The Flame Tree

Etudes and Short Talks, The End

The ground is trembling beneath me as I write, still. It turns out that the world, or at least Nairobi, is divided into two kinds of people: those who feel tremors, and those who do not. (Three days of tremors now, several times a day). Birds rise squawking up into the trees. I'm told the horses and cows out in Karen are jittery. There are media rumors that the US Embassy is going to order an evacuation, but that's absurd (confirmed by an email from the embassy this morning). It's more fun than anything, like surfing the bedroom, or the desk you're sitting at. The tremors start like a nervous stomach. Within a moment you realize it's not within your soul, but beyond. You feel it in your heart, and it pertains to everything. The girl's pink chandelier tinkles, a picture falls from the shelf.  The baby raises his arms to be picked up, confused. It lasts about 30 seconds. It is the most bizarre feeling. The only thing to do is relinquish any illusions of control---and ride the wave. (Regardless, despite it all being fine and fun, I admit I'll be relieved when our flight lifts off the ground this evening.)

It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it, writes Mary Oliver in a poem, "The Swan" (from Winter Hours). This is one way to live. It was a nothing month, when I started writing this project, when I committed to 27 Etudes and Short Talks. It was, on the surface, a housewife driving children to school in a Suburu month. It was roasting chicken on Monday, it was linens on Thursday, it was walking the children to sleep in a stroller when the afternoons were warm enough. It was a neighborhood parent meeting, a news report from town, a yoga class, a memory, a line from a poem, a power cut, a night away with M., and several lovely dinner parties with friends. It was a nothing month, really. But what a privilege---to take a moment every day to stop, and reflect, and think: how infinite life is, how simply beautiful. Perceive this world, and, with your each gesture, honor it.

And so I leave you for now (I'll be writing, though less often, while traveling until September) with a second Mary Oliver poem, also entitled "The Swan"---

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning rising into the silvery air---
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings: a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

#26

Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, a heavy cat jumped up on our bed. It sort of danced around by our feet, like it was chasing a rat. But we don't have a cat, and we certainly don't have a rat, and as I was processing that (and thus trying to processing what was scurrying across the bed), I heard---no, it was more like I felt----about 20 weighty rats run across the floor beneath the bed, and along the attic above our heads. I heard the wrought iron gate door shaking, and I thought (wide awake now, my heart in my throat, my repulsion about to overwhelm my confusion), O my God a scurrying is taking over the world. But even in the dark, amongst the confusion, I knew that 20 rats could not just materialize in our room, at least not out of the corner that they seemed to be arriving from.

I woke M. who, like any good husband, will sleep through a rat invasion, a baby crying, or even another world war if it ever comes to that. "M.," I  whispered. "We're having an earthquake!" He rolled over, mumbling something about the Rift Valley being far enough away. (It was happening in Tanzania actually, where, unlike Japan where it's also happening, there are no nuclear reactors.)

It's 16 hours later, but few moments ago, the desk quivered beneath my computer. It's awfully unsettling, feeling that the ground beneath your feet could simply split open and devour you. It's unsettling to question one's faith in the very stability of the earth. Though I suppose it could be interpreted symbolically: we're flying to the States in a few days---having not been home in over a year---and everything feels a bit shifty, in a way, like the ground beneath our feet is trembling.

Which it is.

Short Talk on Self-possession

It's the afternoon, and the children are sleeping. It's winter here, and everything is blooming. We have found ways to pass the time with this cold, grey weather. We make an event out of buying fish food. We throw parties with hundreds of tea candles burning around the garden. We build a castle out of wooden blocks, and then destroy it with one swoop. A metaphor for life, I whisper to the babe, but the wisdom is lost on him and so we watch a video. The tree outside my window has yellow flowers that form cones. They glow like torches against the grey sky. But this is not how I intended to begin this post.

Years ago, when I first moved to East Africa, it was a different life for a while. There was no ayah pushing a baby on a swing, there was no UN security. There was no M. to help negotiate my course. I had a vague sense of what I intended to accomplish, and how, and a little money, and a good friend who ushered me wisely. ("I can open the door," he would say. "But then you have to walk though.") I also had one word that I forced myself to live by: self-possession. I hadn't thought of this for a long time until today. It's a good word to go by.

Self-possession: The full possession or control of one's faculties or feelings; presence of mind; composure.

It is important to maintain your self-possession when you first arrive, a foreigner in Africa. It is important to reflect upon your decisions before you cross the Rwandan border into the Congo, or attend the French dinner party in Nairobi, or write about the djinns on the Kenyan coast. It is important to maintain a presence of mind, a clarity. The temptation (upon arrival) is the opposite. The temptation is to become possessed---"controlled by an evil spirit, crazed, mad"---because of the intense beauty; because of the sense of personal freedom and limitlessness, because the nights are so dark compared to home, and the spirits so tangible. (With time, instinctively, we re-build our own little societies around us and curl up in them. The limitlessness, the darkness and the spirits fade away.)

To become possessed, to go insane. I have known people in New York who have done that. It is important to exercise your self-possession anywhere, I suppose. Many years ago, I felt I lost my presence of mind after a stint in Rwanda. I was not mad---I was working and walking down streets and living in apartments when I got home. But it took over a year to regain my composure. Perhaps that was why I was so careful when I returned back, to try again.

"Thus am I mine own prison." I read that in a poem once, and it seemed the next line to put down.

Spring Snow

By Arthur Sze

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightening.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

The image is "Plum Tree against a Colorful Temple Wall" by Raymond Gehman. Click here for more information.

how we go on

On Friday afternoon in Mogadishu, five children were killed when one of them picked up a land mine and, playing, threw it against a wall. They were on their way to Mosque for Friday prayers and stopped to play football. On Friday afternoon in Nairobi, after lunch, I walked the girl down to the market at the end of the road. She fell asleep on the way. I bought milk, onions, yogurt, juice. I thought about the two Somali men who were talking by the petrol station. I wondered if they appreciated Nairobi, or felt homesick, or probably both. I didn't know another land mine had detonated in Somalia, maybe it hadn't even happened yet. On Friday night in Nairobi, an employee of UNICEF Somalia felt devastated. We teach land mine education why are they still dying why don't the parents stop them how could this happen think of those parents tonight, think of them!...

There is so much suffering in the world, someone said. And what happened is horrible. But remember, no one writes the news story about the boy who didn't pick up the land mine, and just kept walking.

The Longing to be Pure

                        

...motion that forces change---
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed...
(from PRAYER by Jorie Graham)

It's not fair, to the poet or the poem, to quote a few mangled lines like this, but these are the words that have haunted me lately, recurring through my thoughts like an incantation. I don't know why. I am not a freaky mystic. I am not a mad woman visited by Greek verse as I go about my errands. But I can't get these words out of my head. Maybe it was the weekend above Naivasha, the inevitable demise of that region---the longing for purity. Maybe it's the season, the talk of departure, the sense of time passing as the school year ends and families pack up, some for the summer, others for good---the motion that forces change. Regardless, I must have recited these lines 100 times over the last few days. They seem to apply to everything, and then, just as easily, to nothing.

This morning, the girl's ballet recital (three year olds lifting their arms, trotting in circles). Does this explain the lines? I wondered. Is it the purity of these little girls in pink that the poet refers to? Is it our longing she speaks of---the audience of parents, each tarnished by experience, tarnished by ambition and desire, and bristling with video cameras to preserve (on film) the innocence of being three?

The girls came out on stage.  They were not afraid. They harbor none of life's regrets. When the teacher began, they moved with her in a sort of group, but each was hardly aware of the other. Each was too involved her own stepping, in her toe pointing, in her sitting down and pretending to sleep. There was nothing superficial in their gestures, nothing contrived. When one girl slipped and fell, the others didn't flinch or even notice. But the audience gasped and sighed in sympathy. I think that's what made the girl cry. The teacher hugged her and handed her to her mother, while each adult fought back his or her own memories of disappointment, and the aloneness that those memories evoke. What we long for is to be pure...

And then, as I watched the little dancers, another passage came to me---perhaps, finally, a response to Graham's lines. This by Mikhail Baryshnikov. I read it in the New York Times years ago, a passage from an introduction he wrote for a book:

It [the beauty of ballet] seemed very personal, because it was contained in the bodies of the dancers, and the body is so revealing. When a dancer comes on stage, he is not just a blank slate that the choreographer has written on. Behind him he has all the decisions he has made in life. He has already met a million forks in the road. Each time, he has chosen, and in what he is onstage you see the result of those choices. You are looking at the person he is, the person who, at this point, he cannot help but be. All the experiences he had as a child and as a teen-ager, all the images that his body has accumulated, these come up as colors in the dancing, giving it sparkle and complexity. They come out through the eyes, through the pores.

Well... we are all, if you will, dancers on a stage. We are each the person we cannot help but be---an accumulation of our experience, of the images we absorb, of "the blessings and disasters that are the center of our lives" (Baryshnikov). Can we preserve this morning's three year old? She is already a memory. The longing is to be pure... but  what we get is to be changed.

But, to be honest, the ballet recital was pretty boring. Once my daughter left the stage, I lost interest. It lacked... sparkle. It lacked complexity. It was like going to a museum, and seeing nothing but blank slates.

 

(Click on blue, underlined words to link to poems, articles, books, etc. The image is "Blue Dancers" by Edgar Degas. And it just made the slightest change in you.)

Sunday Morning in Malu

I'm supposed to write something profound, I suppose, sitting here above the Great Rift Valley, overlooking the place where man was born, the cedar breeze carrying an ancient dignity across the cottage porch. But there are three dogs sprawled at my feet, and they impress me too much to ignore. They're way cool. They just trotted in from their morning trek, gave me a heads-up, and slumped down with a clattering of knees to overlook their domain: the yard, the cedar forests beyond, the escarpment to the west, and the majestic valley below with its fires burning and farm flowers growing and morning mist burning off the distant Longonot Crater.

The buzzing and humming and whirring of insects around us is bewildering. And the birds are like children on a playground: chasing, grouping and dispersing; twittering around; little conspiracies being built in the corner, and then destroyed with a simple deceit. I read somewhere that not so long ago, a few generations maybe, most of the world was like this---a pervasive humming of insects. But alas, not anymore.

The cedar forest is beautiful, but the rest of the escarpment has been stripped of its trees. Below, the shores of Lake Navaisha are visibly retreating every year---some say it's the commercial flower farms, other accuse the tribes up-river. But, like most everything in Africa, I'm sure it's not what it seems. Whatever it is, however, it's complicated, invoking murder, greed, corruption, poverty and desperation...

The dogs are acting extra cool this morning because they're trying to repair some damaged pride. The right side of the rotweiller's muzzle hangs in an unusual way, the ridgeback keeps licking the gash under his leg. "A warthog," the waiter told us earlier. "A fight. They followed it into a hole."

"Actually, it was probably a bush pig," the owner said when he joined us later on the cottage porch. "It happened in the woods up there. Not many warthogs." He pulled the ridgeback's leg back revealing the wound as he told the story of getting them to vet. The dogs pretended to ignore us. An occasional glance shot at their owner seemed to say Can't you just let it go? Ok, ok, so we got beat by a pig... Let it go! Then they would turn their gaze back to the great ancient valley, raise their chins, and regain once again their dignity.

(photo: cottage window at Malu)

Here Today, Gone to Malu

View of Lake Naivasha from our weekend alone. Malu, bordering the Malewa River, covered in cedar forest and home to horses and monkeys and the occasional zebra. They light the fire at 6pm, until then---a book. My mobile phone battery is about to die---signing off!

A Day at the Races

It was Sports Day at the girl's school today, a sort of end-of-term celebration. "Good good! You're wearing your whites," the English matron Mrs W. bellowed when we met her in the hall this morning. "Yes I know it's cold, but at least it's not rain!" she added as she briskly limped off, waving her arms, out to attack the million tasks that awaited her before the races could begin. When I returned an hour later, the children were sitting messily on benches along the field; colored flags marked the finish line. Another cold, overcast day; parents and grandparents wearing khakis and tweed, it felt like mid-football season at Princeton. I joined some of the mothers on the veranda above the field.

"... I mean, yes, he's only two," S. was saying. "I know it's too early to push them, but I found myself telling him in the car this morning, 'You have to win, Ari! You have to win!'" S. is elegant and lovely, pure beauty, she flicks her hair behind her shoulder like Cher.
    "That's ridiculous my dear! But then you're Asian-Kenyan so you have to say that," said K. who was in Belgrade last week and will be in Somalia next. "I absolutely don't care how Jay does, only that he has fun. And beats Ari."
    "Darling," S. said. "Don't stand too close to me during the race. We don't want any unfortunate incidents with Mrs. W. watching."
    "It's doesn't matter anyway," my rational American friend said. "They're running against Kenyans. Forget it!" It was true. Our kids---as lithe and gorgeous and fun and cute and smart and perfect as they are---didn't have a chance.

Through the loudspeaker, Mrs. W called the first class up. Five two-year-olds were lined up by a teacher in the middle of  the field. A whistle blew. The crowds went wild, the children ran to the teddy bears placed ahead of them, then continued to their mothers waiting at the end of the course---Run my love, Yay darling, Come my dear, Come to me! the mothers were shouting. The children were running, laughing, giddy with joy---immune from ambition, immune from fear, immune from having to do better---flying on the glory of the moment...

And so why, when they fell into their mothers arms at the finish line, were we all crying? Why does it break the heart so?

A Backward Glance

It was past midnight when we left the dinner party on Saturday. The first quarter moon was a magnificent amber, looming above Runda's corruption-y new mansions like a talisman. It seemed appropriate. I needed some sort of indication as we drove away that night, I needed a sign. Four hours earlier, C & S had made their announcement: she got the job in the US, they're leaving in a month.

But we all just got here, I wanted to say, knowing better. To live here as we do---as diplomats, aid workers and journalists---is to hover for years in a sort of liminal state, never fully committing, never quite investing: a balancing act of heightened appreciation and detachment. It is marvelous, and it is fleeting. It is endless, and then it is over. Every day I look back on my life here with nostalgia---and yet I'm still here! And so, as M. drove home, as I nodded under the amber moon, I let the last seven years with C and then S unfold behind me.

But it wasn't the discussions over the little martinis at The Algonquin Club before C. left New York that I thought of; it wasn't the goodbye party in SoHo with the snow falling outside. It wasn't the excellent advice when I first arrived, or the generous connections, or the trips to Rwanda, Congo, Uganda that I thought of. It wasn't the nightly after-dinner walk home breathing in the sweet fire Kenya smell. It wasn't the love affairs we each once endured; it wasn't the Range Rover like an elephant through the bush; it wasn't the knowing look he gave me after 9/11 that anger and drama would not reverse the course of events. It wasn't the Last Great Party---the army tank in the back yard, the fires burning, the Kenyan dancers doing flips, the drugs, the dancing, the dawn as sudden as a shocking piece of news. Or the years since all that, the settling down years, the family and work and meet-when-you-can years.

It was the luminous way the winged termites used to fill the lighted front porch through the vines that I thought of. The frenzy, the commotion, the beauty and eeriness of it---and how a moment later they were gone, like it had never happened.

Cold in winter, hot in summer

Another quote---unusually long, not a poem. This is from The Irrational Season, by Madeleine L'Engle (who wrote A Wrinkle in Time). It was published in 1977, but seemed to meet me at the door and speak to me today. This passage touches on so many subjects---babies, letting go, weight, affluence, fear, pollution and heat and cold, I found it remarkable.

I looked at my last baby lying in his cradle, knowing that he was the last child I would bear, for I nearly didn't survive his birth; looked, touched, listened, with an incredible awareness I might not have had if I had been able to expect to bear more children. As each change came, I had to let the infant-that-was go, go forever. When he was seven months old I weaned him, as part of that essential letting go, letting him move on to child, little boy, young man.... Love, and let go. Love, and let go.
    It's always pain, this letting go, and yet it leads to joy, and a kind of lightness which is almost physical.
    We tend to be heavy, we middle Americans, heavy in all ways. More than half the world is starving, and we go on crash diets to try to take off weight. Nor are we jolly fat people. Affluence tends to bring with it a stupor, a flatulence of spirit. It is difficult to laugh freely as long as we are clutching all that we have accumulated and are afraid to lose.
     One day in early spring Pat and I drove up to Crosswicks. There was snow on the ground; I made Pat put on boots and a heavy coat and trek with me across the fields to the brook. I strayed from the path several times, fell, laughing into snowdrifts, from which she had to pull me, but at least we reached the brook, which was rushing noisily, at its fullest from melting snow. And Pat looked at it and then said in a bemused voice, "It's not polluted!"
    Pat is a physician who is Chief of Health for a large Southern city. Part of her job is understanding problems of pollution, overconsumption... Standing there on the rock bridge over the brook I asked her, "Are we going to be able to save planet earth?"
    She replied calmly. "No. Not unless we're willing to make drastic changes in our standard of living. Not unless we're willing to go back to being as cold in winter a our grandparents were, and as hot in summer."
                    The Irrational Season, (HarperCollins, 1977) pgs 115-116

The Transcient Land

What a lovely weekend! Dinners, parties, champagne, and friends! It's cold in Nairobi now, icy and overcast. Everyone's wearing sweaters and shawls, so Friday evening by the fireplace was perfect. The warmth of S's house---rugs from Afghanistan, tapestries from Central America, African masks beside etchings from Paris. Meatballs with cinnamon, and couscous with feta and mint; the children eventually curled up under duvets by the tv. The hours unfolded. I stopped worrying about the baby at home with the ayah. We exchanged stories of the first UN years, we cringed at the Africa issue of Vanity Fair. The good chocolate was brought out---geranium and rose. The girl took some too, and soon she was doing pirouettes around the room as the first few adults started to doze in their chairs. We stayed much too late, without any regret.

Saturday night with old friends and a case of champagne. The announcement about the job, we toasted and hugged and on the drive home after midnight, the half-moon rose, a burnt amber orange, quite magnificent. 

Rising from the embers, a Sunday morning walk to buy flowers and clear the head, and then to float half-awake to the lunch party. Indian food under a white tent; all afternoon, children spilling across the yard like marbles then slumping into sleep in their strollers. Talk of documentaries about Sudan, talk of the last trip to Juba, the summer vacations, talk of the Cameroon flight, the car crash to Rhino Charge, talk of new babies and previous lives and future collaborations.

Home Sunday evening to a bowl of spaghetti and the children dozing off after their bath and me thinking How wonderful the weekend, how wonderful our friends--- and yet how sad, that each occasion was a goodbye party to one dear friend or another.   

Edward Hopper, "Sun in an Empty Room"  1963

Look at the Moon, Be a Frog

A few weeks ago, my yoga teacher reminded us to constantly re-kindle our sense of wonder. "Like this! How amazing!" she said, picking up a stone.

When an airplane flies over the house, the babe drops everything. He goes to the window, he looks to the sky. He points and humms like an engine. He truly offers up the respect and awe that each flight deserves. It is wonderful and amazing that we humans can ascend 30,000 feet in a giant bird, and cross an entire ocean in a night.

The other day we were playing in the yard. Ulgh, I was thinking, I have to get the grass cut.  I abused myself for a while about how lazy and ill bred I am for letting the lawn go. Until the girl stood next to a particularly high, feathery stalk and said, "Mommy! Look at this one! I love it!" It was, actually, a lovely blade of grass.

(Photo: the babe looking at the moon, the girl being a frog)

The chill, the stupor, the letting go

Many years ago, I memorized this Emily Dickinson poem for a class. Since then, in times of pain, I have often found solace in it. I know it's hard among the emails, text messages, reports and billboards to make space to really read a poem, especially those poems of yore. You have to let the mind's buzzing and the humming settle down first, you have to create a space. But if you persevere with this one, it very well may yield peace when you need it.

The beauty of a poem like this one is that it moves and adjusts to many interpretations. I tend to think (and this is a very unofficial, un-academic interpretation) that he 'He' refers to God. That the 'Feet, mechanical, go round' is the way we march through life, partially in a daze to conceal our hearts from pain. The 'wooden way'---though obviously the marching onward in the numbness of suffering---also refers to the path that led from Emily's house to her sister's, a link which had its complexities. Quartz is literally a colorless, transparent mass of mineral. I think of it here as representing the heart. The 'Hour of Lead' describes how time seems to suspend and weigh heavy in times of pain.

This is for TEB & MR, and everyone.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes (341)
Emily Dickinson

After great pain, a formal feeling comes --
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs --
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought --
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone ---

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the snow --
First -- Chill -- then stupor -- then the letting go --

You Can't Be Everything

Every Wednesday at 3 o'clock, I study Norwegian. Am I not the greatest wife? M. and the girl are conversing now with a complexity that I can not translate, so that inspires me a little. ("Do you think Mama is getting fat?" perhaps they are saying?) Also, someday we might live in Norway and this gives me a head start on being ignored there anyway. Also, it's crucial and important for someone my age---especially after the brain cell-depleting exercise of bearing children---to do something intellectually drastic, like learn a new language. Keeps you young and alert! Also, it might come in handy one day to pretend I'm Norwegian (or in other words, pretend I'm not American), like when I'm traveling in, say, Iraq.

A moment not captured by the news

Yesterday, I drove past a young family walking. The mother was carrying her child in a kanga on her back, the father was carrying two plastic bags that seemed a bit heavy. It is not usual to see families walking together, it is noteworthy when a man is with a child. The couple was slowly climbing the steep hill that cuts through the corn fields at the end of our road. There was a weight in their step that suggested hardship, their heads were down. They were carefully dressed. They had a quiet dignity that settled like a stone in my heart.

the way we live

The perfect dinner party last night, after a cold, drizzly day. To be welcomed by a fire in the fireplace, a glass of wine, dear friends. The girls (three three-year-olds, still elated after a birthday party) took a bath upstairs and then almost behaved the rest of the evening. The babe was at home with the ayah. I was wearing M's blue sweater to fend off the chill.

Before dinner came out, I was on the veranda with one of the men. We talked, leaning against the veranda's side wall, looking in through the closed sliding glass doors. The girls (American/Norwegian, Danish/English and Finnish/Belgian)---with their delicate blond hair, like little elves in their cozy pajamas---were playing underneath the dining table. They were slinking under the chairs and disappearing behind the table's legs and emerging again. It reminded me of fish swimming through underwater castles.

Something crashed (muted through the doors), a wine glass, out of our view. The other guest swooped up the baby. The girls were guided back under the table. The hostess came out of the kitchen with the vacuum cleaner and after that with a box of salt. I gathered, in the back of my head, the wine must have spilled on the couch.

We were talking about aid in Africa---is it pointless? We were talking about the Kenyan government's sometimes stiff approach to aid. We were talking about our role as individuals, our conflicts of living here. We talked about Mia Farrow and her terming the Olympics in China "the genocide games", we talked about Darfur. We talked about the Rwandan government, and then the embassy bombs in 1998. We were sneaking a cigarette on the veranda and watching the beauty of the people we love moving about silently. The light was dim inside. With the fire and the clean girls and the dinner about to be served, I felt the warmth of a Christmas eve. Then it was time for dinner, and we rejoined the party. 

cultivate your contentment

"You must have seen this over and again in your life: it's when you are free of selfishness that the harvest of contentment appears. It's when you are not thinking of yourself in a selfish way that you experience the tender shoots of contentment growing inside your heart."

                                                         Swami Chidvilasananda
                                                          The Yoga of Discipline

turn out the lights

Yesterday at about 3:30, dark clouds gathered. The sky grew heavy, purple, truly threatening. Kenyans who don't have cars---Kenyans who own just one pair of shoes---are very aware of imposing thunderstorms. Women carrying bundles of sticks on their head pick up their pace; men walking two hours home from work start jogging. The sky grows darker, and darker. Kenyans with cars leave work early (in the rain, the traffic becomes unbearable). A nervousness infiltrates the air. A scurrying. The staff rush around closing windows and pulling things inside. The sandbox is closed, the rabbits are secured, the laundry brought in from the line. You can almost feel the weight of the sky about to break.

When the rain starts, it is swift and relentless. Within moments there are moats around each bush in the yard, the gutters are overflowing, the planted pots too. One step to the car from the door and I am drenched. My heart suffers for those caught out in the rain, those who have another hour to walk home, to arrive drenched and chilled to a room without heat or a fireplace or hot water. I give Evans another 100 shillings and make him promise to take matatu home. He might. I doubt it. The fares triple in the rain, and he's voraciously saving every shilling to build a house upcountry.

Inevitably when the rains are like this, like last night, the power goes out. Inevitably it's when the three year old is tired and cranky and pulling out every trick she knows to make her mum insane. A Winnie the Pooh dvd would take the edge off, but that's not an option now. Inevitably, the babe hasn't had his bath, and the water heater hasn't been on long enough to assure hot water. Inevitably, M. has just called to say he'll be working late.

When the power goes, my first reactions are irritation, frustration and a little fear. Two tired children without the distraction of a warm bath or tv? Two tired children and no distractions, in the dark? Panic! Panic!

After the panic, I remember that I'm the mom. If I don't get the candles out, no one will. I think about Little House on the Prairie and get inspiration from that. I find the lanterns. I light a few candles. Lighting candles is a spiritual act! The fear ebbs a little. The candlelight in the living room is soft and calming. The kids don't try to leave our circle of light, there's nowhere to go beyond it. We sit together, they play with electric lanterns and little flashlights. I think, I want to read. But I can't so I put the desire aside. I think, I want to write an email! Make dinner! Start the bath! But I can't, so I put it all aside. I resign myself, and I have accepted a night of darkness. Now there are no distractions. There is no "I want I want I want...". The girl knows that when the power is out, there are no options. The babe responds to the peace around him, he plays with the blocks and the lantern. It's peaceful. Last night, the girl listened to me read two chapters of Alice in Wonderland, without pictures. My throat hurt from reading aloud that long.

There is a depth of silence that is remarkable when the power fails. The humming appliances---the refrigerator, the stereo, the water heater, the computer, even the lights---are like stones now. A peace settles in the brain, a resignation. The children grow naturally, peacefully, tired. After reading by candlelight, they go to bed with ease. There is no buzzing in the living room to distract them, there is no energy to excite them... not even the smallest energy of a burning light bulb.

Every night that the power fails, I want to write to my friends with children and beg them to try this at home. Turn off the main switch just after dinner---everything must go. Pretend it's real. It's scary----not because of monsters and ghosts, but because of ourselves. The first few minutes, maybe even half an hour, will be truly uncomfortable. It's scary to be together without sports or news buzzing in the background on tv, or music or telephones or email or cooking or movies. But after a few minutes, you'll find out how great you are. And everyone looks better by candlelight.

Short Talk on Old Life

Paris, 2003. April or May or June, on a Sunday late afternoon. Having left my friend at the rail station, I came out of the metro to the sun after a weekend of rain. She was returning to London. I would return to Uganda the next day. She was just married, I was not married yet. For two days we had sat in various cafes, under various awnings, drinking wine and coffee and talking about everything as far back as boarding school, as far back as summers on the island and winters in New York. Coming out of the metro, I was fully tristesse, empty heart, sunken and lonely.

I would go to the Louvre, but I passed it instead, passed the glass pyramid and continued to the Tuileries Gardens and then kept walking along the Champs Elysees---under the most oxygen-drenched trees, past huge statues memorializing World War II or the Armenian genocide, the air crisp and cool, passing not many people strolling by and once an old man on a bench. The wet grass and flowers, and the Seine sparkly. I crossed a bridge past the Arc de Triomphe and returned, the mood, naturally, light by now. The everything better now. I had dinner in a cafe, I sat by myself as I had done for many years before in New York and elsewhere. I was reading a book, Black Dogs. There was a jazz band playing, and an older American couple sitting next to me, professors from a University, traveling in sneakers to cover much Parisian ground (they apologized, we laughed). 

Then it was the next morning, and I took a train to Heathrow in London and flew back to Kampala that night. M. met me at the airport. The dogs jumped up on me when I returned to the house. It was humid and tropical and another world entirely. In a few months, I would be pregnant and married, and even happier. I haven't had dinner alone since.