on the difficulty of understanding

when words, spoken in a language other than your own, grow in the midst of my ability to understand them, the exhaustion of understanding replaces the complacency in not and the weariness in being so nihilistic.

the unarguable fact, sorry nihilists of the world, is that it does matter, and the intricate web of human experience and symbols into which we are placed is a marketplace of activity. and we are all sellers of matooke, groundnuts, sugar cane strapped to bicycles, sweet potatoes in a wheelbarrow and roast maize by the roadside. the language we share in transactions revolves around relationship, you to me, you and me to land, and all of it to God, who is riding a bus through the market, face pressed against the glass. then, stepping down and walking among the piles of tomatoes and eggplants are means of participation in the vastness of our arranged human experience.

instead of watching the sky and hoping that it will end, why don't we gather around the dinner table, after having prepared ugali and matooke, smothering all of it in groundnut sauce? why mercilessly count down the days until a nation-state makes a pact with another nation-state and ushers in the apocalypse when there is food to be given to those without and tables to be shared beyond our understandings? after all, we are all probably wrong. wrong about the way it will end and wrong about when it will happen.

so, let's go beyond our wrongness and dwell with God in the marketplace of human experience, trading, speaking and savoring the goodness of food grown on hillsides of the villages away from town. and instead of misconstruing metaphors into elaborate systems to explain the way in which the world will end, let's understand that in its ending, it matters what we do until then and it can be a life of pineapples whose sweetness runs from the corners of your mouth and down the chin.

the temporality of earth is a means to its beauty, but it does not justify its dismissal