Great! I finally found my way in a live (ish) text box. I hope it stays live, these are thought i wouldn't want to lose. I may have already! They always come cascading down while climbing the stairs, or rising up in the steam in a shower pour down. It would just be amazing to follow my own train of thought, instead of outrunning it, or literally building parallel tracks while i'm not looking. Coherence, clarity, keeping up.
I live in Mongolia. I live in Mongolia! And in the craziest life. Normal, running along a day, inside itself - but exploding into its own moments, sudden introductions, events, aural tones and the language of learning. at all times! I don't know myself here, maybe that's the triply starting point; i've nothing to know anything bye. And yet I'm still learning - and so the ordering of what gets learnt is somehow organic, untraceable, tangibly stored, gone.
I get in any car as a taxi. I think I've travelled as precious (I'd like to be alive) stranger's cargo in every hour of the day, literally. All 24 of them, for something, not knowing where I am going, totally at ease. Through amazing shortcuts and spaces you would not believe - taxi-ing in Mongolia is a crazy ride in visuospatial time-lapse. No kidding - your reaction time eases into this crazy rhythm they have here - a peace at high speed, like every turn and inflected direction is cued, all emotions are shared and zero-sum among all the drivers (nothing is personal, no wasteful emotion - fear, anger, entitlement, outrage, sense of justice, relief) - and all will be well.
Anyways, I get into any car - people just pick you up and take you wherever, baby on mother's lap in the passenger seat. How they make money at that cheap, i don't know. They talk to themselves and I understand undercurrent - or there is an ongoing, dramatic, dynamic conversation happening on the intercom, who knows where in the city which I'm crossing - shouting, placating, directions - conversation that I only just know the tones of. Everything is familiar, I recognise so much - I understand so little, and participate forever at a parallel, which swerves to a tangent. Who knows if I will ever be on the same line? Being so foreign has made fluid my belief that I ever am, even in my own country.
What does own country mean? I've heard so much more in the conversations I haven't understood - I've gone somewhere, instead of stayed.
Tonight I want to write everything -why do we espouse continuity of thought? Is your life continuous, besides it being you- and who you are with? In my case - God is always present, and here I am. But i so often tap out of reality - tap out of that reality. Why is writing a discipline of continuity if really, you shouldn't pretend to have that if you don't? Can you write your way into ordered thinking, ordered being? Maybe you can! Writing surely is not about faking, but laying it bare, hoping you with your projected audience can come out with it, undo self-denial. Whatever. Happy whatever :)
So I trip in and out of meta-cognisance of language - that's one of the things i'm inputting constantly, but not controlling the ordering of the input. There's something I'm understanding - I'm learning to hear differently. Listening intently is exhausting - but I'm also learning to keep listening past non comprehension, all the time. Like, I don't stop at either words I know or don't know - neither is the goal - it all flows past me and i remember flashes of insight of it, split seconds after its happening.
I remember the first time I played basketball at school here, and the first few weeks of it - I felt like I'd come up from a hazy fog of foreigner floating. I was connected to all these men, we were a team (friggen heck we were warriors) and i knew what was going on, i understood so much, i was right in there with them. Communication was this heady symbiosis; and i felt like I was breathing again - people were clear and trusting me to follow them, depending on me.
What's strange in being a foreigner, what is isolating (though in the best intentions), is that nobody depends on you for
nothing. In this game, they tried me, they tested me - and somehow by the grace of God there were times I was a total team mate - not the girl liability. Sometimes even an asset! Because the opposing team will give a wide berth - but a team mate serve me a cracking lay-up in the space. Basketball saved my mind first few months out here.
But besides that now I enjoy rhythms of language around me - I'm under them, beside them, I'm tapping in, I'm reading all the other stuff. Communication is amazing. Jesus could read minds, know what people are thinking. In normal talk in your own language, there's a heady mix of hiding, pretending to be saying something else, wanting to disclose and navigating social longevity, trying to hear by talking. Jesus knew what people where thinking. How often do you even know what you're thinking? So maybe you are telling it without, and before, knowing
what it is you think in your heart. (This is where thinking happens). The heart then is something Jesus could read, while we let our minds shout over the waves coming from our hearts by understanding the words coming from other's mouths. Talk is just the overflow of the heart-what is in the centre of the full cup?
These are the things that fascinate me, that I
get past and over myself to – the delight there – at finding I have a capacity for curiosity for things I did not dream up myself! The journey past looking through the files and junkyard of what I can perceive and have been perceiving for my decades…
I am happy to be in my own skin, overwhelmed at how much there is to me, at happy peace that I can’t get through it all, and I will meet him who can catalogue the soul with kisses on each thing he created and redeemed, one day, in the house we will live with all our brothers and sisters.
That's language. My lack.
I get into any car. I go to work events at 3 am. I sing in crazy full clubs - me, haha! Who totally bypassed and bypasses the currency - I mean the currency of nightlife. Well, I suppose I don't actually - I full on assert it, I am trying to engage in that language - be that good or bad. God and I were talking today and he said this is all wrong because of the way I am engaging with the world. I am mis-engaging with this reality, Misfiring. He is right, I mean, besides always being right. We will get to the bottom of it.
I went to a cafe/bar/dj place. He blows a whistle when the shots are served - genius. I drank strawberry tea and ate a strawberry, too. Does it matter? Time and time again I offensively refuse a shot (even when people don't go to jail - this time was to celebrate Henza not going to jail) - and refuse to give offence. There is a way to this. Its also just because they are mongols. People lean too close and I am always touching someone. Right in my face. There is this crazy-easy physical overfamiliarity which for the life of me I can't feel as gross or possessive - If it is that, then that is something deeper, human, that i want to see and believe in.
In other news. I'm a singer. I'm gonna act. I'm a primary school teacher to 17 tiny little people, the responsibility for and influence over whom I carry all the time, thinking, trying to understand, trying to do it right - making children like PureFirstLight and Pure Destiny both cry in one day. How did this all happen? Last week I was sitting in the quiet at a round wooden table on the southern tip of Africa, writing exams, holding a cat, eating mielies, getting browner skin. Now I am here, kicking up white sparkling sonically brittle ice dust, breathing in cold and walking alone at all times of day and night. My producer did not go to jail today! I might make a movie in summer. We might all hit the road, me and the boys (the team!) and drive to India! Russia! Wherever! Life is free. Might shoot video #3 In SA! Might live in New York. Maybe all together!
Might give it all up. Get married and have a baby and then some. Might do all of that.
Might stay. Stay with Jesus. Stay here, now, and find myself in a here and now, in a future suddenly right under my feet - still here and now, with Him. That might is all His.
