If I was much farther west my experience here be completely different, and I would not be learning the things I am learning. I feel like I am receiving the most intensive educational experience of my lifetime thus far. I think this is because I am actually engaged in it, back at school I didn’t get as engaged with my education as I am here in Ukraine. The name ‘Ukraine’ is literally translated as “boarder lands,” and this is exactly what it is. Kiev has been occupied by a couple different cultures; western and eastern and they have all left their mark. You all should come live here! Ukraine has a heavy and painful history, but also some stunningly beautiful history too. It really feels like I am living on the brink of something, spiritually, personally and geographically. It’s just been so good!

The people here are so fascinating, they have all seen so much pain, and you can see it in their eyes in the lines on their face. But you can also see an honesty to what life is that a lot of Americans have never seen. Things are real to them, that is the only way I can say it. Life is real, if they have a cold they have a cold, while people from the sates drowned it with cough medicine and they sleep it away. Dose that make sense? What I mean is; they are in touch with every part of life, and they feel it all. ALL OF IT!!!! How often do Americans do that, I swear its like were all on drugs! But this is what I needed, I needed to be stripped of my over consuming life and learn to… “Consider the lily’s.” I think that’s part of what Jesus was talking about. Back at Union some of my favorite teachers told me how everything is connected and how wonderful it is to be connected with life and God in this great circle. But now I feel what they were talking about, before their words seemed like nice poetic words that felt good to hear and made me think that I was a true intellectual for buying into. But now being here, I see/feel/know that we are all the same, and were all in this together, and that everything is connected. A year is not long enough to learn all of the things I want to learn! I haven’t become a communist, like some people told me I would, but I think I understand what it was, and my understanding of it makes me more afraid of the United States. Because I am beginning to feel like our obsessive dedication to the ideology that capitalism has offered to the world is just as dangerous to the human spirit as Stalinist communism has been to people here. And I know some people here feel the same as I do. There are a lot of people who feel completely overwhelmed by the drastic shift that has taken place here in the past 17 years. Watching this change has thought me that there is a cost to my living, and then there is a cost of my living. And I needed to slow down to realize this, so that I could connect with this world we live in, and the creator of it. I feel like for the first time in my life I am beginning to see God for who he is, but I am sure it’s only part of his back. But it is beautiful, and so inviting! And most of all it is healing! And this is what humanity needs right now.

Every seven years Hebrew farmers would give their crops a Sabbath rest, so that they could support more crops later on. And today if this happened we would have an economic disaster! So we just pump our crops and animals with chemicals so that we can keep ourselves going at this incredible pace. There is a cost that we are going to pay if we don’t slow down. We need the Sabbath! Never have I believed it more.