sweetest downfall

Life is so interesting sometimes: its ebbs and flows, the themes coloring it, how there are slow bits, climaxes, a playing out you only partially control. Transformation occurs within us, but mostly unbidden I think; how you feel, the way you understand yourself, what imprisons you, your earnest needs, everything making up your internal landscape can change in an moment, unanticipated. But you have no way of knowing how long it will last. The unknowing is why our stories are dramatic, even though the actual events of a person’s life may be mundane.

(My mom hates it when I write this kind of veiled, symbolic hooha. It torments her.

"I read your last post," she states to me during a phone call.

"Ok," I reply.

"About the dream," she clarifies.

"Yeah," I rejoin.

"Is there anything you want to tell me about all that?" she inquires hopefully.

"No," I respond, like a monosyllabic teen boy.

"Oh," she sighs, deflated by the near-miss toward insight into my soul.)

Our hearts and minds experience slow transitions too, of course; but I don't think we control the changes too much. They may be welcome or cause pain. Sometimes they do both.

I went to Gorongosa National Park on Wednesday because June 25 is Mozambique's Independence Day, a holiday. Mount Gorongosa is a regionally famous holy mountain good for all types of cures and spiritual dilemmas, they say; as well as the former headquarters of RENAMO during the bloodbath of the 1970s, '80s, and early '90s. It is a beautiful landscape, despite its notoriety, and we wanted to climb it: Jenny, Joel, Sara, her friend Hannah, and myself.

As these things go, our plans changed several times and we ended up tenting Tuesday night at Sinhale, a tiny 5-hut community that Sara works with, that is situated only a few kilometers from the park entrance. I worked at the clinic until 2:30 PM, then caught a couple of chapas heading out of town and met up with the others at sunset.

Miraculous dusk when you're camping! Africa slays me for her beauty, camping frees my soul no matter where I am, and easy friendships make me silly, buoyant. I'd combined all three, so it should not have surprised me that something began stirring, a change, somewhere on my inside.

Imagine this, if you can: A distant valley, hills blue with nightfall, and drippy orange with sundown, spilling one right after another beyond sight. Woodsmoke rising. Bats now swooping. An open tin of baked beans, masaroca - field corn - set into glowing embers, chicken hot dogs on a stick, four figures wrapped in blankets, swinging their legs off the back of a truckbed, star light star bright first star we see tonight. Jokes about Joel and his harem of white girls. Crickets swelling the universe with chorus. Joy in simple pleasures.

Then our neighbors, the good folk of Sinhale, pulled out their giant marimba and asked if they might play for us.


There isn't a good way to describe a traditional Mozambican timbila. They're crafted from gourds and wood, played in rural areas where little boys learn the art from old men. Musicians stand four-abreast, sweaty from their efforts, and pound out rhythms scented with cheap cigarettes. It's amazing. Joel's photo (above) helps to visualize it, but reality is even better. Pair their melody with goatskin-covered drums, percussion (Coke cans filled with pebbles, impaled on sticks for handles) and one piercing referee whistle in the mouth of an extroverted Mozambican - and it's astounding.

Now add night.

Now add firelight.

Now add us...

I've written plenty about my life on this blog, but I'm not tempted to turn it into a public confessional booth about the particulars that reside deepest within me, hovering there sacred and covered. (Which is why, I once heard said, mankind needs poetry. Because it says what we are unwilling to.) Suffice to say, some timeless themes - righteousness, love, death - have lain heavy on me the last few weeks. They appeared from every direction, hoary albatrosses on a long journey, and came to perch on my shoulders and in my hair. Weighty creatures they, and somber. I wasn't sure how long they'd stay.

Marimba music, by utter contrast, is a cacophony of rhythms and explosions. How it works is: you stand in the dark of Sinhale, watching the players beat away the modern world, and you wonder about your own heart in its little prison. You're tired of it, so you lift up your arms and twirl in a circle because that's what makes sense. The players cheer and hoot, these African men with such muscles, such skin, so rugged. You pick up your feet, you stomp, you thrust (the music requires it), and the children watching nearby laugh, like the ding of metal triangles in elementary school choir. Their laughing is so clear, and they shimmy in front of you, shaking lissome bodies. You reach out both hands and pull others into the cloud of dust, the snakey conga line of children and adults, and you all encircle the giant timbila in the dark, stooping and stretching, faces turned to the sky. The referee whistle crescendos, in a hurry now, and sweat slides off you. You're holding the hand of a woman, a motherly young one with sagging breasts, moving in unison with her round the circle. 

You don't stop moving. Then, without even noticing, your albatross birds take flight; they extend their palatial wings, lift off your shoulders, and disappear. The noise of the rhythms, the laughing, the dancing, the clapping, the rustle of feet, the goodness of a moment mixing with mankind, the very dirt in your teeth, masks their exit. You don't expect or even realize it, not until much later, when the lightness of their absence begins to ache.

It did hurt afterward. The Sinhale men got drunk late into the night – it was a major holiday the next day - and I lay quietly inside my tent inspecting the transformation inside, feeling both softly sad and relieved. The dance and the marimba both inspired the change and consecrated it, in a time when blessing is as important as ever. It could have happened no other way, I think.

The way life proceeds, the unknowing of it, is a hopeful thing for me. I get bogged down, take life too seriously probably, but I have realized I hold a deep well of clear, cool hope inside. It surprises me every time. Changes come, for better or worse, and make the stories – all of our stories, even mine – dramatic, shifting, worth living.