bring on the clouds

The seven am men are the kind you’d find at McDonalds at 5:30am.  ‘I spent 24 years with my family in refugee camps.  They always let us know we were refugees.’

‘My doctor wants me to drink three liters of green tea every day.’  How do you feel?  He shrugs. 

Do you speak Russian?  No, I don’t.  Mahmoud here studied Russian in Kiev.  Mahmoud is the oldest man in the room with the fewest upper teeth and perhaps explains why people like to speak for him.  Mahoud taught political science at the university in Kandahar.  I’d like to hear him say that, nope, he can’t.  Shanti Shanti, we will figure out how you can say

“This Thursday the theater opens at three with the new thriller “Thunder Thin These, Theodore Thistle.”

There was a spirited conversation at lunch and Hanukkah was giving me a lecture on all things colitis  with accompanying pantomiming and Said Wali  told me Hanukkah wishes I understood Pashto.  I miss everything in these conversations and it is unfortunate there’ll always be that gap while I am here, but I understand when they laugh and argue hard, when one has the room and his story goes five minutes and no one says a word, then I wish I understood.

I walked up to the KS and they’ve stopped carrying pistachios and I left with nothing salty to munch on.  I’m still surprised that my food diet had no say in the matter regarding the orgins of this hernia.

Tomorrow a day off, thank you Jesus.  A day off, pray tell whats will ones do but wash clothes and continue a few things I really ought to continue, don’t forget the sunset, I’m still waiting for clouds, for some indication of change in the weather here.

10.16.15

An overcast morning, I kept looking at the clouds checking my eyes to see if what I was seeing was indeed real.  By eight thirty the sun has yet to penetrate the gray and ah, there it is as I write and it fights to be seen, how splendid and strange, such mornings are ideal for quiet contemplatives, only tweeting birds in the distance interrupt the silence.

The way we see it in mid October I have three choices regarding the direction I will take in the following year.  One is to remain here until the contract ends in July where by then I will move to my next destination.  Two is to resign in January and go to the island, the last land mass to be populated.  The third choice would be Leuven which, if this were to be my destination, would commence after the contract has finished.  The second and third choices require the paperwork, the torrential tide of documentations that leave me wishing I had a secretary.

10:26am—We’ve had city power for the two hours so I washed my undergarments and hung them on the clothesline and then strong winds blew them off the line, the smell of rain in the air, the entire sky cast in the gray foreigner matter, in such a delicious environment I finished ‘seven days in Tibet’ and perhaps the best difficult decision to ponder is which book I’ll pick up next. 

You don’t want me to go into this, do you?  A seemingly innocent coincidence does not mean I am in sync with nature.  It’s only my own observation, where is the scientific method, where is the evidence…my spirit knew but I didn’t.  One spirit, two spirits, one pretty old, one pretty young, cosmically speaking.  And I didn’t know today would be such an atmospheric shift and yet I wished for it only ten hours earlier, how does that happen, ha ha, it just makes my stitches want to come out. 

One knows when they are in sync with the environment but it’s hard to explain.  One is always longing to be in it, one is always longing to make connection, naturally speaking, with the energy that calms and sits you down.  Energy which comes, naturally, from the forest or the clouds.  The mountains, as bare as they may be, wait to be acknowledged.  The very winds expect recognition and when the smell of precipitation arrives after ten weeks of a punishing sun, wow, dude you can’t not get caught up in a rapturous welcome. 

And perhaps the coincidences can be understood then for what is man other than what is around him.  No highly cognitive brain will understand this until it knows how to remove itself from everything and learn again to listen to nothing for from nothing comes the truth.