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Published: April 18th 2007
Surprise! Most of you must not know it, but I'm back in the U.S.A.
I say you must not know it because almost everyone I run into here is shocked to see me. Guess I didn't give enough solid info in my preceding blogs.
So. Here's the current update:
- Chelly is in Kenya, taking care of her family and gathering paperwork for her visa interviews. Word is she's also been practicing her sewing and clothing design skills on Momma's sewing machine.
- I am in America, getting back to work so that I can save some money for the government paperwork, for paying back my parents, and for Chelly's plane ticket over.
- I'm living with my parents in Sedro-Woolley, but commuting to Seattle for work.
- Chelly and I talk on the phone every day and exchange regular emails--we've got our eyes on the prize.
- My Mom and I are fixing up the treehouse so that Chelly and I will have a place to live during all the wedding planning and green-card applying madness.
- Chelly should be here in May or June and then you'll start hearing
the bells...
- This is the last entry in this blog, but I plan to put together a webpage of my own soon. (And--just in case you know anyone in the magazine industry--I'm thinking of selling some of these entries as articles and features, with a little re-working.)
I summed it all up to my friends on MySpace like this:
Just so it doesn't shock you completely when I show up in your doorway, I wanted to let everybody know I'M BACK.
I got in last week and I was very sick. Not just from the European germs and the airplanes and the cold, but sick in the heart too. My fiance Chelly is stuck back in Kenya, waiting for me to bring her here and get hitched.
So don't blame me if it takes me a while to poke my head around your way or if you don't see me out at the bars and clubs. I'm busy. Arrival I had a rough day when I first arrived, coming in through Zurich and Chicago with a cold I'd caught in Athens. Circulated air, snowy weather, and hundreds of germy co-passengers
didn't help me any. By the time I set down in Chi-town, I was getting pretty nervous and feeling somehow disembodied.
Here's something I wrote on the plane from Chicago to Seattle:
I've got so much on my mind right now: big thoughts, little thoughts, anxieties about my friends and tensions about returning home, so many philosophical confusions. But, the thing that always enters in, the single greatest occupying thought, is Chelly. I am going to be her husband. She is the woman I will start a family with. I'm incredibly excited about that. I was back in America, which--as most of you know--is full of Americans. It was one challenge to deal with seeing so many white people gathered together, and the black people weren't so friendly to me as I'd like. It was another huge challenge just to have a conversation with anybody (I pretty much only talked to Africans all day). Then there were the loud, vacant, often-rude, stream of consciousness dialogues and monologues which rapidly filled up my air. I almost forgot: Americans are assholes.
I wrote in my journal,
I think the Africans have highly-developed social systems which the divisive, scarcity-oriented Pan-European culture is destroying out of ignorance.
I was missing Africa.
They put me on a United Airlines flight to Seattle and it was worse than the planes the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan are flying. The middle-aged white lady I was sitting next to had a book about Japanese Buddhism, so we talked shop a little. The religious discussion migrated around the far east and near east, but when I mentioned the stuff I learned about Jesus, she checked-out on me completely like I was a crazy person.
Then, on my first day back in Seattle, I saw a group of aging junkies engaged in a screaming match on the street corner, in broad daylight. Welcome home.
I got my truck back, I travelled around. I started talking more and seeing more people. I rented some new American movies and ate at the taco truck. It took me a little while, but I managed to remember that I
am one of these assholes, and I love my people so.
Everybody's Got One It was a couple days later when I found a comment ammended to one of my blogs by a reader. Their ostensibly heart-felt message told me that, "The chances of your relationship with Chelly will work are next to nothing." You can go read it if you like, but the gist is that African girls can't be happy in the states, and, "You cannot and should not change your whole life for one person." Here was my response:
I thought that comment over and I think it's total bullshit. At least it's not applicable to our situation.
I know plenty of Africans who are happy in the states. And, actually, I as an American am rarely very happy here. There is a lot about America that I really hate (the attitudes you've expressed here, for example) and we'll need to be balancing our time in the U.S. with our time abroad, for sure.
When Chelly arrives in the U.S., we will have money. We will also have a large network of friends and relatives to give her support. Already, I am imploring my friends to take care of her and show her around when she arrives, as well as beginning to reach out towards the African and Catholic communities in my area. By the time she gets here, we will do everything we can to make her feel at home.
Changing my whole life for this one person has made me very happy so far, so I think I'll take my chances. Thanks. And that pretty well speaks for itself.
Something to Hold on to It wasn't all great coming home, but it wasn't all awful. I have Mom and Dad, I have my buddies. I also have a great collection of Reggae discs Chelly bought my in Kenya. Here's another one from my journal:
On the way across I-90 traffic to my friend Sean's house, jamming African Reggae, I realized that for the first time in my life, the future does not hold fear. No reason to delay tommorrow, and none to hurry today. I just hope I can keep on to these positive vibes and keep from building too much of my home in that burning building of Babylon. Ain't that the truth. (Babylon, by the way, is a Reggae-esque reference to the capitalist, materialist, struggling, and hating system of the "First World".) The most important sense I need to hold on to right now is that sense of discovery--especially the discovery of my
self. I learned a lot on this trip, and I found someone who completes and complements the me I want to be. I cannot be allowed to forget any of this.
I told a couple buddies the other day that I'm glad because, "it's amazing to meet a woman who seems beautiful, intelligent, honest, caring, and interesting--and then actually turns out to be all those things she appeared to be."
I also wrote something sweet to her in an email that I'd like to share:
I love you too, Mpenzi. It was great talking to you today and I can't wait to talk to you tommorrow.
I read a quote today and it made me think of you. Someone wrote,
"There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart. Pursue those."
You're the thing in life that has caught my heart. I love you and I think about you daily.
I'm gonna go do some work now... Connections One of the "work" things I've spent a lot of time and energy on since my return is making new social connections in preparation for Chelly.
I've been to the Catholic Church in Sedro-Woolley and the Ethiopian Church in Seattle. I've scouted out all the African import stores in the city. I've even met a couple of Kenyans, enrolled to volunteer for a Kenyan charity, and discovered the Kenyan Community Church in Rainier.
In this process, I've also re-examined the way my friends and acquaintances are living. They're all gonna meet Chelly, but there're are some I'm more excited to hang around with than others.
I've found that I myself am very attached to African culture, and I hope we can find enough of that here to keep us sane and centered in the early years of our marriage. There are a lot of East African immigrants in this area. They have community groups, restaurants, and shops. And then there are the Churches.
A Natural Mystic Perhaps the biggest personal change in me while I've travelled has been my newfound interest in religion. I'm exploring a lot and discovering all sorts of things, but my starting point has been a couple of very simple ideas.
The simplest idea is also the most basic religious concept, that of Universality. This is the first idea that man developed when he tried to understand the world around him, it is inherit in the matter of existence, and it's elucidation has been the highest achievement of man's science (as in Unified Field Theory and the Big Bang). He eventually came to label this concept with terms like, "Yahweh", "Brahman", "Allah", and "God".
I think the most sophisticated religious directive is also the simplest urge of life: to Love. Harmony, Co-Existence, Perpetuation, and even self-sacrificing Altruism are the most basic natural motives of living matter. To Love others and the self--to respect and co-exist and give aide, to be wise and healthy--is also the most sophisticated of Man's ethical directives, given by his greatest ancient religious figures and moral teachers (as in the Vedic Rishis, Jesus and the Buddha) and propounded by Man's most highly-regarded modern spiritual thinkers (as in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Haile Selassie).
These two concepts are the most binding and omnipresent in human religious, philosophical, and ethical understanding. So this is the stuff I'm starting from as I explore religions, mysticism, meditation, and the living practices in line with God and Love.
I got to Seattle on that first night and had a relaxing evening at my buddy Jamie's house. We talked about religion all night, and I did some thinking about my own role as a learner and a teacher out here in this crazy human world. Here's another blurb from my journal:
I believe that every idea is given us by God, but it is changed by us as it is we who write it down or speak it in our languages. And he does not give these ideas equally, or with the guarantee of truth. And he does not equally give the ability to write them, or in speaking. It is our work to discern amongst the things which are written or spoken. This is done for His own reasons, and it is good: for light is meaningless without darkness. Heavy stuff, I know, but I'm workin' on it.
Trip Summary I got an email from one of my Canadian friends, one of the guys I'd travelled with way back in the beginning in Laos. I sent him a reply, and if you're looking for an over-arching trip summary, this is it:
After I left you guys, I ended up spending a while in Bangkok, where I met a beautiful tiger tamer from Kenya. She asked me to stay with her for a while at the zoo, which I did. After a month living with her, I visited Cambodia in a totally non-tourist way and I decided I never wanted to travel again without my lady. So, we spent another month together in Thailand, then went on to India for a month. The Europeans wouldn't let her in from India, though, so we had to return to Kenya (and that took all our remaining money). We lived with her family in Kenya for a couple months, just hanging out on the African streets and lifting weights with Rastafarians. I asked her to marry me, she said yes, then my parents came to Kenya for a big engagement party. I went on with my parents to Greece, where we found long-lost cousins we've been seperated from for a hundred years. Now I'm back in the States with my folks, looking for work and trying to bring my fiance over so we can have a wedding this summer.
Not quite the same as you guys, but I did my thing and had a lot of fun. The End Peace,
Nic
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Jamie McEwan
non-member comment
Namaste.
A wild and crazy ride, Nic. Don't let negative comments drag you down--not that you're likely to. All best wishes from the materialistic East Coast. Jamie