peregrine by nature

not so much i couldn’t taste it. life should be fragrant; rooftop to the basement.

-bono

An old book, in my old room, by the light of a kerosene lantern.

Don’t come to Africa if you think you have nothing to learn here. Take the west with all its time saving gadgets and falsely modest claims of the workaholic and see that it is yet unsatisfied, as empty as a vacuum.
One of the Rats of Nimh on the short story, The Rat Race

“It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town- so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

…the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race”- which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race…”

all is well in your comfortable life and you cannot sleep most nights. so you move closer to the equator where the sun and the struggle knocks you flat on your back like a fallen goliath and your alarm clock is the bustle of the street waking up and an occasional early dawn riot.

Brew coffee and heat canned evaporated milk. Pour simultaneously into teacup. Add wild honey to taste.

Slice and toast baguette and slather on organic butter and marmalade, guava jam or hibiscus jelly. Or all three.

In the Bible Isaac is named as the son Abraham nearly sacrificed on Mt. Moriah and his descendants the Jews inherit Jerusalem. In the Qur’an his half brother Ishmael is the offering and his descendants the Muslims inherit the land.

The war is not over.

This is the matrix. Wake up.

A renegade soldier is loose in Goma and Gaza Strip militants fire more rockets and Russia still refuses to pull back. In Dakar we lose power, blacking out the peninsula from Point E to Almadies, and now is a good time to remember your physics, in this universe true darkness does not (yet) exist, only varying levels of light. In any conflict or cave or refugee camp, even if your eyes can’t make them out, there are particles of luminescence. Hold on to that and have faith.

It’s true that no man is an island. Islands are feminine.

Île de Gorée sits 1 kilometre off the coast of Dakar, 17 minutes by ferry boat.

Attaya, or gunpowder tea is strong, sweet tea served in tiny glassfuls in a 3 round ritual. Water is boiled on a fuurnu with a small packet of tea leaves and a full kas of sugar, each round with added sugar to symbolize the growing sweetness of friendship. Or, alternatively, the first bitter round is for life, the second for friendship and the third is the sweetest, for love. The tea is poured impossibly high from kas to kas, up to a two foot arc without spilling a drop. This creates delicious foam. Return warga to fuurnu and bring back to a boil. Serve scalding hot. Second and third rounds add mint.

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.
–CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet