Teacher on Two Wheels

Sunday 3/15/09  Gulu, Uganda

**Taken from my journal.  About my time in Buenos Aires.**

I didn’t fall in love.  No, I didn’t stay long enough for that.  Seven days isn’t enough time to fall in love with someone, to know someone well enough to call a connection ‘love’.  I know I fell somewhere, though.  I fell into something.

I fell into a sunrise that caught us by surprise, one that brought an end to an all-night conversation.

I fell into a long rest on a bench in a rose garden.  With long shadows growing around us, shadows stretching like slow spreading puddles on the ground, with late afternoon light getting tangled in the thorns of the rose bushes at our sides, we watched a beetle struggle through grass.  We looked at our bare feet.  We talked about how still we felt, how time passed us by and let us be.

I fell into song, into awe, watching her fingers pull music from the bowels of her guitar.

I fell into dance and the type of deep rhythmic trance people experience when they dance for hours with a close friend.  Drums filled the room; beats were easy to harness.  Wet hair was plastered to the backs of our necks.  I fell into earned exhaustion.

I fell into a set of eyes, into radiance.  Eyes so alive they could shatter thoughts or sentences with a single blink.  Eyes warmly brown like old, polished wood.  Energy eyes.  Two beacons of energy blazing away in their sockets like coffee-colored suns.

I fell into silence, into awareness of the value of shared silence, of a purposeful quiet.

I fell into something.