Exhale.

Remembering is weird because sometimes it’s wrong.  Well, wrong may not be the right word, but… inaccurate.  The best example I can think of is summer camp.  I’ll be looking through old pictures: scaling rock walls, kayaking down the Royal Gorge, smiling with tan cheeks and tangled hair, and I think, “Well, summer camp was the coolest time of my life EVER.   I was doing the coolest things in the world, without a care in the world, and my teeth look so WHITE.” 

And that gets to be true, that’s how you remember it.  Until you find your old camp journal.  And you realize that you were homesick and sunburned and had lost your shoe, you didn’t like the smell of the tent and you were lonely and there were mosquitoes in your s’mores and you don’t even like s’mores and as a matter of fact, summer camp was not how you remembered it all.  In fact, it sounds kind of crappy.

I made myself become very, very aware of the summer camp phenomenon before I arrived back in Cape Town.  I rehearsed over and over in my mind that the romance of a night without electricity, the mysterious edge of rough streets, the appeal of standing out, may not really be all as sexy as I remember.  The newness and excitement will have faded.  Life will be more… well, more like real life.

But I can say that I as my plane began it’s descent just a few days ago, and Table Mountain came into view, I felt that excitement again.  The fog hung low and clung to the rocky tops, the sky was blue and the sunlight was much more yellow than it ever is in the States.  My heart raced and I wrung out my hands repeatedly because that fog and that light and that mountain felt wildly like home.  And the country smelled just how I had remembered:  like gasoline and warm skin and that smell was as familiar as my own hands. 

But familiar can turn into monotonous if you look at it the wrong way.  Riding the mini bus with 25 of your new closest friend can easily change from exhilarating to frustrating.  Buying electricity vouchers changes from hilarious to expensive.  Happiness can’t be based on the newness and the excitement anymore.  It has to have its roots in something different. 

So, I suppose the contentment or the joy that I have found thus far on my journey has different origin and a different feel then what it was for the first take of Africa.  It’s more of a calmness, a peace this time around.  A feeling that maybe things aren’t new or exciting but they still are beautiful.  They may not be as loud, as bright, as colorful, as they were when I first felt this African life, but they will still change me, shape me, help me understand how to…become. 

And I guess it makes sense that it is in this sort of calm and in this sort of peace that people begin to understand. It can’t be in the hectic waterfall jumping, elephant riding, adventure quenching, love falling life that I experienced first time around.  It has to be found in the realizations, the alterations, the clarifications.  If there is anything I have learned from being a yoga instructor, it’s this: you can’t spend your whole life on the inhale.  Sometimes, you need a full out exhale to really understand where you are. 

Back to Africa Movement

This is approximately hour nine of sitting in the Heathrow airport.  Hour six of being fairly awake and coherent and about hour three of being supremely caffeinated.  This is also hour one of attempting to write again after leaving Africa.  I suppose some of  this lack of words is due to tremendous amount of school work.  They get you in year three of your undergrad degree; college got hard. (Part of that could be due to the fact that my major was Finance once again and no longer Contemporary African Dance.)   

But, other than being busy, my fingers didn’t feel like typing.  They didn’t feel like telling or explaining or being insightful.  Mostly, my brain felt confused and unsettled at what had happened in Africa, how it had changed me as a person, how I was different now than I was before I came, where my life was taking me knowing what I now know and seeing what I had seen.   I guess I didn’t really process my experiences the way that I needed to.

I realized pretty recently that I had a choice to make.  I could take what I had felt and experienced and tasted and breathed in Cape Town and call it all a neat portion of my life.  A cool adventure that I escaped from unscathed, and keep a few photos to show the grandkids.  I could tell them about how I used to live in Africa and how I rode an elephant or had to lock the car doors so baboons wouldn’t get in.  The kids would love that stuff.  And there would be nothing wrong with allowing that to be the extent of my African journey.  But I wouldn’t have been true to myself if that is all the influence I allowed Africa to have over me.

So then, there was the second option.  I go back.  All Marcus Garvey style, back to the Motherland, 3 different flights, 14 hours of layovers, and a 3 day solo journey.  Sort of my own personal Mecca: I go back to Cape Town and try and gain a better understanding of what I am doing in this life.  Why I feel such a pull here and what I am supposed to learn, do, grow from. 

Those who know me a little or know me a lot would realize I chose the latter of these two options.  I am returning to Cape Town for a few weeks.  To do some soul wandering, and then some soul searching, and maybe, ultimately, some soul understanding.  If I come out of here more confused than ever, than well, that’s ok.  Because I would rather know I tried to understand than dismissing what seemed silly at the time.  I guess we will all always live with what ifs in our lives, but I don’t want this to be one of those what ifs.

My rash decision making has undoubtedly given my loved ones back home a headache over this whole thing.  No one wants someone they care about 9000 miles away.  And if I could incorporate an apology for the stress and a thank you for the understanding into one phrase it would be a “thankology” and I would seal it on the heart of everyone who loves me.

I will be home soon, and I will be home stronger.  But when Mama Africa calls, you answer.