I took the longest Christmas break this past Christmas. I just packed up a bag of a few pairs of jeans and a couple of my favorite t shirts and left my life.

I didn’t say anything to anyone, well except my siblings. I didn’t say how long I would stay except to my closest friends. I just left.

That is actually why I haven’t written in a long while. I couldn’t. I didn’t have my trust cyber café up the street that I sit at with a packet of yogurt and write.

I had plans all the way up to the end of Christmas but for some reason; they didn’t seem to be what I needed. They required money, they required a designated drive if we all went drinking. They needed me to think, to strategize. Something I was not too willing to do at that time.

So I just left.

I didn’t go some place fun. I didn’t go to some place I would have room service or in the least my favorites French fries, my daily necessity before. I went to my aunt’s. Mama mdogo we say in Swahili. My mother’s sister. One of the last links to my mother we have left.

My son had been staying there for a few months so I was killing two birds with one stone. Continue Reading »

A cynical friend of mine, whose company I have to endure every once in a while due to social obligations, bears strong convictions against the whole assortment of religious beliefs, and most notably Christian beliefs. In his self proclaimed wisdom, humans have an insatiable need to feel important and wanted. He says this explains every human act, much like the Freudian theory about human behavior and sex, but that’s a story for another day.

You see, my cynical friend has concocted a conspiracy theory, in which he claims that a very brilliant mind realized at one point in history, that the key to universal dominion wasn’t in amassing weapons, arming hundreds of thousands of country boys and heading out to conquer one kingdom after another. That had already been tried and proven to be a futile endeavor by the Romans et al.

No, he realized that what drove even the Romans to try conquering the world was the search for meaning, for a purpose, for a reason to live. The only way to gain true supremacy was to fill this void, or at least provide a shadow that would act as a symbol of destiny, and if he could somehow get the whole world to chase this shadow, then only one thing would be left to complete the puzzle. He would present himself as the key, the answer to this question of destiny. Of course no one can ever catch a shadow, but in our earnest desire for attaining the unknown, we have been blinded to this reality. Thus we keep chasing and chasing, and this brilliant composer of the symphony of faith becomes more and more powerful as generation after generation passes, all in search of the same false ideal. Or so my cynical friend claims. Continue Reading »