Where do you want to be?

It’s all about pulling weeds. The rainy season is here and our gardens are in full bloom with maize, cassava, and okra. The garden is also in full bloom with an overgrowth of weeds. Boys who were hired to come and pull the weeds decided that in the battle of Irresponsibility vs. Money, irresponsibility won with a haymaker induced K.O. That is, the boys never came and the garden went an extra week without weeding. This past weekend Daboe had seen enough and knew that the garden wasn’t just an ugly sight, it was becoming a killing zone for his crops. So we headed out in our work flip flops, old clothes, and hoes (the garden tool, get your mind out of the gutter!) and started pulling, digging, and uprooting all the threats to the soon to be delicious food of the future.

The actual task is pretty simple, pull out the weeds, rake clean the grass, and pile it all up into a nice little compost heap. The tricky part is not getting into so much of a rhythm with the hacking and slashing that you accidentally cut down the maize or okra (cassava is big enough that you’d have to be blind to miss). When I first started weeding I was falling into the trap of repetition and had quite the embarrassing moment when Kaddy, becoming aware of the damage being done, ran to the garden and more or less forgivingly yelled, “My okra!? It’s being ruined! Yaya, please be more careful...”

Like other times that I’ve ended up helping out around the compound, it seems to bring a certain clarity to life. Perhaps it is a remnant of my childhood, my father and mother making sure that my sister and I understood that helping around the house is not a favor, its an expected part of being in a family. Helping should be automatic, and as a result something about working with another family member feels right and lets my mind be at ease. A mind at ease is a mind that can be in the present moment and work things out, clarity realized. I was in the garden physically acting without effort and mentally in a world of open skies with near endless visibility.

That time in the garden was when I was able to begin working out my recent bouts of frustration and near depression. Self aware that I am a person who easily gets wrapped up in the singular, whether that be an upcoming event, task, or emotion. In this case I was wrapped up in a certain loneliness and frustration from feeling like life’s apple was lacking a core. That is the energizing, sweet, and refreshing aspects of life, usually created from the spirit of great friendship, love, and caring were sorely lacking. The simple truth is that a lot of PCVs feel this at one point or another, it’s a horrible feeling of longing, but we have to get over it or face a draining and relentless suffering for an entire two years. This is desire causing suffering in a pure form.

I worked it out slowly by understanding the problem comparatively. What was lacking in my take on the situation was that I was missing that while a lot of us do suffer from this incompleteness, we should not forget that there should also be excitement for the potential. Potential to build futures beyond our lives here (its easy to forget that we do go home after two years and that there can be continuity between Peace Corps and life back home); potential for friendships that will grow to fill the gaps and holes of today and pass the test of time, living on in joyful memories and realities. We often are so consumed in basic survival mode that this is easy to forget, focusing on what is obvious, meaning focus on what we lack. It took a couple days of weeding in the garden and a good long evening chat with my site mate (thanks by the way, I’d put your name here except I don’t know if that’s ok!) to realize this. As I’ve come to believe in time and time again here, beauty is in contrast, and the realization of these two outlooks typifies that expression. They both exist and if you fall too deep into the singularity of one, down a blinding and dangerous rabbit’s hole, it can be impressively damaging. When consumed by the two instead of the singular, life reveals its colors again. Something missing that does create incredible lack now, but leaves open the the future in our hands, uncertain yet promising.

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Thanks to all who have kept in contact as of late. I’ve gotten some rather splendid e-mails that have made me laugh, smile, feel connected, and have empathy for where we are all going in life abroad, in America, and in the soft fields of imagination. One e-mail in particular was perfect for my mental health right now, a reminder of my past strengths in creating group unity and support and to not forget to put it to good use here (Doug, I wish I knew you throughout all of college, your mentorship would have been invalualbe).

And yes Naima, we will be watching all the Kurt Russel movies.

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The 2007-2009 Education group swears in this week. On Friday, my group will officially be 2nd year volunteers and part of the old crowd. Agonizingly slow minutes turning into months that pass by with a baffling haste.

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Then there was humor in life. Just a reminder that in some cases, we simply don’t have any control, take life as it comes and make the best of it all.

“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players*, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”

* i.e., everybody

From Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’sGood Omens.