Morning Musings

I'm sitting on a landing about 30 feet above Jaguar Creek itself. It's 6:03 Tuesday morning. Quiet time is hard to come by. The temperature is pleasantly cool. The sun is up. The air is humid, as always, with a slightly ominous portent of the sweltering heat it will contain later today. I listen over the steady rumble of the waterfall about 100 yards away for the mornings announcements from a myriad of birds and other jungle critters proclaiming the morning.

Jaguar Creek from this perspective is every bit as beautiful as the web site led me to believe. The creek itself is crystal clear with sand and sharp coral-ly rocks on the bottom. It ranges in depth from about a foot to several great swimming holes chest deep.

The creek was salvation for half a dozen of the laundry construction crew yesterday afternoon. We worked harder than we thought we could hauling concrete all day. When we got back to camp, Daniel, Jordan, Doug, Tim, Sarah and I all headed for the creek. The water was biting and refreshing. 76 degrees, the same water and temperature as in Blue Hole National Park half mile away, and in St. Herman's Cave, where 7 of us had a cave tubing adventure on Sunday. We splashed in the swimming hole for a while until we got used to the water, then decided to explore upstream. We braved the current and the rocks to work our way to the top of the waterfall - really about a 5 foot cascade where the river narrows to about 10 feet across. At the top of the cascade we waded through several pools, culminating in a pool about 10 feet deep that simply disappeared under the rock. We were at the source of Jaguar Creek!

The physical beauty surrounding us here is truly breath-taking. Reverence and awe are cheap emotions here.

But when we venture out into the "world" outside Jaguar Creek, it is all too easy to see the crushing poverty that leads people to destroy this very beauty for the sake of survival. There are no easy answers and too many hard questions. And the beauty of God's creation envelopes them all.

Dan Terpstra