16.9.07

On containing the Unknown

What I want to do is sit on the roadside, watching overcrowded matatus taking people from one place to another, making sense of those in the market they pass. I want to sit in another rainy afternoon, as Kampala washes away, collects in the valleys between her hills and her watery life gathers as a river. And, I want to ride that river from one end to another, making a raft with my friends from tin rooves and mattresses, jerrycans and soda bottles. And, all of us, taking the river from the valleys to the lake.

There, we could go on to Jinja, take the lake into the river and make our way down the Nile. We will navigate all that way, traversing the rapids, diving the falls. We'll make one a look out atop a crow's nest! And, there in all our fashioning we'll have one who calls out for falls while we portage around, cutting bushpaths through malarial forests.

A crew of equals making our way down the Nile, eventually to Egypt, were we will deposit ourselves along with silt from Murchison Falls into the Mediterranean Sea. Taking a warm bath on the Egyptian shore. Then, splashing in the sea! This is what we have from a day's worth of rain: a river to a lake to the River to the Sea.

And, in being lost, we make sense of what we don't know. In being lost, we know the Unknown and the sky that belongs as it empties itself into the valleys.

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