Nakayama

OK. Also this happened.

The refugee camp visit was heavy. It is not an easy way to live. Resources are scarce, future uncertain and the circumstances that brought them are traumatic. Hard to keep hope. Hussein tells us he wants to go back to Somalia. But isn't it dangerous? It is more dangerous than when he left, but here he is dying slowly. To be 30 and have nothing to do with one's hands, one's time. He's jovial and charismatic and he stays because his wife doesn't want to go back. He shows us her picture. She's beautiful, with her teenage daughter and they look so comfortable together sitting in the front yard. He shows us his cleats and pictures of him playing soccer. He wants someone to see that he has things he wants out of life. Everyone's got a plan, he tells us. I've got plans. He's funny, but his rhythm is frustrated.

I'm making space for you in my thoughts, in my heart. The little boy who asks me to pay his school fees. The woman who cries when Deborah asks her what kind of future she imagines for her daughters. The brother with dull eyes. The woman at the market with piles of tomatos who has adopted many, many children, married as a child herself, telling Deborah she still receives death threats for being Tutsi. Is it enough?

We are staying in hotel with a view of Mubende and the water in the air at dawn. The hotel itself used to be a headquarters for UNHCR staff working at the camp, 40 km away. It has a sauna but I don't know if that's from its time as UNHCR headquarters. It's nice for us though, cedar walls, and men pour eucalyptus over the rocks. There is a lot of space between the helpers and the communities in need. But people are living in the camps now, the space is attended to more.

Near the hotel, maybe 15 minutes up the dirt roads of the mountain is a traditional religious site. Nakayama. Past a road that says it goes to a traditional healer. Nakayama is a woman, a priestess who had a relationship with an old tree. A long time ago. When she died, her body was buried elsewhere, but the spirit came to live in the tree. No one knows how old the tree is. The sign at the road calls it a tourist site and we pay a young boy a dollar to tell us the story, but otherwise, there is nothing touristy about it. A community sits on the grass and prays by the tree. There is an old woman who tends the shrine. The tree has a thousand roots and each large fold of trunk reaching into the earth creates a separate area, or chamber, where one can approach Nakayama. You need to take your shoes off to enter the ground covered with dry pine needles. And you leave an offering. Coffee beans, usually. They smell sweet from rotting.

Go ahead, go pray.

So I do. And I remember my dream with the woman, the healer - will you make my strange dreams go away? - it is possible, the other possibility is to be fully inside them. and the wrinkles of the bark are skin, a dark green in tiny canyons, tree growing since memory and the sweet smell of coffee and the sense of breathing eyes lift up as if meeting a gaze (strangers, strange, I am strange here)

In the car, I do not talk the three hours home. What is it?

Sleepless. My bed is a four poster with mosquito net canopy and I lie in it staring at the dark of my eyelids. Can't sleep. And it occurs to me, my dream is not about dreaming at all. It's about being alone. Will you make me not alone anymore? It's possible, the other possibility is to be fully inside your own alone-ness. To be completely alone as a way of facing out.

OK. Only how? I vanish in sleeping.