Reminder

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it , not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment..."

--Joan Didion
Commencement address at University of California,
Riverside, California, 1975

In Maskalyk, James, Six Months in Sudan: a young doctor in a war-torn village, Anchor Canada, 2010.


I remind myself of this quote as I approach the end of this dream. Many times since I have come, I have been invited to step through the dream -- to see something that is greater than the adventure of coming to Senegal for a month and working on a project that I see as worthwhile.


There have been and will be still this week many long moments of doing nothing that feels particularly worthwhile, of doing nothing at all, of experiencing frustration of plans that do not work.., of feeling fearful as I struggled with eating difficutlies.... But there have also been many lasting moments- jewels- of intimacy with people, of spirit to spirit communication, of knowing that I am doing what I see to do no matter the consequences that I cannot control, of taking risks and seeing myself move forward in my quest for transparency and self-acceptance-- my quest to comprehend what it means to acknowledge my ordinariness and in this find my true power. 




And there are the experiences I did not expect at all: learning a little more about the Black American experience, the converted Black American Muslim experience, sharing with a gorgeous 16 year old Senegalese girl  our mutual insecurities about our skin color, learning about the experience of a Senegalese Wolof woman marrying into a family from the Casamace -- and her first arduous years proving to her in-laws that she could work and take part in home duties and she triumphed and is now honored by her in-laws, learning about a Senegalese mans experience with retirment at 52 and finding meaning in his days, seeing a little of the world of the young talabe boys begging for a living as they complete their religious studies,.....  Gifts all of these openings to others experiences.

Bye for now