Within This Eye

I’ve been in Cambodia three months now.

The heat is suffocating. 

The uniformed children ride bikes too big for them.

The cloudless sky leaves no room for rain.

The termites chew at our three-tiered water filter stand.

The brightly colored banners still wave for the new year.

The dust sticks to your face and the loud speakers blare while you drive.

The shades of skin mingled throughout the city give variety, purpose, and life.

Only a small glimpse, but what is viewed through my small perspective at this moment.  There is good and bad… fun and not fun… pretty and ugly… important and frivolous.  Maybe because I chose to live here, I have found these things.  I did not choose the country I was born in, therefore sometimes we lose perspective… or rather, we never gain a real one because we’ve never experienced another.

A foreign place changes your perspective on everything.  It may not change who you are, but rather reveals what is already in you.  It reaffirms personality and exposes what needs to be exposed.  It discloses the dirt and tells the truth.  It balances life and world decisions.

Just for a moment, it allows you to be an outsider… who can look in on that timeworn, used to be perspective and shake it up a bit.