turning points

I leave for Kenya in 4 hours. I will be there for 6 months.

This is the longest spell of time I'll spend in Kenya since I first left home. The longest trip I'm making out of America since I moved here. I think it heralds a new bi- or tri- continental phase of my life, where I go back and forth between East Africa, Europe, America. Learn the skills of a nomad - how to welcome each new season and the migration it brings, how to be at home while in motion.

On my birthday last year, I thought:

It's getting smaller. The number of years before I'll have lived outside Kenya longer than I lived in Kenya.

My friend, the brilliant Roger Bonair-Agard, wrote a poem I love, called The Sadness of Migration. It begins:

is when you realize you've finally spent
more years in your adopted country
than you've lived in your own.

and ends:

and all of a sudden you belong to no-one
and no-where belongs to you.

Despite my ambivalence about belonging, I remember thinking on my birthday:

No WAY is that going to happen! I have to find ways to work in Kenya!

And lo and behold - the Kenya tour of Migritude. It's a little scary when the universe delivers so powerfully, in response to an appeal you didn't even make out loud.