Growth and Subsistence

I've been in Madagascar for two weeks and two days now.

I was encouraged, before I left, to "absorb now, process later". It's impossible. 'To process,' for me, is synonymous with creation. We absorb and then create -- using different media, of course -- I use language to create an image of the personal evolution I sense transpiring as I see (the sunsets at Acouba, the sand at Libanouna, the street vendors, the port at dusk, and the sunken ships), feel (moist heat, hands on my waist at L'Hotel Gina, mosquitos, the trade winds, my burning lungs at the summit of Pic St. Louis, a new cockroach friend down my shirt), smell (mofo akondro, her sweat, his sweat, my own sweat, the outhouse, ylang ylang blossoms, aloe), hear (Tay be!, incontrollable laughter, zebu, roosters at 5am -- Transylvania should invest in a couple and let them run around back circle...fewer students would miss class -- Salame vahaza!), and taste (zebu, rice, rice, rice, brown rice, rice water, lentils, dust, hint of mint -- not my own). I become despondent when I can't enjoy my process, enjoy my creation. I become despondent when my words cannot make known to you the effect of these miracles, all around, that are seeping into me, that I am photosynthesizing, like the peeling trees, through the skin and into the unknown places, changing the composition of my head and heart.

For this reason, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to transition into exclusively speaking French and Malagasy. My desperate and battered words can't evoke anything but laughter...they don't draw pictures...they do not synthesize subtle, nuanced sentiment...they turn my heart into something almost vulgar and incoherent. I cannot focus on theme; I must focus on conjugations and articles and sentence structure. I cannot create with these words...I can only cling-for-my-life. I can subsist but I cannot grow.

And that hints to a more fundamental problem, perhaps. I become despondent when I feel I am not growing.

But I know that stillness is not stagnation...I talk about it all the time. One can certainly experience a swelling of the spirit within physical subsistence. Have I told you of the marriage of two halfs, yin and yang, the arrow and the orb? Have I told you how much I want to realize this union in my person? Have I described a picture of God, balanced and whole, fully empowered and how I want to understand?

Ironically, Madagascar is, both for logistical and cultural reasons, forcing me to be still. It's forcing me to spend a lot of time in my head. I have not been able to hide from things that I hoped would remain stateside. And it is clear that those things from which I'd hoped to hide are hands-down the most critical to explaining who I am.

I didn't leave bad habits or insecurities. I must have hid them, subconsciously, in a invisible zippered pocket in my enormous internal frame backpack. My security blankets.

I didn't "leave my past behind". I am the product of twenty years of roll-with-the-punches "past"...and I couldn't very well leave me behind. So along the past came.

No conclusion here. Only a final observation: I am both growing and subsisting. I don't understand it entirely -- a clever trick that the Divine can pull -- but I have faith. Specifically, I have faith that subsistence isn't a punishment and that the growth it stimulates is of an unfamiliar type. I have not experienced this type of growth, and I feel the pains of it (remember when we would wake up howling, clutching our legs when we were eleven?), the pains of mind and body shifting and grinding into new positions, shooting through my whole body. I am malformed, I fear, because I haven't known growth through subsistence. Not malformed forever though. I'm confident my body can correct itself. Our bodies are all so resilient, you know.