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Mornings in India smell like bath soap, mustard oil, and floor cleaner.  Hair oil and unregulated exhausts.  Rose-flavored candy.

Life is so incredibly close here.  Walking across the neighborhood at 8:15 in the morning means brushing shoulders with herds of freshly face-washed school kids.  It means stepping onto the front stoop of a home to avoid being hit by a scooter, and glancing just inside the open door to see a woman on her haunches scrubbing her drawing room floor, the water trickling towards my feet.

All manner of things dead and decaying add their odors to the mix.  Carcasses, animal waste, garbage.  So often I have to get closer than I'd prefer.  Hop aside and bump into an old man to save my white trousers from being splashed with the fermenting residues of the street.

I'm reading a book about the New Earth; about how everything will be restored to be as it was meant to be.  Living here teaches me about the New Earth by giving me glimpses of what it will be and what it will not be.  It teaches me the value of humanity.  I can't explain it, but to sit close enough to my friends to smell them somehow teaches me that God's creation is good, and if we can't always see it now, we will.  No matter how greatly I value my introverted alone time, I miss so much when I live my life far from others.

Living here - being close - reminds me... everything is going to be so incredibly beautiful.