Yesterday morning, I got up at 4 am to go to my friend Tasmi's dojo where friends and family were invited for an introduction to Katori, an ancient martial art of the sword. It was amazing. I was amazed at my own cheerful capacity to sit cross-legged on the floor with a straight back for two hours. Ei, Yah, Toh! Yoh, my arms hurt today.
Afterward, we had a lovely breakfast of fruit salad, greek yogurt, muesli, and sushi, yes, sushi. We ate outside the dojo, in a garden full of native South African plants, in the company of some mighty fine singing birds. It was chilly outside and we were bright eyed!
I spent the afternoon back at home in sweats, cooking black eyed peas and finishing a paper on the definition of poverty. If you want a copy of the paper, which has the answers to everything you've ever wondered about, just let me know. But if you read it, all you'll do is shake your head and say, yeah, I already knew that.
At 4, I went to a fellow Rotary scholar's digs for a Soul Food Party (hence the peas), ate some fried chicken, baked mac'n'cheese and apple cobbler. It's stuff we hardly eat at home, you know, but here it opened up that whole soul dynamic in revolutionary ways. I talked about the south to anyone who would listen. If I'da had some beer, they'da been in trouble. I might have started talking music. Well anyways, they all said the fried chicken was way better than KFC (there's one on every corner here in South Africa), which fulfilled Valerie's (the hostesses's) ambition.
This morning, after arriving home from passing out energy drinks and water to 2000 cyclists at a Rotary sponsored bike-race (woke up again at 5), I played ultimate frisbee with some folk I met at the dojo. Two more hours in the zone! My legs are already sore. We had such a good time, we went out afterwards to a Middle eastern place for tea, honey and halva smoothies, and a piece of apple-date cake. The conversation was music, development, meaning, God, books, life. People are so amazing. It's such a privilege to see people, to be seen, to listen and be heard. A conversation is enough, just in itself. A Sunday evening conversation. We're playing again next weekend, and might go skiing in Lesotho sometime soon.
Now I am home and I have lots of reading to do for class tomorrow, but all I can do is listen to music on my computer and write this blog. I don't have much to say, just that I am in the thick of life here, experiencing so many new and different things. Internal, external, all at the same time, and I can't make much sense of any of it just yet. Like this evening's conversation over tea and cake: I encountered some hugely new ideas...big new spiritual ones that made me excited and uncomfortable. Almost everything inspires some level of discomfort. It's hard work to stay grounded when it feels like the earth is shifting underfoot. All humans know this. You don't have to go to another continent, but it definitely heightens one's awareness. Yebo.
So this is my monthly blog. Not all that interesting, I'm afraid. I just wanted to check in and say, Hi, Hello, to any of you readers out there. I love you.
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