Leaping

Take a leap or let a leap take you - where did that come from? Could it be my current situation, my sense of being suspended in air, walking through nothingness? In the middle of this leap of mine from South Africa back to the U.S. of A., it suddenly dawns on me that once you activate leaping then the leap takes over. I am mid-air and my scramble is to surrender those small, fear filled notions of what might be.

"I love the recklessness of faith, first you leap and then you grow wings." W.S. Coffin

My task at this moment is not to screw up my courage for action but, rather, to listen intently to the whispers saying, ‘trust,’ to reach out with all my antennae and know that certain, subtle buoyancy that is the support of the invisible realms.

Elena

I think of Elena every time I see a pretty little girl’s party dress in the shop windows. I picture how her eyes would light up when I gave it to her and how she would run to show her Mama and her Gogo. But four year old Elena is far away, shedding her winter sweaters as I don mine. I can’t just walk over to the creche and watch her show off by riding the creche’s one little plastic scooter around and around and around the room, fast. She will have graduated from the creche by the time I return and I will miss her beauty pageant bathing suit walk down the aisle. She will be in the uniform of the public school child by the time I see her next. I miss her.

http://mapusharooibokme.blogspot.com/2007/12/little-spider-fingers.html

(a previous post on another blog about Elena 2 years ago)

PDX

I watch the late afternoon sunshine sculpt the hills of the Columbia River valley to beautiful shadow enhanced. serpentine shapes, as the plane circles into PDX. I take in the evergreen forests that signal the Northwest after three weeks in the delicious, deciduous world of New Jersey, New York and before that the wide open vistas of South Africa. And, for just a moment, I feel myself retract, a frisson of claustrophobia runs through me as I remember the sun drenched hills below in the grey of November. I absorb the thump of the wheels contacting earth; my three fifty pound bags and I have made it home.

Sitting on the bench outside the exit doors, awaiting Lorena, I muse as the soft summer air, still bright and warm at 8 p.m, fills me with memories of other summer nights here. I lived here for 18 years before the pull of Africa spirited me across the oceans. Now, ten years later, it is time to return and reclaim my life here, my role in the circle of family and friends, the third chapter. I taste the breezes to see how it sits in my cells, these familiar Portland sounds and sights and smells.