a beginning

I stop to write my first entry in a long awaited blog while exiting the jungles of newly formed Zaire (modern day Congo) that are filled with death and new love, to discuss my existence and my life. In my temporary respite from the despair of survival and the damnation of a Baptist preacher in Congo, 1961, where Barbara Kingsolover’s The Poisonwood Bible has recently kept me captive, my thoughts are clouded with the continuum of death and life and the existence of love and even faith. I must apologize for the morbidity of those thoughts, but if I am to begin a blog, which I appear to be doing, it will be from where I am in life and not one step ahead or behind. You are open to reading or ignoring, to listening or even to hiding within these words, or to not reading at all. Frankly I cannot decide that these words are even legible, but they are from my heart, and hence they will choose to grace this page and some space in your thoughts if you give them leave.
While my thoughts find themselves dialoguing the goodness of live, both here in the present and in the far away and distant Congo, my existence discusses a different parable. I sit in the basement of a home owned by long family friends and contemplate my summer here in Winnipeg. My hope is that it will contain no more death than perhaps that of a grandfather far away in California who has lived long, good and well. And also, that my summer will contain no more love than that of family and friends, for I do not think my heart could contain a romantic interest. But as for goodness and despair, I do not begin to hope. They will come as they do and only God can guide me through them.
And so, my blog, perhaps unlike most of yours, will dialogue with my thoughts through all the goodness and despair, and look at liminal space, or becoming time, in ways that may go over my head, but may hopefully leave a blessing in yours. I have no illusions about my writing. I know that most of this is nonsensical and it is my bet that it will continue to be so. However, in the words of my mother, who finds herself dialoguing with poverty and hope in N’Djamena, Chad, this “nonsense is another side of the real but in a cloaked form.” Hopefully through writing I will glimpse that real, and maybe you can too through the reading.
And alas, I could continue to create conundrums of language or riddles of words, but the trails of the Price children and rains of Congo call my name. I will then surrender myself to the stories of Africa, in search of some parallels to those my family tells of Chad. I will return in time to this place and to this blog to share more thoughts, perhaps once the money bags lie a little looser and there is a job closer on the horizon than 6 weeks away.
Prayers and Peace.

Comments

  1. EnnsplaceMay 12, 2010 at 4:27 AM

    Bekah, you have majestically caught the beauty of contradictory emotions and the veil or mirror of life we live within, merci. I have 2 comments that further my interactions with your proposed thoughts : 1) "If you seek a spark, you will find it in the ashes" by Elie Wiesel, and when you find the ways for goodness and dispair to sit together you are on the way to growth and healing and freedom 2) as Rabbi Nachman of Breslov stated, "Regardless of what happens to you, in the end you will find that all your descents will be turned into great ascents...because the purpose of the descent is the ascent". As the Africans of Chad display, one must sit within the moments of dispair welcome them and recognize that they are liminal spaces of new birth'. Keep challenging us to look into the nonsensical and see the veil beyond. - naomi

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