Here's the thing...

"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...

I am listening to a song right now by Cobalt Season that's called, 'Careful not to draw your maps in pen and ink'. The lyrics go: You are gonna change your mind someday So just let go of all your thoughts on tomorrow You may find your bearings in disarray Though you may lead and trip and fall and follow And all that you thought black will be proved red Full of life and complication and sorrow And all that you thought white was in your head For life is lived in the shadows that we borrow And I’ll look far, but may see nothing And I will thirst, but may not drink And I will yell to those behind me “Careful not to draw your maps in pen and ink” The same road disappears up ahead Will you ever understand this equation? The compass in your hand is all but dead Time to feel your way around this evasion Read the words again, for you might see Life where you saw death, a way to your salvation Best to lay down what you thought was certainty Freedom’s found i...

5:30am: The sun is not yet up and it is already hot. The generator is not on so the still air inside my tukel has grown even hotter. I hear the scuff, scuff of the water man dragging his feet pushing his heavy wheelbarrow outside my wire mesh window. He unloads four or five 25 gallon plastic jugs of water, dropping them on the ground with a thump. I open my eyes and ensure that my mosquito net is still tucked in to protect from the bugs, bats, snakes with whom we share our space. Satisfied that I am alone I roll over and go back to sleep. 8:30am: Scuffling inside the plastic ceiling of my grass-thatched tukel wakes me up. It is probably a lizard crawling around making a racket. Others are up already and moving about. The builders from Kenya have begun banging nails into the roof of the cement block kitchen they are building. There are no builders in this part of South Sudan and so we have to have them come to build anything other than the mud tukuls in which we normally live and wor...

I was reminded of Antjie Krog's excellent book, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa , this evening and so reread some. Here's a great part: “And I wonder: God. Does he hear us? Does he know what our hearts are yearning for? That we all just want to be human beings ... some with more colour, some with less, but all with air and sun. And I wade into song ... in a language that is not mine, in a tongue I do not know. It is fragrant inside the song, and among the keynotes of sorrow and suffering there are soft silences where we who belong to this landscape,…all of us,…can come to rest. Sometimes the times we live in overflow with light.”

So I was walking along today and out of the corner of my eye thought I saw a snake. 'Hmmm...' I thought, 'this is a good life lesson. If you see something that looks like a snake it probably is.' I'm making this life lesson number #1. For posterity, I will now record other life lessons learned in the field - in no particular order: #2: Do not stand on well covers. #3: Everything is better with bacon. #4: You are not as good a driver as you think you are. No one is. #5: You are not as good a swimmer as you think you are. No one is. #6: Never say, 'it can't get any worse' because it always can. #7: The best time to use the toilets on a plane are immediately upon boarding - or within the first hour. #8: Everyone can survive without washing for at least 4 days before becoming offensive to yourself and others. #9: Television is overrated. #10: Headlamps (torches) are not. #11: Almost no one ever knows what they're talking about. #...

Someone recently asked me what it was like leaving all the time and the question struck me as strange...cause is isn't like anything. It's like asking if you found it strange to go to work this morning. Was it strange leaving the house? We're always leaving. Sometimes you go farther than other times. Sometimes you don't come back to the place you left. But there is really no difference. It's just part of living - like everything else, joy, loneliness, laughter, aggravations, suffering, returning, leaving. It's part of being alive. You have to leave sometime.