Diary of 2012 Summer Trip (1)

7/15/2012

Mingway and I started our 2012 summer trip yesterday and we arrived at a small town Ismaning of Germany near Munich this morning. Ismaning is as beautiful and refreshing as before.  Plants are amazingly green and well kept, air clear and moist, street quiet and neat. A creek full of clean water quietly flows through the center of the town.  Widows and front decks are decorated with fresh flowers. Something in this small town deeply impressed Heping when he first came here for a business trip a few years back. He said he had found me a perfect town I had been looking for  and he promised us he would one day take us here and he knew we would enjoy it as much as he did.

Two years ago in May 2010, Heping took Mingway and me to Ismaning. The beauty and neatness of this town impressed us as much as it did to Heping and we thoroughly enjoyed its environment and its food. I remember Heping was very excited and kept saying “I have finally brought my family here” as if it was one of his missions of life.  Coming here again this time seems coming to our second home, heart comforted and spirit uplifted. We stay in the same little hotel around the corner, dine in the same restaurants. Everything stays the same, nothing has changed except the one who led us here in the first place has left us.

Our hotel Fischerwirt in Ismaning

 
River flows through Ismaning

Nearer My God To Thee

The weather is so unbearably hot that nothing could be done outside though there is a lot need to be done. Both Mingway and I got sick after the carnival of July 4^th. I stay inside lazily listening to music or reading a book or flipping through old pictures.

Some time ago I came across this song called “Nearer My God To Thee” from Mingway who told me it was the last music heard on Titanic before it sunk. The melodies of this song touched me deeply, and aroused deep longing of my heart to be nearer to the Source of Perfection. I listened to it again this afternoon and felt the incredible beauty from within and the magnificence of life seems to become sharply focused.

It seems that time and distance, sometime viewed as the biggest obstacles against our desire to be near right here at this moment, could act as filters that events happened in the past and hopes for the future, people far away or parted from this physical world are formed and reformed so that only the beautiful are remained. When we (mainly me) live in daily life, busy ourselves with mundane details that life demands, it is so easy not to see, not to feel and not to value properly the beauty that life presents in every moment. Time and distance simply have that magic to add beauty into all things happened and push deep down into our heart the beautiful feeling of appreciation for each other. Sometimes I believe that beauty, true beauty could only be seen, felt when one is in suffering. How could a person who has everything, who owns everything appreciate anything, properly? How could a person who is always full enjoy any food, however delicious? In this sense, hunger, loss or deprivation could be a blessing in disguise. They seem to sharpen our senses, cultivate our feelings and align our views that we could see farther, feel deeper and focus on right direction. Is this why, I wonder, that God starts our eternal journey toward Him on this earthly plane, the farthest point from Him where our deep longing for perfection could never be satisfied, where anything that maters is intangible, veiled or inaccessible to us, while anything that doesn’t matter is solid, clear and all the time accessible? How wonderful it shall be when that day will finally come that the veil will be lifted, we shall see the world in its true reality, we will see each other in our true beauty, there will be no more time and space that can separate us, we will walk together, with hand in hand, toward the Source of Perfection, eternally.

Nearer, My God, to Thee

Titanic Last Scene (1953)