting, from destruction. Theoretically, I don't know what this means; practically, I don't know what this means - but just for this one story and one day, I saw the physical embodiment of a peacemaker. Oh,
el Capitan.
Those days also changed my life. I played chess. I did what I needed to, to prevent further casualties - I did it for all the people in my care, but I wouldn't do it again. It's a rights thing. I think this is why we are meant to have free will, and not meant to play God. The only thing I can say is that I operated out of love and it worked out better than I thought it would.
Onto Dublin.
Onto Dublin.
I
am getting closer to the students at this point, and they are
wonderful. Amazing. Bright-eyed undergrads who think that the world is
at their fingertips, who love their dreams like they will all come true.
And their dreams will come true, you must believe that they will - believing is one of the only requisites. It's why we
have such a fascination with youth.
Dublin was a blur. One of the students and I woke up early and by serendipity stumbled across
the exact spot where Handel's Messiah was first performed. We ate almond
croissants and went to St. Patrick's for mass, where we were
too late to participate and instead wandered the cathedral and towards the tomb of Jonathan Swift. If you recall,
the first human rights piece I ever wrote, we wrote together in grade school - in
response to A Modest Proposal. I have always loved Jonathan Swift,
because I owe a lot of my philosophy to him, and being in that cathedral
and looking at his life, his off-color thinking, his legacy -- which was largely his work on
mental illness and society; and his famous wit... well, the
Irishman had a life I'd like to lead. We ate lunch on the steps where Oscar Wilde lived debaucherously as a college student and went to mass with the Professor and his wife. The priest talked about compassion and what
compassion means - it means love for all things, for nature, for all people, even animals
and even the devil that lurks. Compassion. Isn't that what I learned
this summer? Isn't that what I have been learning in the last several
years? I don't know why, but I started crying silently and I felt completely free. As if on cue, the priest said, (he cannot see me because it's a large church and he's reading behind his tall pulpit) tears of compassion come not by your own volition, but from God. I read a plaque that said that the first 13 Sisters of Mercy were buried a couple of feet from where we sat. I know you don't believe in all this, but it was too perfect not to mention. Anyway, I hate crying.
With a few girls, I had a dinner of baguettes, an assortment of cheeses,
mimosas and salads in St. Stephen's Green, a lovely park with the
sunlight falling in rays through a canopy of trees upon a lake that runs
through it. And then if we went out, I don't remember. Everything else
in Dublin was a blur.
Ah, except that the Professor and his wife sang a duet at the
Hibernian Club, an exclusive military club where he hosted an
evening of canapes and a High Court Judge who spoke about morality and
law through Grimm's fairy tales. Such is the strength of our laws, that we extend legal theory to make-believe in order to understand morality.
We were soon off to Amsterdam, in a frenzied sort of way -
frenzied probably only in my head because I'd been trying to keep track
of 17 students, what they were learning, a professor and his wife and my own things, and the
entire budget for this month (no small sum) -- so when we finally landed
in Amsterdam and trained our way to Den Haag, I was relieved - because
this was the last move, and the big one across state lines. So we got
here and went to the beach and had a glorious evening of tapas and wine.
More friends made, more conversations about careers, futures, law,
boys, and everything else 18 to 21-year-olds worry about. It was here that I really realized I love them each and all, for their own unique character and what they bring to this world.
This letter is getting way too long and your eyes are probably
bleeding because none of this has anything to do with you - but there it
is. My summer, well not all of it. I've yet to leave the Hague and its wondrously flawed courts and tribunals, so this novel is only half of what I intended to write to you. Sorry there's quite a bit of Jesus in it, but trust that I've at least left out all things "law." And I promise the next one will have more photographs.
Do come in October. Come for a
weekend, we'll play! It may be shit weather, but we'll play. And maybe
Luke will fall in love with you because you're gorgeous and friendly.
Hahah. I don't know what he's doing, Michelle's moved to Seattle - he
may have popped the question - and that means that you and I will have
to live in the cardboard box across the street from the Space Needle. I've made eye contact with its owner a couple of times, and he's quite friendly. So. Voila. Come!
