Bridge over troubled water

December 12, 1995 village                                                                                                     

I am depressed today, not to the point of tears though that would be nice. I am getting sick too. I’ve got a scratchy throat and runny nose. I’ve been wondering today why I still haven’t moved into this house. Why haven’t I changed a thing since the first day I moved in a year and a half ago? Why haven’t I gone to get water like I was going to two days ago? I only have half a bucket left. Though I had planned on bathing, I’ve put that off for another day too. I don’t want to leave my house until it’s time to go to the my family's at 7. I’m falling into this pattern. I go to my house. I go to the my family's house. Nowhere else. Because…because because because.

All I want to do is read. After reading, all I want to do is sleep. Other than this I want to be in Essaouira.

I’m bored here. I don’t want to be here. I feel my time here is done and I think about how much time I have left before I can do what I want. This is never going to be home to me. Though I love it here, I don’t belong. I am thankful for this experience and know that I’ve gotten much more from this than I’ve given. The truth remains? A year and a half almost and I still can’t work like my job says I’m supposed to. I think this is what depresses me. Maybe I need to go visit Suzanne in the sister village. Maybe this is guilt. I feel guilty and I shouldn’t. I feel like I’ve failed at this because my motivation continues to cease to be.

 

Then again, I’m sick. Maybe that’s it. I’m in love. Maybe I’m in love. Even with that I’m depressed. I have all this energy directed towards a person I worry about having feelings for.

Another thing is that I don’t want anyone to know I’m feeling all this. I don’t want to even be around myself. Perhaps that’s the reason for the reading. If I read myself through this time it will pass faster.

I feel too simple.
No substance.
No dimension.
No Contrast and Texture.

I find this when I read beautiful writing that’s better than mine.
I find this when I stop smoking after a period of constant highness.
I find this in the season of winter.
I find this when settling back in after long travel.
I find this when I’m not satisfied when I get what I thought would satisfy me.

Don’t trouble the water, let it be.
Still water runs deep…
Like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down.

I dreamed I was on Kabir’s ship, which had three levels and other boats of his docked on it. At one point he was asleep in one room and simultaneously awake and pacing the floor in another room. He was calm like a baby asleep and wired and working awake. I remember sitting next to his bed, rubbing his hair, thinking, “Is he white with black stripes or black with white stripes?”

This is real…for the past three days I have woken up to a bird flying around in my room. A small brown finch flapping about. Each time I have to go open the door to let it out. My question is this: where did it come from? How did it get in my room?

To K: Taken from Norman Rush’s Mating

I said: One thing about yourself that I think you don’t appreciate
Is the complexity of why people tend to accept things you lay out
For them as good ideas. Don’t get mad, but in a way your life work
Could be described as getting people to do things you regard
As improvements, better for them. You have great powers of getting
People to do things the way you want. Only partly is that because the things
You come up with are sensible in themselves. The rest of it has to do
With something benign about you, unusually so. You seem good.
You seem unselfish. Even people who are really at loggerheads with you
See it, although it may drive them even crazier against you when they do.
Also you look counter to what you are, since you look more like an
Unemployed wrestler than anything else, which incidentally
Adds to your power. What you are operates cross-culturally
For some reason.

This book I’ve just finished, all 480 pages of it, parallels the kind of love I’ve fallen into. A realistic, intelligent woman goes after a very smart man that has created his own utopian society. She struggles later with what she will do with herself eventually. Is she really to stay with him forever, in a small village in Botswana. She weighs the pros and cons, studies her life directions-what does it take to satisfy a life span? Can she possibly sacrifice the America that she was born into and which she does, in fact, despise, to be with this man in his world and perhaps, in a way, start anew?

My new friend, the bird, is sleeping in here again tonight. He doesn’t want the wetness and cold of the outside rain. This is night number two of rain. Real rain. This is the desert remember.

 

In the morning, hopefully, he’ll wake me up in time to meet up with R to go on our adventure. We’re taking the village goats and sheep to the mountains for the day.