Meditations
One shoe was moderately clean but the other encompassed in thick, sienna, slithering muck. She sat contemplating it. She was tired, the syrupy sludge of exhaustion drudgingly seeping through her veins. To proceed home meant questions, multitudes of inane ponderings and gossip. Her patience had waned, her resolve diminished, her bright, sculpted smile grown paper-thin. If only she could lose herself in this seamless niche of solitude, complacently flattened against bleached granite with the soothing murmur of moving water ebbing through her thoughts, blotting out the loneliness, erasing the pessimism.
It was so easy to fall in love with Africa here, as great blue herons dipped from the sky nesting into the radiating water: to watch the sun dazzle and reflect infant fish slithering through the shallows or feel the humid breeze as it played with slender stems of water plants.
Here, it was simple to forget the unclean children, pitifully thin, rummaging through rubbish to claim a discarded can as this afternoon’s plaything. Here, it was simple to let go of the frustration of the day, the anger that only 8 teachers were at school to teach 900 children, while the rest were off interviewing for jobs of higher authority and responsibility, regardless of the fact that their own students were desperately behind due to inattention. Here, it was easy to want to stay, give up your soul to a goal that, at best, could only be moderately accomplished.
Yet, at some point she would have to stand up and face the realism. Hiding in a twenty-foot chasm was impossible; unless she planned on drinking infested water and eating worms: a village temptation she hadn’t given into yet. Eventually she would walk away to the role that she now played: an actress- always patient and forgiving, always pausing, always dropping her own activities to listen to melodramatic sufferings; but for now she would hide, and as always in hiding, she would allow her true feelings, attitudes, and being a few minutes to romp around and be itself.
It was so easy to fall in love with Africa here, as great blue herons dipped from the sky nesting into the radiating water: to watch the sun dazzle and reflect infant fish slithering through the shallows or feel the humid breeze as it played with slender stems of water plants.
Here, it was simple to forget the unclean children, pitifully thin, rummaging through rubbish to claim a discarded can as this afternoon’s plaything. Here, it was simple to let go of the frustration of the day, the anger that only 8 teachers were at school to teach 900 children, while the rest were off interviewing for jobs of higher authority and responsibility, regardless of the fact that their own students were desperately behind due to inattention. Here, it was easy to want to stay, give up your soul to a goal that, at best, could only be moderately accomplished.
Yet, at some point she would have to stand up and face the realism. Hiding in a twenty-foot chasm was impossible; unless she planned on drinking infested water and eating worms: a village temptation she hadn’t given into yet. Eventually she would walk away to the role that she now played: an actress- always patient and forgiving, always pausing, always dropping her own activities to listen to melodramatic sufferings; but for now she would hide, and as always in hiding, she would allow her true feelings, attitudes, and being a few minutes to romp around and be itself.
posted by Cait at 1:22 PM
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