Sometime this morning, in the half-sleep between snooze button smacks before truly waking, I had a dream about an old friend from college. An indecipherable dream. I remember none of it, other than waking up and wondering exactly how my brain and memory had colluded to unearth the face and name of someone from nearly a decade in my past.
Late this afternoon, curious and hitting a lull in my work, I decided to look him up on Facebook and send him a quick "thought of you this morning and hope you are well" message. No luck. He's not on Facebook. Admirable, really.
But still curious, and a tiny bit bored, I threw his name into Google to see if I could find out whether he was still teaching, still doing some of the same stuff he was doing the last time I had crossed paths with him.
Lo and behold, one of the first things that popped up (and the only link I bothered to follow) was a newsletter from the school where he used to teach, where he and a group of 20 students were highlighted for their travels to Tanzania!
I read through the snippets that he and the students wrote, and looked at the pictures of their travels. Any one of us could have written those snippets, our experiences were so similar. Singing together as a group in response to the Maasai choirs that sang for us, throwing frisbees with Maasai elders, standing up in the Land Rovers as we rode through endless land and sky...
And when I looked through the pictures, it was amazing to me that I recognized the Ngorongoro Crater before I had even read the caption.
One part of me easily could have interpreted all these similarities as discouraging, as if there were nothing unique to be experienced and felt in Tanzania, no matter how new and exciting our adventures were. But instead of feeling devalued or deflated, I felt excited and proud.
I felt privileged to be part of a small inner circle of people who have felt and experienced these things. I wanted to call up everybody in that newsletter and tell them, excitedly, that WE had just tossed frisbees and visited the Serengeti and poked our heads out of the tops of Land Rovers and slept in tents in the Tanzanian wilderness.
This past weekend was full of Tanzanian reflections for me. Three worship services, all dedicated to the telling of our travel stories. A visit from out-of-town relatives and the chance to share 800 pictures' worth of stories. Mini-reunions with members of our own traveling group as we sold beadwork and looked at each others' pictures.
But as fun as it is to tell all of our stories to new ears, I suspect that each of us, in our own way, wants to stumble across someone else who has been to Tanzania - someone who can see the landscape as we recount it, someone who understands our stories without any extra explanation, someone who has felt what we have felt, and someone who just knows what we're talking about.
It is the way of trips like this, I imagine. You experience something that can never be fully explained and described. I want to tell everyone that I know everything about the trip. But I get sad when I realize my words will never fully describe the pictures and thoughts in my head. I am slowly letting myself off the hook - giving myself permission to accept that there are things about this trip that will only ever be fully understood and appreciated by our traveling group, or perhaps by others who have also traveled there.
I will keep telling stories, most certainly. And I will do what I can to bring others into my experience. But I will also keep my membership card to this little secret club, this inner circle, and be grateful for the memories in my mind and heart that no words will ever communicate.
Peace,
Melissa
No comments:
Post a Comment