Mujalifah's mighty musings in mirth and magnanimity

Friday, April 01, 2005

enduring reign

I'm listening for the Spirit and I'm asking her , 'now where are you and, please, where am I?' She tells me I'm not here, so I go with her.

I stepped off campus for one week in November and took a trip to the Republic.

During that week, I wrote a few lines - observations, words, confessions. I wrote down whatever I was told to write.

Line 1: "When it rains, people pay attention and are forgiven."

It was a sunny summers day (for their summers are our winters) and the land was dry. My father, sister and I had not told a soul that we were coming to the country, to be at my grandparents' 50th anniversary. We arrived, having come from the opposite side of the planet, unannounced.

Faces I had not seen for 5 years masked familiar souls that I'm afraid to say that I don't really know. We looked at each other. We said hello.

Under happy chatter, the silence between us related absence.

Sorry for abandoning you. I reassure you, I've abandoned myself.

Chatter in my uncle's home office - every man with a Castle or a Windhoek in hand. The light draws shadows under the trophies of the wild hanging on the walls. Daylight turned to darkness, a few long strokes of lightning filled the atmosphere with nitrogen, and the clouds let go. Sitting with my uncles, my dad, and myself (for I was beside myself at that time) I saw men drawn into the rain of the Spirit.

Their chatter she hushed and their protesting hearts she annointed with their own warm tears.

The rain fell hard, too hard for anyone who didn't need the forgiveness that it gave. Water collected on the rock hard soil and began to run down in any direction it could.

As for the rain, where it came from or where it was going, nobody knew or spoke about even after. For as fast as it came it was gone; nothing said. For the duration of the cloud burst nothing was said and even if something was said, it was the man beside himself that spoke.

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