Our bags are packed. The dryer is humming away as we do our best to leave Anchor Park UMC as neat and clean as we found it by washing bed linens and towels. Soon, we will head to the Anchorage Airport. Most of us carrying with us as many souvenirs as memories!

The Native Peoples here devised the totem pole as a means to tell their story. Carved in wood the totems last from one generation to the next preserving history, heritage, and sharing with future generations one generations experience. The story is told vertically, but the people who live out their lives around it do so in a network of relationships with the land and one another that becomes community.

As a VIM team we have formed a small community tightly woven by means of conversations in the close quarters of the church van, the sharing of devotions morning and night, and shared experiences. We are now about to stretch these bonds that have been formed as we return home to families, friends, and church communities. Memory is the means of bonding individuals together, families, communities, and peoples. Sometimes we need memory joggers like the totem pole or the poem. Here is one of my memory joggers.

Alaska Genesis
Spruce trees stand tall.
Spired tops point to the sky.
In unity they breathe their fragance to the heavens
like incense.

Eagles ride the air currents
Piping their clear, shrill call.
Adding to Creation's Choir.

The ocean swells and heaves
And breaks against the rocky shore
Keeping rhythmic time day and night.

Moose and goat graze the deep lush grass,
While bear fish for salmon in the streams.
Silvery and thrashing
Protesting the quick journey from life to death
All the way.

In the midst of this I stand with them.
All of us caught in this moment of time
Navigating our way
Through the tangled goodness of Creation
Proclaiming to the Great I Am
"It is Good."