all the clouds blew away

I was sitting here on a dark Sunday evening, listening to Cake's cover of "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps", halfheartedly catching up on paperwork,  being quiet, stuck in my own head. I was pondering how I am becoming more selfish, not in a nebulous, human-condition way but in a concrete and embarrassing sort of way. I know this because I just snuck into my bedroom and retrieved 9 Teddy Grahams from an enormous birthday package my sister mailed me. I keep this treasure trove under my bed due to lack-of-storage space, but doing so adds an element of furtive secrecy when I access it.

There I was, Teddy Grahams clutched in my palm, Sara chatting with Lois in the office, and as I slipped past them I purposely kept my fist out of sight. The evil which consumed my being in that moment was: "I hope they don't hear me eating these, because I don't want to share." 9 rotund little bears, I don't want to share them?

Earlier in the day, a person with whom I find it difficult to converse but who has a tremendous need to talk, plopped down in front of me and I may as well have been Stalin. Which might've be okay if it hadn't been the 231st time I responded that way to him.

These are just two examples of my worst, tiniest self. Many campfires of greed burn within me.

So I was sitting thinking dark thoughts about the depravity of my soul and then I clicked on Sara's blog to see if she'd written anything lately. And in a twinkling, the sticky polluted muck in my head evaporated.

We just got back from a week and a half down south on the coast, a few days at a place called Tofo, but mostly in a languid, faded beachtown called Vilankulos, a place high on tourist listings for Moz but one where it is not actually possible to purchase soft-serve ice-cream. Anywhere. Mozambique is pretty wretchedly poor, but that's only if you think of these things in economic terms. I can't. There is an unadorned generosity in the essence of Moz, especially in its willowy coastline, which is a loooong drip rolling toward the tip of Africa. When you're nestled on a wooden veranda at night, feet up, sitting beneath an incandescent heaven, drenched in the Milky Way, all those foreign constellations of the southern hemisphere, and the surf is just a single hazy line in front of you, and there's the outline of palm trees swaying in drunken pleasure, and the sound of the wind, and the pulse of the earth...

There's no room for miserly thoughts in such beauty. There, our souls are cleansed, for a moment.


If I could choose just a couple of photos to represent all I really want to be, which touch on the expansive-me, not the puny-me, that begin to sum up my hopes and laughter and gladness, these might be them.

I love the dorky hats they gave us to wear on the dhow. I love the bright purple boat on an emerald sea. I love my rainbow-colored favorite tank top ever. I love BFF and her walking-wounded beauty.


I am still, on this Sunday-in-Chimoio moment, wearing that shell necklace, which is something I made in Tofo. First I found the peculiar circle shell, when Rebekah and I rambled up an empty beach, then some discarded fishing line, and lo - I had a rough-and-tumble necklace which makes me happy. I find myself fingering it throughout the day, like prayer beads. It is comforting, oddly.

There is something about ocean water, for me, too. I vaguely alluded to this once: one summer in South Africa, the heavy blanketing privacy and frothy, mysterious disquiet of what's under the waves, the physical exhaustion of learning to scuba dive, the electricity of salt air and wind, straggly wet hair.

In Marilynne Robinson's incredible book Gilead, the Reverend John Ames talks a lot about water. Rebekah borrowed this book from Marina for our trip, said it was wonderful, and then I began to read it too, before she had gotten halfway through. It's the sort of book that makes you speechless.

At the end of his life, Ames reflects in a letter to his young son:

[After telling a story about baptizing a litter of barn kittens as a child]

"I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. ...

Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, 'Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this, its natural character, it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance.' Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant. But he is marvelous the subject of joy, and also on its religious expressions. ...

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don't know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it. ...

You and your pal Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did just look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

Being by and in the ocean blesses me too. I don't know why, but it does. I grew up about as far from the sea as you can get, though where I lived the land was bursting with forests and lakes (and one very Great Lake, which mimicks the ocean but retains glacial beauty of its own). I do love swimming in a lake, the coolness of it, the green. Something I discovered growing up, and in traveling since, is that I am most at ease in myself, most unburdened with the wrong voices, most simply free in feeling, in natural bodies of water - rivers, lakes - but especially in the ocean. (This was perhaps foreshadowed by my obsession with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a girl. I have read it at least 12 times.)

Tofo.

Only a few months after I came to Mozambique, in another life almost, I wrote to a friend:

Can't believe you are so close to the end of the school term. Am happy for you. Wish we could take a celebratory dip in the Indian Ocean here: sit in the low tide as I did yesterday, alone, beneath a domed, endless blue sky, immense as the plains, scooping the muddy wet sand out, digging deeper and deeper beneath the waves to cover myself in it, until I am as dark as these people around me. Using the sand to scrub roughly at the length of my legs and arms, harder and harder, until all the old skin rubs off and the new skin pulses pink and raw, my own mud bath. Submerging the muddy parts of me, over and over, back into the water, letting each new succession of waves hit me chest level, falling backwards, chuckling to myself, sand in my hair, whipped by the wind, eyes burning from salt, watching dark young men - barefoot, in shorts - shout, run, turn endless backflips, their football game just up from me on the beach, with four craggy tree branches stuck in the sand to mark their goalposts. They leave en masse, para almoca, for lunch, slapping each other's sweaty sinewy backs, singing radio songs and laughing. The beach grows quiet. I lay down completely, spread-eagle on my back and bob up and down in a planet of blue, or grey, or white, listening intently to the sound of the ocean, its murmurs and crescendos, so I can lift my head two inches up when the next wave hits, sparing myself a sputtering noseful of saltwater. An impossibly skinny boy, in a little-boy body so tight and perfect and African, naked, runs along the beach, and throws himself in the waves beside me. With the sun behind him, squinting bright, I can see only his outline - until he grins at me. Then I can see his teeth, and they alone, which makes me laugh again.

Further out in the waves there are men dragging nets, as they do every morning, two by two, pacing side by side in chest-deep water. Crude sailboats jostle about on the near horizon, made of rough-hewn tree trunks and fragments of cloth, like toy canoes in the big giant ocean, each carrying a trio of fishermen, moving about, at the mercy of the sea. I breathe it all in and give thanks. I paddle myself back closer to shore, then walk and sit where the tide merely laps at the sand before sliding back to join the enormous whole. The water there lingers, and so is warmed by the sun; there you can enjoy the most wonderfully warm bath you'll never find in any Mozambican home. I flip over on my stomach, resting my cheeks on my forearm, face turned outward toward distant mountainous clouds, eyes closed, and feel in the warmth and wetness and massage of the receding water God's love for us. The next day - today - the white sand is still in my hair and armpits, in the creases of my body, my toes, my elbows. I pick it out, brush the grains off, and smile only to myself, savoring the memory, hidden, for moments when coworkers turn away, attending to office matters.

Heavenly day.