Dakar, Senegal

May 31, 2010

The flight from Paris to Dakar. Again on the window, sandwiched between that and a fat lady and her fat husband. As my fatigue increases my tether decreases. In fact, they were very nice, even though she coughed relentlessly throughout the flight. They were on their way to vacation in Senegal. But the real interest this flight was the view out the window. It was clear almost all the way so I could watch the landscape below and track the plane's progress on the GPS. France looked so green and bucolic. Small towns surrounded by green patchworks of fields, rivers meandering through. Each town appeared so circumscribed as though the French have not discovered (or discovered and rejected?) the idea of urban sprawl. I wanted to descend and stay in one of those villages.

Spain, of course, appeared much dryer and emptier. Then we crossed the Atlantic west of Gibralter. There the water was spotted with thousands of white dots. At first I thought they must be white caps (which didn't really make sense from our height), but then I could make out some larger vessels and realized that I was seeing a multitude of small boats in those blue waters off Spain and near the Strait of Gibralter. As the plane flew closer to Africa, the sea emptied except for one large ship, perhaps a container freighter.

But the most fascinating part to me was crossing the empty desert reaches of Morocco and then Western Sahara. It became empty desert with the most amazing formations of rock, mountain, and rivers of sand. Some of these formations looked like trees with a central trunk, large branches, with ever smaller and more ornate branchings. One becomes multiple. I can hardly think of anything more fundamentally archetypal--as though these images summed up the entire meaning of the universe. I took picture after picture out the plane window.

Dakar, Senegal

May 27, 2010

My third trip to Africa has begun. Saying goodbye to Maya. We hug by the mailbox, then she goes inside, I step into the van, my hand pressed against the glass and Maya watching and waving from behind the front door.

May 31, 2010

The flight to Paris was long. I watched the GPS display on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me, tracking our passage across Canada, Greenland, Iceland, England and finally France. The Charles de Gaulle airport was enormous, lots of shops and places to eat. I changed a little money for euros and got a Paris coffee cup for Maya and a bag of pasta shaped like les petits Tours Eiffel. I got something to eat--expensive French yogurt: so good.

That first flight was stressless, on time, adequate food, but cloud cover the whole way. I slept awhile in the airport--unlike most airports they actually had some seats without arm rests inbetween to foil tired souls. Better yet, there where wonderful foam seats and couches in a remote sunny corner where I could stretch out and actually doze awhile.

Although we had arrived in the morning, having left the afternoon before, the sun had never set, I guess because of the polar route, so my sidereal clock had already taken a beating and I had entered that weird timeless, dateless state of being inbetween places. Such is travel.

two insights

Two insights. I complain that I cannot feel the presence of god, that my prayers seem rote. But it occurred to me that I always allow the world to overwhelm my time and space, not to mention my heart and mind, with its multiplicity, all the good and bad of it. If I want to feel god I will need to make a space and a time, just like I might make time and space to knit. So I need to make that small clear space and open, empty time and then I need to be there.

As I was walking to work, I was rehearsing where it was left with RM, his not coming to my wedding celebration and saying to me something about boundaries. As I was talking to myself, I said he was talking to me like I was 18... I realized that I am so angry with him because he fell into the parent role, accusing me of not knowing what I should know, shaming me, making me feel like I felt at 18. And it is being 18 that it seems I can never get over, how all of the present troubles play into that punishment, endlessly repeated.

Summer Reading

I am reading Martin Lings "What is Sufism" and "The Secret Teaching of Plants" by Buhner. Both books answer to a need I have to reorient myself to Islam and my religious belief. I just want to note this, to remind myself that my heart can open. As I walked to work, I felt a looseness and observant quality not present every day. The coil of a hose on the sidewalk, the ripening blackberries, the clarity of the sky. I am trying to find the presence of god in my heart and life, to have my practice of Islam come from my heart and to probe the meanings more deeply. This is something Lings does so exquisitely well and I can feel something dormant come alive in me as I read.

Just a slog

... only because we just got the computer wiped (again!) due to a certain person in the 17 yo category using certain peer-to-peer downloading sites. Well I think maturity may have moved us past that phase. Meanwhile I can't find a damn thing and I've come to rely upon said 17 yo to be my tech support. So I might hope to upload a pretty picture for the day, but can I find my pictures??? No.

Yus is planning a trip to LA. He was going to take mom back to Carmel, but we decided that we'd save that until M's spring break and all go, the better to insure that Mom returns to Seattle as promised. It makes me stop and think: Here we are making decisions for her. While she clings to the notion that she can still make her own decisions, but she really can't. Even this weekend she must have said twice how hard it is to be so old, that being old isn't for sissies. I can see that this is true and I feel it out there waiting to claim me in my turn.

So many new beginnings

So now it is 2009 and I have still not rectified my consistency in posting or anything else for that matter. But with the new year, my dear husband and dear daughter and I have weathered our immigration troubles. Yusupha will have to leave the country but we can go through the consular process and get a visa so he can return. It's uncertain how long that will take but, insha'allah, our ordeal with Homeland Security is over and we can return to our lives. So it is a new beginning.

We are going to get remarried--to renew our commitment, to bring in a wider circle of friends, witnesses, participants. It is to seal something, or maybe to close off the involvement of the government, to bind our community to us--because the whole experience was traumatic, with lawyers, agents, people inquiring into the insides of our family, a place they didn't belong. So we are starting anew. The ceremony is, for the most part, going to be simple and informal EXCEPT that I bought some beautiful fabric to make myself a beautiful dress. I'm still working on details--the date in May, reserving the community center, who to invite, who to officiate.

This weekend is Yusupha's birthday. We never really celebrate his birthday because it is indefinite: we only know that he was born sometime around now in 1964. But this year he will have a birthday dinner, cake, and at least one present. I know what he wants!!

Obama is President! Michelle Obama is first lady! This new beginning, which resonates across the land, also feels like a purely personal joy. I drank it all in--the miles of people, all the dignitaries, the music, the fashion, the seriousness of Obama and then his face split by that luminous smile. I have great hope that whatever he achieves or fails to achieve, he will bring this country back to a position of dignity and humility within the world community. I believe he too will bind us to the greater world and seal us off from the indignity and the shame of the Bush years.

I woke up to NPR's Weekend Edition this morning. I heard that Colin Powell had endorsed Obama, then fell back asleep into a dream in which I was joyfully telling everyone at work about this good news. I do alternate between joy and excitement about Obama's chances of winning the White House, and anxiety about the alternative--we've had enough disaster from the Bush Administration for the last eight hears.

I've been watching the television series "World at War" on dvd, and simultaneously reading the first volume of Ian Kershaw's book on Hitler: Hubris. It says in the book that for Hitler politics was first and foremost propaganda--that at which he so excelled. It struck me that that also define Rovian politics, in which a lie can be repeated so often, and somehow gets purchase on reality, however often the truth is told. Witness the lies that got us into the Iraq War, witness the lies like "palling around with terrorists", witness the lies about free markets being self-correcting. I so hope that we can begin to turn all of this around with an Obama presidency. He makes me so proud when he says (to paraphrase), "this has never been about me, it's about you, the people, bringing the needed change to government".

Watching the "World at War" series also makes me think about my father, who was born in 1917 and died in 1995. He was on a battleship in the Pacific, but the only thing I know about his experience during the war is that he hated it, and that they fed them mutton that was so unappetizing that they'd empty their plates overboard rather than eat it. My father was an FDR democrat and Adlai Stevenson type liberal. He taught the history of philosophy and Western Civilization at Santa Monica College. He hated Hitler and war and the killing of the Jews. Although he didn't talk about his personal experience in the Navy, he did talk a lot about the betrayal of decency and civilization that the Nazis wrought. I often think that WWII feels like a part of my life, even though I was born well after the war because of how much he talked about how fragile Civilization could be in the face of totalitarians and fanatics of all kinds. He would not have been happy with these last eight years and he would have seen in Sarah Palin the raising up of vulgarity, ignorance, and superficiality. He would have shared in the hope for Obama to be the next president.