wild places

We're back. We started packing and cleaning last night, carried on packing and cleaning this morning, got in the car at about eleven, got home this afternoon, and then started unpacking and doing washing. I'm sitting here surrounded by drying racks covered in washing, with more waiting in the laundry to hang out tomorrow. Where does it all come from? How much energy is wasted over the globe with our modern (and privileged) obsession with clean clothing? With clothing, for that matter. But that's another story...

We had a great holiday. We had down time, family time, fun and adventure. It's not everywhere in the world that you can jump in your car and drive to see scenes like this.

The steaming ground in this geothermal area was punctuated with craters and blow holes. In a couple of places the craters were filled with mud that bubbled and blew steam out of large holes. The noise was amazing, it was like the ground was alive. I'd hardly given a thought to what was beneath me while we had been back in town, in our safe and tidy suburban house. And yet only a short drive away the ground was roaring, wild and inhospitable.

We saw water roaring, too. We visited a dam yesterday and watched the gates open. The water poured out in torrents and steadily filled the first pool immediately beneath the gates of the dam. Then all of a sudden it burst through the narrow rocky gap below, churning and bubbling.

This:

Became this:

The noise alone was breathtaking. It was the like the thunder of a hundred waterfalls. I thought about Psalm 42:7 Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and billows  have swept over me. 
This roar was man made, but we'd seen the same force of water rushing at Huka Falls the day before. There the water rushed through a narrow gap in the rocks and poured out in a torrent over the lip of the falls. It's waterfalls and boiling ground, earthquakes and hurricanes that remind us how fragile and momentary our lives are.

As we drove down the motorway into the city today I felt myself sigh, a kind of resigned sigh. The holiday was over too quickly. But as we got nearer to home and the roads wound down through the bush and out to the harbour, my spirits lifted. I can't tell you how surreal it was, to have been on holiday in suburbia, where trucks roared past on the main road behind us, and then to have come home to this quiet paradise.