motion

Sitting next to a stranger my soul calls brother, the world passes me by.  Or maybe it’s me that’s passing through the world.  Daan Daan.  Too fast but never fast enough.  Trying to inhale every ounce of culture and absorb what has been, what is, and what will be through the pores of my skin so they are known to me as my heart knows no boundaries.  Disconnected from all communication my spirit dances with the carabao to the tops of the mountains, while simultaneously falling back to earth kasama the graceful jungle rains.  Delicately balanced between a detachment from all emotion and thought, and fighting to know and feel everything that could ever be, my mind keeps me present while rewinding the hands of time so the past becomes the future and the future becomes the present.  Like a carousal madly spinning, peace showers over me cradling me in a blanket I call home.

With the tires still spinning a woman jumps on.  Quail eggs, pasalubong, and hot dogs.  The heat engulfs even the typhoon rains, evaporating them before they soak through my pants.  The woman, a tattered history book struggling to stand against typhoon after typhoon, passes some eggs to the back while the bayad moves forward.  Just as she was on she is off, waiting for the next bus, praying for the next customer.

And just like that, “CHI WAAAALLLLLA!”  People shoving and pushing…India flying by.  The tracks and trees and saris paint my dreams to life.  Not sure where I’m going, but sure I am moving and certain that movement is home, I cling on to this vortex of time and place, finding comfort in the stench of worked bodies.

Burning garbage unites with the moist air holding my lungs hostage. A putrid smell, but so beautiful it is.  Bamboo huts. The backdrop for the fires that create constellations planted in the soil.  Mmmm, it looks so familiar it looks like home.

A bota bota under the pure African sky, illuminated with every astrological gift from God, zig zags me through swamps and war zones.  The world spins chaotically round, spitting me out at the mercy of fate.  Grounded and unpredictable, home welcomes a future of hope.

A new song comes on. I’m back.  And just leaving.  My heart is ahead of my mind.  Both are still, and both are moving.  Moving with the wheels and the quail egg sellers I revisit the places I have yet to go, dreaming of the places I’ve already been.  Faster and faster we move, but slower and slower the world is.  The colors blurred together forming indistinguishable shades of hope I know this is where I am