Two weeks home

I am sitting at home, snug in front of a blazing fire with a warm sweater on and a scarf around my neck. I have a little bit of a cold - just enough to compel me to stay home and sit still for once. Life is quickly settling back into a routine, and the frenzied urgency of American life is taking back hold.

It's winter here, and the weather has been gloomy and overcast. I remember that once I liked this weather. I saw it as romantic and pensive; it was free license to be lazy and immobile. But right now I am thinking about Uganda's warm moist air one can just about drink, the braising equatorial sun, and the brief spontaneous baptisms of thundering rains.

I want to be practicing Rukiga (ru-chi-ga) and Luganda, learning about African history and politics. I want to be dancing with women in the village and learning how to make a new friend without sharing a common language. I want to remimber how simple life really is.

I want to live in the real world - not in a fantasy land of Toyota 2008 models, white carpets, and $300 sunglasses (or shoes, haircuts, purses, etc). The coffee we drink for $3 a cup - people in Uganda may grow the beans and earn less than $1 a day. They have HIV and malaria and worms and no clean water or electricity or health care. And we sit around discussing what the other thinks of the new Peppermint Latte at starbucks. Gross. I am not saying we're bad people, it's more that we're asleep.

We're not only asleep to the poverty and suffering - we are asleep to our immense power and capacity to change things. We simply have to decide that it is more important to bring balance to the world than it is to go on living in fantasy land. We have to realize that bringing the rest of world along would be more nourishing than the fake emotional food we consume - tv, cars, long hot showers, perfect bodies, home remodeling, dance clubs. It's not as though we even happy living here! Come on, we're miserable; spiritually malnourished; emotionally isolated.

I can't be happy - deep in my soul at peace happy - when so much of the world has so much suffering.

It's kind of like when your house is really messy, and your mind keeps stressing out about it, and you get a little paralyzed because the mess is so big that you don't even know where to start. You know how once you just START, once you start moving and cleaning and addressing the problem little by little, you start to feel more at peace.

That's how I feel, and I won't have peace until I start putting my efforts on the side of the scale to bring more balance to the world.

I feel as though sitting on a meditation cushion seeking spiritual awakening, and "taking care of myself" with expensive massages is not going to set my soul free. I feel like sitting still in meditation and listening to my breath simply allows me to percieve ever more clearly the hurt that exists in the world. The more I "treat myself" with pedicures, and shopping trips the more lost I feel.

In Africa I felt connected to life again, and now that I am home I feel like things are not right and they won't be quite right again until I get back.