14:59, Saturday, 9 February, 2013

I cannot believe how I get to start my days.  Waking up in a world still sleeping, stars remain twinkling across the heavens given it’s clear, Rupell’s (sp) starlings and the other earliest-rising birds excited for the day and impatient to get it going.  Some fruit bats still chiming in the trees, perhaps a genet whispering past the solar tent, its day coming to a close.  Then we go out into the field, still trying to shake off sleep with the main cue to waking yet absent.  Go to the dens and say good morning to the hyenas, lit only by the beam of a magilght, or have them say good morning to you in the case of curious cubs scrambling out to the car to look up at you beneath the window before returning to their tumbling play.  Driving back out, and there it is – the cue the diurnal primate brain waits for.  It’s as though someone has liquefied the sun and dipped a paintbrush in it, spreading just a few strokes across the dark sky over the mountains in a contrast that makes me forget, or perhaps fully remember, my being.  I can hardly breathe some mornings; I know I have described sunsets as painfully beautiful, and perhaps sunrises already as well, but to see them is a realization of somewhere inside that only the most intense beauty makes you remember is there, and it’s impossible to keep my fingers from writing it again and again.  And each morning is a bit different; if there are some clouds, the liquefied sun might be tinted pink by some heavenly hand, and then brushed carefully so as to outline the lower hangings of the clouds, each cloud with different thins and thicks so that’s it’s faultless in its inconsistancies.  Light pink paintball streaks and fainter yellows are often featured, the colors generally gentler than the glory of the sunset, when the sun feels pressure to make a grand exit in its closing of the curtain.  The start of the day it likes to ease in tenderly, like a mother softly waking her sleeping child.  But the gorgeous beginning and grand exits are unimaginable in this the land of the big sun and sky; one sunset the other day looked like a child prodigy had been given finger paints of whose oranges, reds, and yellows cannot be found on the entire land masses or oceans of the earth, and then this prodigy spread them thickly across a sky I was sure would burst at any moment.

Midday the sun, if it’s not hidden behind clouds of some sort (also impossibly lovely in their variation), becomes distant now that it’s woken many creatures and sent others off to bed.  One afternoon I can remember looking at the sky, and there was not a cloud in sight, which rarely happens in these parts given its vastness.  And I wondered how anything could be so blue, so perfectly blue.  An unbroken mass of blue, and now that I try to describe it, it sounds just like any other day of blue sky that everyone enjoys and marvels at, but it wasn’t.  It cast a different brightness, perhaps given its enormity, and most blue skies you don’t feel like you could stare at all day.  This one I could have.

The sun does exquisite, less noticeable things in the evening before divinely lowering itself.  For instance, it might be cloudy, and then it glows quietly like an unearthly streetlamp turned on early during a hazy city afternoon.  Or it might cast brilliant pink or dusky purple over a sheet of rain in the distance, so that a thin slant of angel mist falls in a curtain nearer the horizon.  Or it might make the fattest rainbow you have ever seen, blocking a small portion of a large purple hill that might be called a mountain, each color thick as your hands held a foot apart even from such a distant viewing point, and not in an arc!  In perfectly vertical stripes banding down to touch the earth with no bend. 

I must mention the flowers as well.  The flowers that open and close, bloom and disappear in response to the activity of the sky.  One day I noticed lovely yellow flowers, morning-glory types growing on long stems in bush-like gatherings along the camp paths.  They are closed tight when I walk past them in the as-yet dark of the morning, then open wide with the sun, then if I pay attention when I walk from dinner to bed I find them closed again in my flashlight beam.  One evening after a previously rainy day we were stuck in camp when the sun went down. I got to watch these yellow flowers progressively close, and was convinced again that we are out on obs during the most wonderful times in camp.  There are also little purple flowers that hide in the grass, unnoticed by me until I walked with Wilson to church and there they were in tiny adornment here and there.  And after every heavy rain the shorter-grass parts of the savanna explode in little white flowers.  It’s lovely.  Naturally, the clowning baboons (as Joy Adamson terms them) walk along and delightfully mar the idyll by picking and eating them.  Finally, following consistent rains, the savanna becomes a sort of horse pasture full of every type of cloverine flowery grass you can imagine, a meadow of dotted blowing long and short yellows, purples, pinks, whites, and blues.  I never knew a savanna could bloom like so.

Even Nairobi has its typical show of flowers, any time of the year, but when I went in November there was a surprise show of magnificent trees in bloom.  These trees’ branches showered down in a waterfall of light purple flowers, sweeping the earth before kissing it with petals floated down.  I momentarily forgot all the unjust ills of the city looking at those trees, and everything seemed happy driving along the streets of Karen.

Overall, I think weather and plants unite places on the earth in an odd way, although they are cited as things that differentiate them.  Climates are so variable, and yet nothing takes me home like the wind or the smell of wet tall grass on a rainy morning.  Although the sun is like I’ve never seen it here, there are some things just so familiar in it, and in the clouds, rain, the wind that makes them old friends unchanged by place.  They have both produced and relieved the few instances of homesickness I have felt during my time here.  Most of all, they just make me smile.