Today Mbarare. We travel - the roads - it is dark when I am awake and waiting at the Shell Station near my home. And then it is light, warm light on the quiet clay or cement. We pick up all the professional women and we drive east. Doze. Banana trees. fields have soft waves. Slowing on the one lane road for the speed bumps. For this one truck on the uphill. For police checkpoints. And then working out something about being alone in my sleep. We all sleep. Even G falls asleep over the paper she is trying to prep with for her Friday meeting.
We stop by the side of the road and buy sausages. We buy tea. We buy ginger soda. An old man in a bright plad jacket and a broadrimmed hat sells us medicines that he has cultivated and carries in a black plastic bag and we laugh at ourselves and buy them. This one is for heartburn. This one for asthma. We laugh and drive to Mbarare. Yes, we do.
It is like this, a long time ago you had a dream. You were on the bus in Uganda. It was your 30th birthday and your father gave you a present. There were three words on the wrapping that you can’t remember. But in reading, they translated simultaneously to “Standing in the absence of god is standing in god’s presence” and “To know yourself is to be without self.” Separate, but not sequential. And then you looked to the back of the bus to show the person seated there, but cannot get his attention. It is only now 2 years later that it occurs to you, you were in error. You can’t give a thing you have not received.
in desert learning
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