“The wind that comes off the Sahara towards the Atlantic is called Harmattan. The breezes over Senegal and Mauritania mingle with the warm waters near Cape Verde and occasionally become one of those end-of-summer storms that plod their way up the Mid-Atlantic states, dropping enormous amounts of rain and causing damage.”
There is a second sort of bamboo growing here, with beautiful varied dark green stripes on a yellow background. My friend tells me that in Vietnam this is special and a spirit might live in such bamboo. There is a large stand of such striped bamboo nearby. I’ve seen no spirits but there are weaver birds occupying the grove, much activity from the birds building their nests. The ground around the stand is littered with failed nest attempts.
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
The late afternoon light was too beautiful for that moment; out of place in the dreariness of that corner of Abidjan, tucked away among the drab offices of the business district. It reminded me of summer nights in Cape Town when the sun is so seductive you can’t bear the thought of going indoors.
‘”What do we do now?” I asked, but Dirk obviously had no answer. We knew the name of the camp, but that was it. No idea where it was, how far from the station it was. No contact name. No phone number. No coins for the payphone even if we had a number.’
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.'” – Douglas Adams
In this our land we have a term for suffering, shege. The proverbial phrase seeing shege is a present participle tense that describes the action of going through it — suffering. And there’s levels to it you see, because in this our land we’re all in the same hell, just different levels.
I am now forever connected to that city but not because of the house, because of the people and relationships that were forged over that time.
Everywhere the surface was changing, crumbling to dust, washing away … Gradients of color, broken edges quickly softened. Never straight lines, only gravity pulling water on paths of least resistance.
magpiesmagazine.com 