Rebounding in the Big Sky

Sitting in the back of the taxi van bumping along pot-holed, congested, polluted Jinja Road, beat-up cars and disheveled lorries and sagging taxi vans running past each other and bodas lining the road’s edges, I stared out the window into the grey afternoon, thick equatorial clouds squeezing the dark green hillsides. I had grown accustomed to the route having traveled often between Lugazi and Kampala, I knew all the rest stops, the speed bumps, the markets, the shanties. Watching the world rush by, the world now familiar, but lingering in the back of my mind, soon again to be foreign, I withdrew inwards, daydreaming, listening to my Ipod.

Big sky
I’m gonna hurt you
Big sky
you’ll remember this
Big sky
up above the rain
How can I ever put a stop to it
look you in the face again?

How could I stop? Where did I restart? Why was I feeling so disconnected? No, I knew, I knew: the uncertainty of my projects and the thieves trying to destroy them, the lingering strangeness of my surroundings and the impending shift from it. I was about to reemerge, about to surface from dark, cool waters back into my old comfortable life, entering a strange vortex of the familiar and foreign and what was once one would then, poof, become the other and it would be confusing and maybe a bit upsetting and all the while I was acclimating, readjusting to life as I had known it for decades before I would be thinking how are my projects going? what about the kids? but then how long would I think that 15,000 miles away; I might as well be on another planet as it certainly was a different world. I was drifting, losing sight, feeling worn and muddled.

When I’m breathing
When I’m sleeping
I can’t think of nothing else
All my longin'
All my waitin'
All the things you never felt
All weepin'
All my wailin'
All my standing on the shelf
How am I ever going to get through this
back to myself again?

I stared into the fields, the workers dotted along the hillsides, digging as they did everyday; I watched the vendors along the street side carrying baskets of fruit on their heads, pushing their wares as they did everyday; most here are without much choice as to what they do, performing their daily tasks without mind of the monotony; maybe there was assurance in the routine, maybe they felt grounded in the certainty of their habits.

But where was my center? What was holding me, what was holding all this together? I stared through the grimy taxi window dust and exhaust blowing in my face, looking into the billowing clouds masking the huge blue sky beyond and continued to listen.

Won't you say it isn't so?
Watch me fallin'
See me fallin'
I slipped through
the vortex of the sky
Darkness and light
That’s what’s inside
Darkness and light
It’s what’s inside

And in listening I recalled. I recalled what I already knew; what I had known all along. I just had to remember what I had forgotten…

The sky is limitless; a void of light and dark. Stretching as far as our imaginations, it reflects possibilities existing within all of us; a potential and nature revealed faintly in lives of want, and starkly in crushing need. I anticipated watching it vibrantly within others Here, but within myself….what will I do faced with the novel and unknown?

I wrote the above paragraph last spring, just a few weeks into my African stay, questioning who I would be when confronted with then unknown challenges while spending months on unfamiliar terrain; yes, within all of us is incredible potential for darkness and light falling across the span of our lives filled with endless possibilities in what we experience and encounter, and the one certainty in all the uncertainty is choice: how will you respond? Which will you be? Darkness or light?

The last couple of weeks and their corresponding blog entries have been the dark sequel to my story, the sort of Godfather II to my saga. Weighted and disappointed, bruised and disgusted, I entered the dimmest hours after months of slowly walking away from the light. I felt everyone around me to be suspicious, a society fat with poverty and corruption forces you to be untrusting, and my particular circumstances absolutely required me to be calculating and dubious, but in guarding your interests, in protecting yourself and that which you hold dear, you cannot forget the good, you cannot forget those around you who are honest and faithful and inspiring because then you are no longer a little bit of light, darkness has taken over.

In remembering this, in considering all this while staring out the taxi van, pollution and dirt whirling from passing trucks obscuring the peaceful emerald green horizon, I recalled a conversation that I am sure never to forget. A young American woman and I were speaking some months back about the extraordinarily unscrupulous things people will do here in the land of the have-nots: stealing from family members, leveraging disabled children, using charity for personal enrichment, etc. Then the hippyish teenager donning African jewelry and a long flowing dress, dirty feet and unkept hair whimsically said, “I love them even though I can’t trust them.” I watched her dance across the room after she said it, staring hard at her, I am sure my face furrowed in confusion, unable to decide if it was one of the stupidest or most profound things I had ever heard.

But in the months that I’ve been here I’ve come to realize it doesn’t much matter which you think the statement is, naive or compassionate, sophomoric or philosophical, childish or selfless, it is just true: here you learn to love people even if you can’t trust them, here you learn to love the darkness as well as the light; in a word you learn forgiveness.