Re-entry

“The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips…” (Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat).

Re-entry is what my friends and colleagues call it. It is the physical and emotional experience of traveling from one place in time and space to a distant land on the globe. The actual time it takes to travel the ten thousand miles from Cape Town to Seattle is usually about thirty-six hours. It feels more like travelling to the moon and back. I always feel prepared; I never am.

One would think that travelling between the two places I now call home wouldn’t cause such tension. Both contexts are familiar; I am loved in each location. I am in love with the people and landscape of both tiny dots on the planet. It is never so simple. Returning to friends and family after a year in Africa made me fraught with anxiety. However, once there I soon settled into life like sinking under my favourite childhood blanket- warm, familiar, secure, loving.

A part of me, as has been for many years now, was still in Africa though. The desire- or need- for the vibrancy of culture or the intensity of dialogue or the serenity of worn mountains and the constant drum-beat rhythm of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans continues. That crazy part of me still yearns for the vibrancy and steel-raw daily existence in Africa. I don’t know when a part of me was laid here to rest, but I am certain that pieces of me are still in Africa. As they are in Seattle. It seems incongruous, even as I think about it.

Fuller’s description is so true and real it is painful. My heart aches for the camaraderie, familiarity and comfort of my life in Seattle. I have the depth of friends there that, unfortunately, many do not know. True friends. Yet, the call of Africa was so strong that it seems in retrospect that the Cape Winds propelled me from my cosy, lovely Seattle life to the rugged tip of Africa. Apparently I was not content with cosy and familiar but in search of challenge and vibrancy in a place on the planet so near and yet so far.

However, the longing of familiarity, of hard-won relationships that are as enduring as Rainier Mountain itself also lingers. The embers of that existence also continues to burn with blue-hot heat. Arriving in the Emerald City added oxygen to the fire. Sinking back into the intensity and boisterousness of my African Life again fans the flame. The trip has made me realize one thing for certain- perhaps something I have known deep inside me for a very long time. I will never again have a singular place that I call home; my existence, my soul, my heart is forever tenuously, inharmoniously stretched between two very far places.