Thinking More About Africa

8/8/2007

Now I’m thinking more about Africa, South Africa to be exact, myself being there to be even more specific. I’m waiting to leave. Not the kind of waiting I have been doing lately, like as in wondering if I should go, or if we should turn in an application or if we should buy a ticket or if we should even go, the actual physical waiting. I’m in the waiting room. I am on the precipice of my first visit to a new land, which might sometime be my home. I’m waiting for my plane to take off.

I watched the clouds roll into the San Francisco Bay today in a new way. They were like avalanche clouds pouring down in slow motion wiping out trees as they went. They were like an army of worked up soldiers descending upon their enemies. Then I saw a man who had been thrown from his car and was lying in his own blood in the middle of a freeway. That was strange and gross to see. I’m alive and well which at any moment could cease to be the case. And now I am waiting. I had stronger feelings about the stranger lying in the street dying than I did about this trip I am about to leave for. I haven’t been feeling much about it, not much expectation, not much worry. Am I scared? I won’t even consider it to be honest. I’ve been planning this trip for quite some time, or someone has anyway.

It’s kind of like starting a new school. I don’t know if I will fit in there. There is life going rough and well and dark and light and on and on. There is renewing and regenerating life that has nothing to do with me. I might go there, but I will be an outsider and in a new and strange way. I hope that I will have the wisdom to be humbled immensely by the situations I find myself in. I hope I have the frame of mind to ask good questions and I hope from the very depths that I have the courage to do what is good, even if that means being very, very lost.

Friday, Saturday,


Someday…