On the walk yesterday morning I went to the river, to the lake shore, and found a full five minutes slightly hidden by the reeds, smelling like maple syrup, of all things. Pale greens. Fluttering of a small bird from reed clump to reed clump, their variable attractions indistinguishable to me. New light on water. Old light. The hand-dug canoes – called pirogues in French but the word feels better anyway, feels necessary to name this floating creation differently from the image of the Land's End fisherman – black dashes on the receding foreground.
By the river the women bathed, or carried laundry, or filled the plastic jerrycans with water neither saline nor sweet. From the reeds this far back, all that could be seen of them were clusters of forearms and swaying heads that rose above the tips of the green curtain, the necks and outlines of their bodies blurred by the embrace of a dawn sun.
Eventually found; it is the way. New bud girls, the chattering flock age, who skipped like a crush was close but did not hush the same way. Courage in gender alike. And a few small ones from the neighborhood who knew my name and called it with surprising accuracy, the middle part so usually lost in translation but someone here had got it right; and the others listened.
I am in love. With a white-washed room bare but for a camping cot and desk and chair. A mat of reeds cut into strips, the one for a hammock shelf suspended from the rafters, the other for sticks to frame the mosquito net. And two mis-matched fabric curtains, yellow and a green. And a single backpack suitcase that serves as well for storage.
With half buckets to shower every two days, or even each if you so desire, and with the bar of soap that smells like laundry.
With the same six cups and plates. And metal a delight.
With concrete floors called luxury.
With mangos for dessert. And spaghetti noodles as the ultimate surprise.
With all that is made re-fabricated and re-named, re-used and re-cycled, until by all agreements it returns to bits and pieces, and to its smallest divisible unit.
It is so much enough. How can I otherwise explain?
Extra, even.
All needs assuaged. And hope left room to grow, expand and breathe.
But the knowledge that we could have more is of course a pillow for anxiety: to muffle and to hush.
And still. Yet. Sometimes you need a holding hand to lean over the edge that very first time and feel that even you, small one...could jump.
It is not so far as you imagined.
How letting go you find yourself embraced by something greater; a chorus of agreement; a jet-stream of truth; that pulsing life within you and without.
All that you ever set out by the light of day to find, one pilgrim on the dusty path of groundless hope. The sun. The light. The shortness between the day and night and how darkness can no longer be named the enemy, because you are in it together, anyway, and cannot separate what frightens from what builds. A strange encounter. Surprising friend.
How you never knew you could reach the limit and then look over and see that the edge of the world was yet the beginning of another; how endless is your capacity: for love, for hope, for reaching past yourself.
For lifting up again, and wondering...
It must be this that they call faith?
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