Living Between Two Worlds
- Dec 7, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Dec 9, 2024
Our plane touched down yesterday in the Luanda airport, close enough to take a picture of Air Force One and Air Force Two (see the matching twin 747 hidden behind!). We didn’t see President Biden, but his presence was evident at every turn. Here’s a remarkable video of how he travels internationally.
How do I start to describe the overwhelming power of global politics that is boiling in Angola - this country of my birth? (Read here if you wish an excellent overview.)
I must try to put words to the paradoxical and joyful turmoil I find myself in.
For us, one world began when we touched down 30 hours after leaving Boulder, CO and discovered that the airport roads were completely shut down by the military. Sirens wailed, but for over an hour we waited with our luggage on the sidewalk. Streams of people pushed suitcases up and down the road, while our hotel concierge anxiously telephoned for news, attempting to shield us from this mayhem. As well-seasoned travelers, Uli and I watched with humor, marveling at the sight of both Arrivals and Departures clogged with sweating humanity staggering to get somewhere on foot, or wooden wheelbarrow, or bicycle. Too embarrassed to look at me, our well-suited driver eventually asked if we too could begin to drag our bags uphill and out of the parking lot.
We heartily agreed and found the parked hotel car in a nearby barrio, and after driving the wrong way down a one-way street, eventually had to negotiate another round of metal detectors and a K-9 dog sniffer to enter the hotel. As I waited in the opulent lobby of the InterContinental, two squads of US military marched through in full regalia, helmets and scopes, with layers of draped firearms bouncing over their body. They had done their duty and were heading home again. The US Embassy had a special staffing desk – and I noted a stack of US passports over a foot-high on their desk.
Scores of black-suited businessmen and women in colorful finery clustered around in serious conversation (apparently several African heads of State were still here). Blaring motorcades and Angolan soldiers with Uzi’s kept rolling by in open trucks, so my travel-weary-being was ever so grateful to enter our 15th story room overlooking Luanda Harbor and then eventually make my way to the serenity of the pool while Uli began his first round of meetings.
A second earthy world resonated through me as I read the WhatsApp adventures from South Africa from my dear friend Jade – she ‘through whom the earth echoes’. She recounts her daily rich and wonderful experience of Africa from a private nature reserve community “dedicated to the conservation, protection and survival of endangered species where game rangers share their incredible knowledge of elephant, rhino, buffalo, hippo, hyena, leopard and over 350 bird species.” She recounts daily tales of extraordinary relationship with wild nature – including this smiling elephant! Sigh. My heart too has cherished those African footprints and birdsongs for decades – as if they are my own family.
A core part of me would far rather revel in that peaceful safari world, yet it is a curious honor and struggle to be reminded of the original wild peace of this land while being deluged with the reality of energy and infrastructure projects and relational investment opportunities in resource-laden Angola. This IS my birthplace which today stirs extremely complex feelings that seek creative resolution yet still feel as if they are polarizing opposites.
Deep inside me, and all around me today, as Uli and I prayerfully talk, as we struggle with how to continue to love in the path of my ancestors, to serve and give to this beautiful nation, we remind ourselves that we are part of a unified whole. We have been given this complex life and today we remain open to stay true to our unique calls which have brought us here today.
By the luxurious pool, I read these words from Malidoma Some (The Healing Wisdom of Africa): “Being born into a place is like having the signature of that place stamped upon you.… human mobility does not remove a person’s original connection to their birthplace. Your footprints still lead back to the place where you began. …The line that divides the modern mind from the indigenous mind is not the line between truth and falsehood.”
It is my gift to have been given both an ‘indigenous way of belonging’ in this world, and a ‘modern mind’ which is constantly challenged to think clearly and create fresh pathways for change. I seek to be more clearly a part of a pipeline of understanding to honor the Hidden Wholeness of this bifurcated world.
I end this post today with important inspirational words from Michael Meade today – Living in Two Worlds. I invite you to consider your own ‘opposites.’ To know and feel the creative tension at your core that seeks resolution in this truly critical season on this globe.
Join me in this way of wild wisdom that is so urgently needed – to awaken to an eternal otherworld beyond time.
“We are most human when we suffer the tension of the opposites in order to find again the threads to the ongoing story of creation and the renewal of the world. The trouble is that genuine visions and meaningful revelations of the way out of the darkness tend to appear only after all the more rational, familiar and predictable ways of seeing and being have failed.
In truly critical times, we can’t solve our problems at the same level in which they were created. We become more trapped in time, more stuck in blind beliefs and more caught in despair when we have no other level of life to turn to. If there is no otherworld of spirit and imagination, there can be nowhere to turn to when everything around us becomes more irrational, more dehumanizing and increasingly chaotic.
As has happened at other critical times here on Earth, the keys for unlocking this prison of our own making have to include an awakening to the sense that there is an otherworld that exists right beside this world, that extends far beyond the political world, a realm that is not ruled by the blind march of time, but rather is connected to and can reconnect us to things eternal.”
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