This is a ring i bought when i was home in Australia almost a year and a half ago. I bought it at my favorite market in my favorite city. It was very cheap. It was a symbol of home that i would carry with me and somehow it carried me when i was homesick. not magic, just meaning-full. so last week i was working with TP in the bitter cold shadow of a storage unit. we were unpacking and sorting donations for the refugee settlement agency in our city. my hands were hurting with the cold and then, after a little while, i didn't really feel them. sometime after the feeling went, so did my ring. slipped....away.....into knickknacks and kitchenware. refugees have lost homes, families, national identity. i lost my ring. the day before i had visited the immigration office and been treated very unkindly. i was freshly aware how lost one must feel in the militaristic environment of the USCIS without english as a first language. So, i wish i had a solution to this parable. just lots of lost people and things...and my ring from melbourne somewhere in central kentucky.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
the parable of the lost ring
This is a ring i bought when i was home in Australia almost a year and a half ago. I bought it at my favorite market in my favorite city. It was very cheap. It was a symbol of home that i would carry with me and somehow it carried me when i was homesick. not magic, just meaning-full. so last week i was working with TP in the bitter cold shadow of a storage unit. we were unpacking and sorting donations for the refugee settlement agency in our city. my hands were hurting with the cold and then, after a little while, i didn't really feel them. sometime after the feeling went, so did my ring. slipped....away.....into knickknacks and kitchenware. refugees have lost homes, families, national identity. i lost my ring. the day before i had visited the immigration office and been treated very unkindly. i was freshly aware how lost one must feel in the militaristic environment of the USCIS without english as a first language. So, i wish i had a solution to this parable. just lots of lost people and things...and my ring from melbourne somewhere in central kentucky.
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2 comments:
we will gather together, nine of us, I will call it a fellowship. We hunt down the lost ring and destroy it. . . oh, wait wrong parable.
I do hope your ring turns up in the pile that is the storage unit, Geoff.
thanks lads. big kev (my dad) also offered to go and get a new one from the market in melbourne but i think i will wait and make it a part of my next journey 'home'. i'm unsure as to when that will be...not in the next year or so. for now i will take comfort in your encouragement and in the hopeful anticipation of a visit to the vic. market.
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