Africa in Quotations...

There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.
–Diane Ackerman

This quotation from Diane Ackerman perhaps best expresses my experience of East Africa this year, 2011…breathing it into my cells where it dwelled, brewed, and then was turned loose, each of us slightly different for the encounter. For the ambiance, the atmosphere of that part of the world does stoke the furnace in the cells as it not only surrounds but passes into and through the body, mind, spirit of any Westerner who takes the time to really BE there.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself. –Alan Alda

And though Alan Alda wasn’t speaking of Africa when he wrote these words, his description is so apt…for to really be part of the African experience and allow it to be part of you, it means leaving what is known and comfortable and immersing oneself in the intuitive heart of the African continent. Indeed, the journey of discovery is wonderful…that sense of going back to one’s deepest, truest roots, the birthplace of civilization.

…if I put this off and wait until I’m older, what if I don’t make it to being older?
–Stephan Brown

Now well into my seventieth year, with birthday #70 only a few short months away, traveling to the other side of the world to work, to learn, to see, to experience things which are not only beautiful and amazing but difficult and dreadful and heart-rending may seem to some counterintuitive, especially when my “Bucket List” contains so very many places I would love to visit…beautiful places, filled with art and natural wonders, places to enrich and enliven my heart and soul, places where I would truly be a tourist, rather than a worker. But being a tourist is something I don’t do very well…simply looking and seeing is not nearly as satisfying to me as immersing myself in the culture, the people, the ethos and atmosphere of a place.

When in doubt about where you are meant to be, look down at your feet. –Buddhist saying

Perhaps these words of wisdom from Buddhist philosophy can convey some of what drew me back to Africa this summer…can convey the sense of call which has taken me across the Atlantic the past two summers with the Nyanya Project. I have just followed my feet- which were in turn following my heart.

Everything has something to teach us. The only question is, Do we allow it, or do we resist it with all our might? –Joan Chittister

Am I tired? Oh, yes…in fact, exhausted would be a far better description of the way I’m feeling right now on this last leg of the long journey home. And what I have actually learned, gleaned from this summer’s experience will not be clear for some time to come- this I know. But learn I did…meeting many new people, seeing things about which I had only read and heard, having my eyes opened wide again and again in both amazement and shock, having my senses assaulted in ways I could have not even imagined, becoming angered at injustices and ineptitudes, shedding tears of frustration and joy simultaneously…

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. –Agatha Christie

But right now, on this eighth day of the eighth month of this year 2011, I am profoundly joy-filled and thankful- that I was able to make this amazing, difficult, wonderful, terrible trip with my dear long-time friend, Mae, and my much newer friend, Mary Martin…that, whatever the future holds, I have the vivid memories of these 5 weeks to turn over in my mind and through my photos…thankful, too, to be heading home to my precious house and family and friends, to the place where my “life” will go on from day to day, the place where I will be living, glad to be alive, glad to be part of the grand panorama which is life on this planet.

…we can still leave footprints in a trail whose end we do not know. –Annie Dillard

Indeed we can, Annie, indeed we can. And who knows? Perhaps the best is yet to come?