Dissonant Belonging

Last night, the wind was howling in a north-eastern city in the United States. Storm's coming, said the weatherman. Started with raindrops drumming softly on roof tiles as I welcomed nightfall with a mind at rest. 

Looking outside the window at the swaying trees felt soothing, melodious, and the feeling fastened a pair of studs on the feet of my mind and galloped me far out across the oceans, way out into the land of my perpetual being, my absent belonging, the place where my mind tucks itself into a pocket of unbridled comfort and elicits a feeling of euphoria I can only explain as touching God. 

Home. A place called Jangara. Up the hills of Taita where serenity lives on the branches of the trees, drips from the leaves of banana plants, rises with the fog of the morning, whistles with the rushing of the wind as it escapes the scorching of the savanna to rest on the cool of the crest up the hills, sings with each raindrop as it drums up an ancient symphony on rooftops. 

Looking down at the banana plantation in Jangara

I said to my husband: Of all the places in the world I'd rather be if I had a chariot that could transport me in a blink, I'd rather be in Jangara. A thousand times over, I'd rather be up those hills where my soul lives and has never left. I told him I don't know how it is that my body is able to find a home anywhere, but my soul insists on living somewhere else.

I've traveled into a land oceans away, found belonging among strangers, drenched foreign soil with my sweat and toil, and thrived far away from the home where my soul dwells. 

Capturing the rainbows that give applause to our belonging in the places we call home far from Home

When I'm awake to the wanderings of my soul as I was last night, I always find it playing and dancing and dreaming and resting its head on the hills of Taita, in Jangara. I may have a say in where my flesh and bones are laid to rest - and I say now that that place will be wherever it is that I breathe my last because soil is soil - but as for where my soul chooses to dance with the ancestors, I have no say in that matter. Earthly life is a dissonant belonging.

The full moon from outside mama's home shines upon the hills of Taita. In the US, they would be called mountains. They rise over 2000ft above sea level