Free

I grew up in the city.  Yes, in Taipei.  My parents are professionals.  When I was a little girl, we visited Europe, and many different countries in Asia.  We took road trips around Taiwan in my dad's Mercedes Benz.  When I was 10 we moved to Vancouver, Canada.  And other than the 4 years that I was away at University, I've lived on the westcoast of Canada ever since. 

It's my 13th and going on 14th day doing a winter drilling program in Fort McMurray, and I am just over half way done my shift.  It's been an emotional rollercoaster.  I find myself doing things that I would have never imagined doing - driving a large pickup truck on snowy roads calling out my kilometers heading in and out of the work site, working in below freezing weather 8 hours a day, and working alongside men who, for the most part, earn their living by using their skillful hands.  While the work is challenging and interesting and I am gaining a lot of experience, it's the people that I am more drawn to.  I feel so ignorant as I have lived in Canada for almost 20 years now and there is a huge part of it that I haven't seen - and a large part of its people that I've never come in contact with.  How can I call myself a Canadian?

Being in Fort Mac has opened up my eyes in a totally different way than anything else I've ever experienced before.  For example, I never knew that there were Hutterite colonies (kind of like Amish people) all over Alberta and Manitoba and there are a whole ton of Hutterites who work on the oil patch.  They leave their colonies when they are 18 to find work, and either go back after a couple of years or leave the colony life altogether.  There are some of them working on this project and from what I hear they are the most hardworking people ever - no warm up breaks, barely a lunch break, and they keep warm by continuously moving.  It's a completely different culture up here, where men and women work 3 week shifts and take a couple of days to a week to go home in between to see their families.  Then, it's back on the job.  Life seems so simple.

As I spend time on the job and spend time with my fellow workmen/women, I realize how little I know and question the use of my education.  All my life I have been taught to use my head, but what about using my hands?  We think that higher education is the key to a successful life, but what if other than studying we don't know how to do much?  Do we 'educated' people think that we have it better than those farmers, labourers, and other blue collars?  Do we really have a better life?  Are our lives, the way they are, really how God intended for us to live?  I wonder.  God gave us brains to think, but he also gave us hands to work.  I don't know what I am trying to say here, but I feel like being out here and seeing the things that I've seen, talking to the people that I have, I feel like who am I to think that I am anywhere near knowing the ways of people in this country, or even in this world?  I want to travel the world, but I don't even know my own country.  People are so diverse, and their outlooks and expecations of life are so different.

I like to think of myself as a free spirit, but I don't think I am as I worry a lot and become anxious of the unknown.  I almost had another breakdown when I found out that I may be staying for another 10 days.  But after a while I decided, I am here, with all these people I might as well make the best of it.  I got back to my room and organized it a bit, made it a bit more comfortable.  Then I hopped on here to blog.  I've had many thoughts over for the past 2 weeks but have never had the chance to write them down.  After not doing much every night for 14 nights straight, I decided that tonight was going to be the night I jog down my thoughts, however jumbled they may be. 

I feel like I am on a different planet, experiecning things I have never before, and wondering what my life would be like if I had grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan or Alberta.  I've been living in a bubble, a safe one.  I guess you could say the same thing about other ways of life.  But I wonder if I would be happier if I was wild and free, if I wasn't who I was.  What if I had to work for my food with my hands, make my own clothes, draw drinking water up from a well.  As Barbara Brown Taylor described in her book, doing these things must be altars, and how we can experience God, in this world. 

A part of me wants to break free.  To run through a large meadow bare feet, to get my hands dirty while digging for my own vegetables.  To be close to the earth that God has created and that we dwell in....  What would that be like?