Which Life To Choose?

Feb 22

When the locals tell you it’s a hot day, then you can be sure it really is. I am sitting on the roof of the Zanzibar Coffee House, Stone Town, in danger of sensory, (as well as heart and soulery), overload. The coffee is perfect. My body refuses to stop sweating in the unrelenting heat. We have just spent a few hours at the Slave Museum, emotionally eviscerated by the reality of the centuries of unspeakable abomination and cruelty on this small island, this funnel of perspective on the East African slave trade, whilst knowing my own country led the way in the same 250 years of cruelty, from the west coast. Across the continent of Africa generation after generation scraped off the landscape in a display of evil. We can never know what Africa would be like now without this sucking dry of its people.

As I sip my Arabica, I see Martin Shaw has just posted on substack from Dulles airport in Washington telling me that, as he sits there, he is thinking about Jesus. Around me the Muezzins are calling me simultaneously to prayer from six different local Mosques.

“Whatever you are doing or wrapped up in right now, just stop and realign your mind and heart on a Divine Presence. Something soooo much greater than you. Refocus. Recalibrate”.

Michael Meade has just posted an interview on Growing Your Soul. On the table is Mirabai Starr’s translation of Julian Of Norwich.

I find myself envious of Shaw and Starr.

My phone pings and wants my focus.

Shaw, Starr, Julian, the Muezzins …..all are saying the same thing to me. Rilke’s moment of awakening was in front of the Archaic Torso of Apollo,

“You must change your life”.

Prayer. A breath breathed inward and outward and upward. Not a formula or religion.

Prayer, said poet George Herbert (1633),