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Showing posts from June, 2011

Careening...

"Careening," I thought putting the New Yorker down on my lap. That is the word for what we are doing right now - in this taxi - through the hills above Nairobi. Careening. Under the heavy grey sky, over these pot-holed roads, between the jungle threatening to come over the garden walls. It struck me as funny - or funny enough to stop reading a magazine - that the word just came to me like that. After so many months of having no words pop into my head to describe anything. After years of not having really anything to write. Having no words compose themselves in my head. One just pops up. Just like that. Careening. I guess we are all careening in life - which is a great metaphor for life if, in the words of someone famous, you're stupid enough to want more metaphors for life - careening along roads on high mountain cliffs, over hills, being shifted in our seats from side to side by bumps and turbulence. We rarely, if ever, just stay perfectly still. Not even wh