Through the dream

E---

As I write to you, the fan hums a noisy electric song in the corner of the room, and a single cricket outside has made it his mission to sing me to sleep in the confines of this hot, square room.

Listen!

Today, the road to Bparpalou was dotted with craters, filled high with water as orangered as a ripe pumpkin. Against the shocking green of the jungle, the land bleeds minerals freely, the rain a razor releasing her veins onto the land.

Look!

We sat tonight in a little bar called The Silver Spoon, stepping down into a dark, quiet place and sitting on plastic chairs, sipping "Club" beer from clean glasses and toasting the end of the road. As night fell and the crudely painted signs on the walls faded into the dark, my Liberian colleagues told me of the first Liberian president, a mulatto bastard son of Thomas Jefferson, and of the care lavished upon a new mother when she gives birth to a child amongst her family and friends. We spoke of our two cultures, of the first slaves we returned back to their continent, stripped of the language, traditions, even their names. We spoke of the war, and they shook their heads blankly when I asked why...why? People became crazy, they said, they became inhuman. Despite the warmth of the African night, I shivered as their eyes gleamed in the dark.

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In the village, the peeling of the pineapple is the most interesting thing that has happened here all day. My colleague M has bought a pineapple on the side of the road, and sits cutting it open under the shade of a tin roof as we wait for the return of the car from Bparpalou.

A daring rooster picks a piece of grilled corn off the charcoal grill as a sudden shower of rain picks up from a clear blue sky. The smeet smell of the pineapple chimes in unison with the delicate cheeping of chicks underfoot, and a cool breeze bring the scent of grass and rain. Just as suddenly, the sky dries up.

The sun, so hot in Senegal, seems muted here by the presence of water. Everything is flush with a green shine, the ground is never quite dry from the last downpour. Despite the abundance the people are terribly poor, and I have learned most survive on subsistence farming. The land is rich with pineapple and corn, water greedy crops, and my friend shucks the skin off the pineapple on the plastic lid of a trash can.

The sweetness of the first bite nearly brings tears to my eyes. The sugar of the earth and heat of the African sun has turned its insides to warm yellow gold, and its juice runs down my fingers to land on the earthen floor. We are working our way through the fruit of the land, now we have bought a bunch of five ripe bananas for 25 Liberian dollars (about 25 cents). They are sweet and starchy, with a light sting of unripeness, just enough to cut the flavor. Tonight we will return to the town of Bomi, where we may not find anything to eat for the night.

This is the boredom and the beauty of village life. It is good for the soul sometimes to sit in silence and let the sounds of life wash around you. Clucking of hens, the rustle of paper, children shouting, women alternatively laughing and arguing. I can see the great challenge that we are faced with here, the same that I have seen in every African village since I first came to the continent seven years ago. This is a village. These are farmers, rural people. They cannot, and will not, ever truly change. It is only our stubborn and strange insistence on "helping" them, that creates the weird situation of development today. Perhaps we try to make up for stealing their land and their people by sending them free medicine, by starting project after project.

Everyone must eat and make progress in one way or another, and I have long since stopped trying to make any sense of it. There is no reason or meaning behind anything, no explanation that can help us understand the "why" of life. Man is a dreaming animal, following his instincts with a passionate absurdity. Watching the play of life here, thinking of the empty egos shuffling around the streets of DC, I see that they are equally as meaningless. What effect does this have on me? Do I become defeated, lethargic, nostalgic?
In fact, it leaves me unafraid, no longer fearful of making a mistake that will place me at odds with some kind of proper plan. There is no plan, there is no final decision that any man can make that guides anyone. We are all making our way through our own dream. 

Return to Africa

I'm at the Hotel Ganale working on some emails and getting articles.
Free wi-fi here. I used to come here as a volunteer, and nothing has
changed. The same tall, thin bartender pours drinks, a small plate of
peanuts and pickled vegetables comes free with a drink, the same European dance songs play endlessly on a loop. It's truly bizarre being back
here, scenery the same, and I so different. I feel more like
a stranger, yet so much more comfortable. Before, this felt like
such a foreign place, and absolutely overwhelming. I was so involved
with the culture and enamored with the people. Every experience stuck
to me, and I absorbed everything, reacting constantly. Now I am just a
visitor, albeit an experienced one. I observe. I act on the surface.
And honestly, I enjoy it more now. A strange sort of homecoming.

Things have changed here: some are better and some are worse. The city
seems cleaner, with less garbage on the streets and fewer aggressive
street-hawkers. At night though, the face changes. Both women and men
find space on the sidewalk to sleep, shoulder to shoulder, on strips
of cardboard. If they had anything to steal, it would be gone by
morning, picked off by those even more ravenous. But what they have
they wear on their bodies, use for a pillow, wrap themselves in for
protection against the heavy, tropical night.

I still find the contrasts shameful. Barriers of glass protect big
screen tvs, air conditioning and expensive alcohol from the squalor
just outside. The wealthy sometimes have to step over the
bodies of homeless sleepers in order to enter nightclubs
and bars. Is there any evidence that things are getting better here?
Or is Africa just entering a further stage of exhaustion?

So, I'll stay here my two months gathering data, treading across the
skin of this country, and probably never again experience it as deeply
as before. Time passes and my world is changing, interests and tastes
evolving toward different frontiers. It seems sure though that, if I
return again to Senegal, it will still show the same bittersweet face
that it does to me now.

No Kid

river long sun and gold
walking on the sky
mossy rock, long dark face
falling to the ground.
cutting through, meandering
love sometimes says no.

longing.
something in you is longing.
something in you is free.
white sand green light
eyes of someone new
bright and full of mystery
beauty strikes a blow.
beauty solid beauty low
deep beneath our feet
beauty before our eyes can see
beauty lives alone.

alone in light alone in air
alone is just a part
of everything we see and do
the mirror of the heart.
sweet river run
sweet voices call
darkness coming soon
high tension star
red flower glow
beauty never sleeps.

One Year

It is beyond me to understand why my thoughts, personality and needs all tumble around inside in such chaos, grasping for recognition and order while Nature stays so peacefully constant. It is raining. If there was ever a reason to believe in an omnipotent god, one who controls the world with levers and buttons, it might be found here, where every year the rain comes with near perfect regularity. My microcosm of joys and rages, thoughts about Sartre and the cooking of beets can do nothing to change Senegal, my effect is nil. Is this comforting? To slip into another world like in and out of skins? The rain, the first rain, is falling, filling the room with the sound of water and I wonder, returning to this question as regularly as there is dry and wet, what is this furious, ghostly, gorgeous thing looking out of my eyes, what has it seen, who is it after a year in the sun, a year in the rain?

Mere and I are working in the garden. She tells me through her terrible teeth and gorgeous smile that dogs, children and the insane are all alike: give them an inch and they'll walk all over you, ignore them and they'll eventually go away. This seems wonderfully wise, funny too, and I inwardly feel thankful that this woman and I have become friends. Mere tends to her cucumbers, mending twisted leaves and keeping a constant rattle of nonsense chatter directed at her year old granddaughter, who cries as little as I've ever seen a baby cry. We make a funny triumvirate in the garden; grandmother, baby, toubab, but it is Mere's equalizing gaze that seems to bind us together. She has a total disregard for all those things which usually separate people: race, age, handicap, and the baby is just as worthy of conversation as the young American who comes to weed and put down chicken manure. I admire the look of intense concentration on a boy's face as he expertly rolls a tire through the garden door and am touched suddenly by the red of my bicycle under the waving green arms of the mango tree where a mother kite has laid her eggs. Together we watch the bird as she circles closely above, the cream of her underbelly contrasting deeply with the black of her eyes. The baby, suddenly excited, quacks, and Mere seems to understand. I feel I understand too. What more is there than to live out the day somewhere along that tightly stretched line between what is inside and out? The tree, the bird, the warm brown earth…these moments are at once too great to understand and yet wholly within my grasp, like a star held between my hands.

Woken in the early morning by the sound of rain. The breeze lifting the curtains brings the soft drumming of water falling on the green earth, and finally the lilting voice of the muzzein reciting the first prayer. 'I praise the perfection of God, the Desired, the Forever Existing, the perfection of God, the Desired, the Existing, the Single…' I want to think but can recall nothing. It is enough to be alive, held, still and breathing, within the great shining heart of this moment. Overcome by beauty, my head falls again and I sleep, the great prayer winding its sweetness around and around me, intermingled with the child's song of the rain. There can be no more than this, it is enough to be alive.

A perfectly blue sky on a promising morning takes on a pearly haze and, with surprising speed, releases great gusts of rain like from some mystic reservoir. Could the unexpected ever truly be welcome, or must we simply embrace the inevitable unknown? In painful, unhappy moments, the jewel remains buried deeply inside, at other times the sky and everything beneath it seems to sparkle and fill with light. We are turned inside out and tread a razor thin line between the inner and outer worlds. A few years, a few days, are just boxes to put memories in, while throughout strives the Self, so intent upon its work of living.

11/22/08

I see now that
you will never leave me
or the things that I love.
The snow which
used to fall so quietly
speaks your name where
it gathers, white
on the patient green.
From inside watching
daylight fade as the snow
piles more substantial,
chairs, books, my very clothes
begin to speak of you
begging your presence
lamently softly as a child does,
where is my heart?

Everything choruses
demanding you appear
with all your joy, light
in your hands, fingers
like stars, star-man
mother, builder, sun
sun-man enclosing and
naming all the lost and
little things.

We sing for you.
Unwilling and now
willing in our desperation
we sing and call for you
to come back from
whatever great distance
you maintain.
We are like supplients
in a temple whose
god has fled.
Myself and these things
in a room growing
ever wider.

The whole world asks
for you, the smallest flower
cries bitterly at your loss.
Would you deny this thing
its tiny happiness?

In each flake of snow
you reflect, multiplied
weighing heavy on boughs
straining under your bounty.
Yet hopeful is the green
unseen beneath its burden.

To be

We long to be wind. Something that touches and takes without need. We long for pure existence, to stand without knowing we are standing, breathe without feeling the intake of our lungs. We long, constantly, to be immortal, not in the sense of living forever as human, but to forever be a part of the elements of the earth - the stone and dust that gives shape and form to the limitless idea of God.

Proof

We are plain until we decide not to be plain, expressionless until we decide to have expression, disinterested until we take interest, outside until we demand to be let in. Our lives are a series of decisions, the greatest and most important and most oft challenged the decision to live. One may live but not be alive- we must decide to be alive, demand from ourselves and from the world the right to have meaning. Meaning is not given, it is not an intangible sustance existing in the world to be discovered, it is created. Do you want to be real? To be approached and appreciated? Your right to that must be earned and defined, until then you are animal but not human. Place your hand in the box of fire and prove that you can take it out unscathed. Prove that you are worthy of life.