...some of my recent writings...

3.12.12 Ruaha National Park
And I know why this day was brought to me to live.  Or perhaps it was that I was ushered toward this day to live it.  I lived perhaps the most beautiful day of my life - the sights I saw today can only be aptly described using EE Cummings' words: 'Everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes!' I saw mountains in the distance that were blue, purple, and beginning to block a descending red sun.
Oh my goodness, the beauty I was permitted to see today!  And the great joy I have in using these beautiful words to describe it!  During our evening safari, I was struck by how beautiful the people around me are.  And even though we seemed out of place in the midst of these open plains, we somehow fit so perfectly - creation in creation,and both looked overwhelmingly beautiful.  We turned off the vehicles to watch foxes at one point, and I sat there, palms open, listening to the powerful stillness that coursed through me - and I felt that this was the sound of peace.  The whole day the engines and sound of the road had stopped up the background, but for a few brief moments all I could hear was stillness - the plains of Africa as the Lord must hear them.  How powerful, healing, and majestic is this silence.  For it is not an absence of sound, but the filling of something most wonderful and natural, and holy.  The mountains here, the yellow and purple wild flowers that are only great proof that the Lord is Beauty - I saw the clouds and the flowers, and the flashes of color from birds taking flight as signs of how majestic an artist and creator the Lord is - everything about today was holy and deeply majestic.
 And as the trees faded to black sillouetes and Orion's Belt pushed through the clouds, my heart was screaming 'holy holy holy art thou!  For this is your creation for the day - this gentle coming on of night which was different yesterday and will be different tomorrow - and oh to know that I am your creation for eternity, and you have filled every inch of this place with beauty that hurts to take in, and yet you cherish me above all this.'

3.13.12 Ruaha Morning bird walk
I slipped through the tent's opening and walked the sand path alone.  In the morning, everything, including the river whose banks preserved the lion prints, was gold.  The wind dared not move for fear of breaking the glory of the moment, and I wrapped my waist in a kanga, feeling Africa on my skin, in the intimate spaces between my hair which fell forward into my face as I knelt in submission before the white flower which opened around as the skirt of a whirling dervish.

3.14.12 Second morning in Ruaha
I can only walk with my palms turned upwards.
Somehow my hands must be connected to my soul.
I tried to absorb the feeling of this morning,
tried to gather this holiness through my eyes,
but they would not open wide enough, could not translate
the language this ground only speaks in the mornings.
And so my palms drifted up.
The creases on them must be how it gets in -
how this morning seeped in and reached my soul,
to be stored there in the category of 'Holiness.'
For it was only when my hands turned upward and each step in this Eden
was taken in worship,
that my soul could feel creation.