Don't worry my darling, the sun is coming out

So, I've got 8 days left. I must put the Golden Dogs on my Ipod on hold to write something coherent here.

In the past few weeks, I've been:
angry,
heartbroken,
inspired,
loved,
deliriously happy,
and constipated.

More and more my thoughts turn to Toronto and my plans for the fall. Everything is up in the air, yet I have faith that this next section of my life will be just as eventfull as the last 4 months.

I find it amazing how life simply transitions itself from one thing to the next. One day I will be here, in Guatemala, wrestling on the floor after dinner with the most beautiful children in the world, and the next day I will be back in Ontario in my small room at the Ark, wondering how in the world I am going to leave the 12 people whom I've spent every day with for the last 4 months. And then, suddenly, that will end too, and I'll be potentially moving in to a new home with people I don't know, and that too will end up being a situation I'll feel deeply attatched to.

I wonder what it feels like to settle down.

In the rental van the other day on the way home from Semuc Champei (our destination for our weekend off), a tropical, jungle-like place with clear water pools and dozens of small waterfalls which Kris and I spent the day climbing up, and likewise found some rocks to climb up and jump off of AND which also had this sweet cave tour where Nick, myself, Steph, Dale and Cam had to swim through an underground cave holding only candles in our hands for light while we did things like climb up waterfalls and jump off rocks into dark unknown pools....amazing....but i digress...back to the discussion...

So yeah, we were talking about love, and there were different opinions expressed throughout the short-lived convorsation, but some things that stuck out to me were this:

Kris saying he knew he loved Char because when he was around her, he just felt like he HAD to tell her that he loved her, as if love needs to proffess itself whether the person wants to or not.
Interesting.

Nick saying that love cannot rely on romance or feelings, because neither are constant...Interesting tambien.

What then ARE we to base love on if not feelings? Is love more than a feeling? Is love more of a knowledge? Is love a surrender? I used to think I had love all figured out, and certainly I know how to SHOW love to people, but I have lost the ability to know if I am in love or not...perhaps it is only because I am not in love, or that the people that I could love are not in love with me?

And as much as I seem to like romance, I find more and more that romance just freaks me out, and that what I really want is someone to make me laugh, someone to inspire me, someone who is as much in love with life as I am. Life and God give me all the romance I can handle. I want someone who wants to share in the romance that we've already been given...yeah, that sounds about right. There is nothing new under the sun...no songs that could be sung to me, no flowers that could be given to me, no fancy dinners that have not been eaten before. And so, may my life be filled with the un-ordinary, a new type of romance that does not feed off the set standards, but creates its own, and revels in the simplicit beauty that we've already been freely given to enjoy together.