Africa

Making my way to Berkeley on BART

I landed in San Francisco at about 8:45 pm tonight. I'm here for an Ashtanga yoga workshop, and when I signed up I thought it was going to work out super perfectly because one of my Ashtanga buddies from Madison moved to Berkeley just over a year ago.

I got in touch with her, she and her partner were excited for me to stay with them, everything was working out great. And then, last week, she told me that she was leaving for Africa the day I arrived.

That's right Toto, Africa:

I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation
She's coming in, 12:30 flight
The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation
I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies
He turned to me as if to say, "Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you"

It's gonna take a lot to take me away from you

The view from my friends' house in the Berkeley Hills

There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

The good news is she got a new job that she's excited about that will help teenage girls in Malawi get a secondary school education, something only six percent of them do right now.

The bad news is that she left her house at 9pm tonight to get to the airport, and I arrived at 9:50 pm...