Return to Kenya

The red earth rises up to greet me as a fine dust. Driving across it, a simple serenity comes over me and I feel as though I have returned to an old friend. The first time I traveled to Kenya (about ten years ago), she captured a part of me. I have always been drawn back to this place. Whenever I return, that piece quietly returns and a refreshing sense of ‘alive’ resides within. There is a peaceful familiarity in the burnt dust… beneath the brilliant stars… within living in the simplicity that this world breathes.

There is a vibrant rawness that attracts me. Everything here is completely vivid… the cloth the women adorn in their head pieces, skirts and the kangas- fastening beautiful Kenyan babies to their mother’s backs… the bewitching cadence of the untouched tribal chants… the enchanting acacia trees painted across the horizon… the open sky that stretches its cloudy hands into infinity…

But the most magical part of it all is the people. The people with their rich chocolate skin… burning coal eyes… weathered hands, weathered feet, weathered souls… They are the most poor when it comes to the tangible enticements the world values. But they have a secret. They keep their riches out of the eyes of the world. Though they live in mud huts and dance in bare feet, they are rich beyond imagining. They have stored away endless vaults of happiness. They are giving. They are kind. Their culture continues to pulse through their veins.

Yes, as I drive across the red earth, breathing in her bone dry dust, I am almost home.