When The Lights Go Out

I wish you could hear this wind, tonight; it's almost shocking. Some friends and I walked outside McDougal's, after our weekly indulgence of tasty chicken tenders, to find ourselves bracing against gale force winds. I mean, maybe not gale force, but something like it. The drive home was pretty intense as I watched light clouds zip across a dark sky, atop trees with upturned leaves and twisted branches. It was almost like some sort of fast-moving dance set to the sounds of the wind and not it's force.

Right now, I'm laying on my bed listening to leaves hit my window as they fly off the tree just a few feet away. And no kidding, just as I write this, the lights go out. I hop out of bed and look out into a pitch black world, save the street lamps and emergency flood lights from a neighboring apartment complex seen in the distance. Speculation rises as I wonder whether cars approaching the nearby intersection, which isn't so much a single intersection as it is offset perpendicular meetings of two separate roads with our own, will make it through successfully. What I notice, too, is that the wind seems to have settled with the darkness - and then in a moment the lights flicker back on. And as I slide back into bed, the winds pick up again.

In darkness, the world is still; in light, it is stirring. I cannot blanket this simple statement to cover everything, but it's funny to me the implication of that moment. How often life seems so different than that, as though the equation were more fit to link darkness with chaos and movement and light with stillness and rest. It is more often the darkness, the moments of pitch-black, that cause unrest and fear - the light is comfortable and safe. But what happens when the lights go out?

I feel like that's what Africa might be like. Like everything that, from here in America, seems so core-shaking and opposite about that place will all at once not be so. I mean, it will be challenging and scary, but not in the ways that I now perceive; because today, I see myself as in a different world. All I know from my life here in America creates a sort of contrast in my mind that only leads to separation. Separation of heart, of mind, and of circumstance. In America, I am in the light and happily so and when I look at Africa I see darkness, chaos and the unknown.

There and back, I hope and pray separation no longer remains an issue. That maybe I would be joined with those people and that continent in such away that makes the story more about one I was written into, than one I have simply read. And to know them as my brothers and sisters, fellow humans with minds and hearts, dreams and fears - people whose lives are not so different from my own, and yet enough to teach and to share with and to learn from each other.

And maybe the greatest lesson I have even now begun to learn is that we are all at once in darkness when the lights go out, and in those moments, we find that the world outside is not so dissimilar from the one within.