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.