All of This As Paradox
- Dec 13, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 18, 2024
It’s mid-afternoon on our last full day here at Caboledo. It’s humid 90+ degrees and I’m sitting in the bamboo slatted roof bar with this outstanding view and a welcome ocean breeze. I’ll see how long I can be washed in the African/Pop/Euro beat music without being distracted!
Uli and I have just consumed a major seafood feast, but it’s too beautiful to stay indoors for a siesta. I’m wondering how to once more pass on the spirit of this country that has claimed my heart. I couldn’t be happier in this moment…
Here's the delicious poem from Laura Weaver’s book, Luminous, that mystery turned me to this morning …
You have whispered
a thousand prayers to get here. You have traveled
a long way in body or soul, to come here with hands
outstretched in offering, in longing. When the waves
rush over the rocks, when the tidal pull whips
the silverlight waters into a froth at your feet,
you know that mercy is everywhere.
Your soul is a door, but a doorway to what?
This, the place that asks you gently and then relentlessly,
until you empty your pockets of the tangled
fishing lines of lineage and the stories
you thought you must carry--until
you turn yourself inside out to be revealed.
So my question continues to be – what is this doorway of longing leading to? Other than this flood of mercy we are experiencing on this trip.
We have been here a week now, and all day, every day, and as I swim in the warm ocean careful not to be tossed around by the waves - I am being turned inside out.
Captivated by the extraordinary beauty of this land. To my left - the miles of empty sandy beach I can walk every morning and meet only a few fishermen. Awed by the vast expanse of sand, the sea turtles who I have been told swim on shore in the darkness to lay their eggs nearby. Grieved by the scores of plastic bottles that wash up and the scraps of broken fishing nets that Uli has been diligently collecting.
To the right, we watch the boats rowing in and being tugged across the foam by a horde of shouting children, the milling humanity of an African fishing village, totally dependent on today’s catch. One morning, we watched a boat capsize in a giant wave and about 75 people quickly waded into the waters to assist the recovery process. This is a village at work and yet it is a world apart from resort life. Only wealthy, educated Angolans can afford a place like this, but divisions abound. Education is sparse everywhere. Opportunities are limited. It’s troubling and yet … my heart wails like the peacock in the distance … and I feel my soul continuing to whisper.
This area is surrounded by Quicama National Park, a giant conservation area set aside after the 30 years of war for animal and plant protection. It’s a spectacular place and it’s bleeding. War is the extreme enemy of Mother Earth. All her beings suffer. The animal kingdom throughout Angola has been decimated by subsistence living and guerilla warfare. I have been told that elephants have found their way back across the Namibia border. They have tracked their own path of suffering through the minefields, and have returned home. We were thrilled to find a herd of 28 of them eating and bathing in the mud of the papyrus marshes. The road down there was something else!!
Trees like this are still burned for charcoal, although it is now a crime to cut down a baobab tree. We had a wonderful day in the park, driven in style by Eco-Tur – a company who works hard at reversing this land’s devastation.
All the animals we saw have been slowly imported from Namibia or South Africa and the government is doing their best to protect them now. We saw a multitude of birds on the Kwanza boat trip. The African fish eagle and the giant monitor lizard hold special soul places in my story. As do the almost extinct eland which now have a breeding program started.
It sure is hard to choose what pictures to show you – I have so many and so much more I could say. I hope this gives you a flavor of the joy we shared to be with these precious ones for a short time. Sadly, I need to end with a difficult story – 2 mature giraffes and a younger were recently brought into Quicama from South Africa but two weeks ago hunters came in and killed them. Their meat was sold in the nearby market at a hideous price. It’s impossible to tolerate this outrage and yet until there is more supportive financial help for the game wardens and better security, it will happen again. Sigh. It would have been easier not to tell you, but I am trusting that more of us together can hold the power of these bountiful and dreadful extremes as a paradoxical puzzle and together wait in hope and offer prayers and sacred ritual that third ways will emerge in due time.
This is the shadow side of the abundance of a country like Angola. Where war and violent oppression for centuries has imbued the collective with a traumatic heritage that repeats and repeats … and repeats. Thank you for your presence in this struggle to not lose hope.
I leave you with a gift of one last image – this fig tree rooted in the earth and fed by the river that has been flowing far longer than any human or animal life around. May we find the wisdom to be rooted like trees beside the waters of life.
Such powerful images and descriptions of a country in a continent that is full of so many unique cultures, riches, and factions. I sometimes imagine what it would look like if these United States redesigned itself into unique countries with all the challenges that come along with self government styles, inequities, wealth, employment, monies, language, religion, etc