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travel far now

an archive of rants & revelations from life on the road

contrary essays

A mystical mama monologue, blue heron sightings, pie in the sky

2/28/2026

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Mama, it’s your birthday, which means it’s nearly spring, which means exodus and green buds and Queen Esther, stories of war, deception and peace. I hated the dressing up for Purim as a kid—I never understood the assignment. We made a lot of noise and learned vague lessons about good and evil, and later, my father explained to me quite carefully that there was really no such thing as good and evil—only consequences. Which hurt my little baby philosophical heart.

Mama, because it’s your birthday, I wish I could buy you the perfect burger from Wendy’s but you were always so picky about what they put on it, and even if it wasn’t the burger, you’d berate anyone who made you a sandwich for getting it wrong, and when you died, I looked up at the Sarasota sky and thought, that’s a perfect sun, and that’s a perfect cloud, and I thought, you’d love to eat the sun-cloud as a perfect sandwich.

Mama, I’m not sure what these words are coming out directed at you. It’s the last day of a monthlong assignment I gave myself to write daily and see what finds me. It’s you—asking for my attention, yet again.

OK, I’ll tell you about the last few days with you on earth. Your three girls walked through a park in the Amish part of town and saw a blue heron shimmering in a patch of sunlight in the river. So astounded were we by the heron’s beauty that Nina’s yellow amber beads broke and scattered everywhere like shooting stars. We laughed, we cried searching for them but never found them all. I’m sure there’s still a bead or two hidden like golden eggs in that park.

Mama, you taught us how to talk to strangers and so we talked to the ladies in their bonnets playing shuffleboard that day in the Sarasota heat. I never knew the Amish ladies from Indiana pooled money for the long bus rides south for the winter, snow birds. They denounced technology but made an exception for an engine that could pluck them from a winter of despair in the Midwest. It was fun to chat it up with them but then again, I knew you were dying and felt distracted.

Mama, when you sent me out for pies, I decided to do a story on them, the history of a famous Amish pie shop in Florida. I ate a lot of pie—for research. Key lime, French silk, apple. I met the lady who married into the tradition, and she was on mission to convince me that a marriage was forever and so was her devotion to a life of pies. They made thousands a week—and I wrote about this with the attention of a surgeon while you were making your cosmic transition. We got so many free slices, and I know you winked at me for that.

Mama, how silly to think I keep on writing into the void of a motherless future. It took me a while after you slipped out of here to realize that I wished you loved me, but not you-you, more like, a mother-you, universal-mother-love-you. I’m glad you came to me through the psychic medium to shake your hips and talk about your porcelain dolls and tell me you were healed and whole in out there in the heavens of your flea-market dreams.

Mama, I hear you in my head sometimes. “Mand,” “I don’t think so,” “Get out of here!” “Over my dead body.” Ha! You loved to say that. Now that you’re dead, I still try to not to make you mad, and hope you’re feeling proud of the way the three of us have figured out how to live our lives without you. It’s easier than we thought because we know you’re still here—just out there—real busy—on a long ride—hunting for a bargain or a treasure or a slice of pie out there in the clear, blue skies.
​
Transit Slips, #28
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On Mumbai goodbyes, traveling in trios, and finding words for pain

2/27/2026

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After a bad break-up, I flew to India to visit a good friend. My ex tried to chase me down in my taxi as we tore off toward the airport—banged on the window with a torn lease in his hands. I’d be homeless when I returned, he shouted. When I landed in Mumbai, he’d become a speck of dust in the distance. I could wrap myself up in green silk and sulk by the mosque with the white doves squawking at the edges of the ocean.

That trip felt like stepping into quicksand. I couldn’t stay there forever and I didn’t want to return and home was not an option. Another friend came to visit and we became a trio of travelers on long bus rides through cold, starry nights. Grand, royal palaces became the backdrop of our escapist dramas; we delighted in small pleasures, like barfi with chai, mystical men atop tired elephants sauntering through the narrow streets of Udaipur. It’s easy to romanticize a pain that is not yours.

Traveling in a trio, one must tread carefully and leave through side exits. I’d head out on my own to silver shops and chat it up with tired old men with droopy eyes and clever lies to convince me that the rings they chose were just for me. I bought one ring, a slab of thick silver that looked like a mirror on my hand. I constantly caught my reflection in it as we bussed back to Mumbai, and I finally said goodbye. The other friend remained on my friend’s couch for months, imagining many futures.

I returned to Zanzibar, relieved to believe that my ex had grown tired of his stalking and would now leave me alone. I was wrong. I’d so desperately wanted to be known as a poet and now I had no words to describe these circumstances. Instead of leaving, I stayed to investigate the crisis. I stayed to tolerate the delusion. I stayed to stalk my own perimeter, hoping that I could hold my own against the separation. This was a difficult time to live in a place where no one knew my past. On an island, everyone’s an actor and the ocean is stage-left.

I thank my higher self for letting the past get lost in language. If it’s lost in language, it’s not lost but lodged. I read another Wiman essay today, he asks: What wounded you into words? Do you write from a feeling of having been wronged, or because you now feel right? Our bodies always know more than we can tell. Writing is not a way out but a way back in and through.

Let’s go with the deep-diving metaphor. It’s too dangerous to go deep without a breathing apparatus. I’ve never been interested in diving, it terrifies me. But the metaphor is a good one to describe the dangers of staying too long in the subterranean oceans of consciousness. I go down once in a while and find these flashes of experiences as shells that shimmer out there without me. Catching glimpses of these moments is a marvel, but I live on land just fine, no need to hold them in my hand.

I’m nearing the end of this Transit Slips project. Today is my mom’s heavenly 79th birthday. She died dreaming of her jewels, she never got to sort them but we’re still sorting it all for her. I got a letter in the mail from the Jewish Sacred Society, reminding me to light a candle for her. I traveled because she traveled—I close my eyes and see a photo of her waving to the world from the backseat of a rickshaw in China, 1989.

Transit Slips, #27
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On learning to wait for meals and messages from God

2/26/2026

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Travel taught me how to wait—for a meal, a message, a bus ride out of town. I waited, and waited. In the blistering heat. Under the shade of a tree. Next to a mango stand or phone card man. In dark parking lots at dawn. Near the coffee stalls, enthralled. By the port, for my ferry, in a flurry of sweat and swagger. I waited.

I carried a tiny black Nokia back in those days. I could text and make calls, even pick a ring tone, but beyond that, no big cloud existed on which to float except the one in my own mind. I dialed up my daydreams and surfed the waves within, scrolled through my rolodex of regrets.

When I studied at the University of Nairobi in 1996, I stayed at a dormitory called Stella Awinja, near campus. There wasn’t much in the area—a YWCA across the canopied street, lined with a few fruit sellers, and a few old men frying fish in deep black kettles bubbling over with hot oil.

One afternoon, I decided to try the little restaurant down the road. I lost my mind waiting for my food to arrive. (I was an American baby, I had to learn).

Here’s the scene: The waitress asked me what I wanted from the menu. I pointed to several options. Each time, she told me they were out. Finally, I asked what was available. She pointed to a curry stew with rice. I agreed. She shuffled out of view. I waited. I read my book. An hour and half later, my food arrived. I asked her what took so long. She’d gone to the market and back for the ingredients. I felt like a guest star in a sitcom with a laugh track. I never went back.

My tolerance for delays expanded as I landed further out afield.

Monks in monasteries say meditation is about waiting for God. Philosopher Simone Weil also talks about prayer as a kind of waiting—you don’t go looking for God, you wait for God to find you. Christian Wiman says the poet lives in perpetual states of waiting, “enduring silence.” I can wait as long as I’m in motion inside a promise I’ve kept to myself to keep going. It’s only when it feels that life stops that I get sad or enraged. Waiting can feel then like a betrayal, no God in sight.

When we wait, we locate ourselves in the interior. Now, we pick up our phones for quick hits to swat away the boredom. But back in the day, we’d climb inside ourselves and look around for some yarn to pull or shelves to organize inside the mind’s mansions. When the bus breaks down, we can experience it as a delay or an adventure.

I did fear once though, on the road somewhere between Lushoto and Arusha, that I’d never make it home again. And I couldn’t daydream in the heat.

I remember those enormous sisal plants that stood tall on the side of the road like gentle plant mothers that had seen it all and told me I’d be OK. Weird to think of them now, all ancient, prickly and green. I also remember how the preacher passengers on the bus cracked open their bibles and just started reading aloud in the middle of the road in the middle of the day in the middle of the waiting. Parts got replaced, our fear, erased, and we were cruising again back to the city.

The letter home is a daydream. The letter home is a meditation. The letter home is a prayer. I’ve written many thinking the letter was about the other person. But we all know by now the letter is about spending time with yourself while keeping another in mind, your witness. Dear you also means dear me.

Where do you go to practice patience these days? Where do you find glimmers of anticipation? I think a lot about these ideas but at this very moment, I’m writing my way out of the dream and into a calendar. Like you, I’ve become impatient with myself and what a day can do (what I can do in a day). The day as a unit of measure. The hours strung together like a series of letters to myself.
​
Transit Slips, #26
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On memory as make-believe and the secrets of a scene

2/25/2026

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I wake with a headache; pain is its own reprieve, perhaps. I grant myself the morning to meander. At least the sun is reaching for me through the window.

Before coffee, I’ve already gone swimming in a strange bath of news—the cruelty and shame of adjuncts in academia; the maddening mantra in these times, “they knew, they knew”; the death of the middle and the mediocrity it often peddled; it’s all too much for a Wednesday morning meant for writing an essay on letters.

I went to Cheesecake Factory the other day, and it was packed, and it was actually really good. I don’t think we can romanticize these places any more than we can critique them for the paradox they perpetuate—that we want ease and consistency and we also want curation and gates.

Walking on an indoor track is a form of self-hypnosis. I started listening to a woman talk about memoir and her video had the strange tinny affect of a 1990s infomercial. She wanted to sell me her genius and kept on dangling the promise of two main components to a memoir that she discovered after studying thousands of them at a big publisher. It took her at least three minutes to reveal her secrets: the scene.

As I circled the track, I grew mad at her for wasting my time and then I also realized I had no where else to be and kept walking. I left the gym with her gems: 1. a scene must have a time anchor; 2. something must happen in the scene. That was her reveal, the grand finale fireworks of her spiel. I thought about it while dreaming last night, still walking around the track inside my mind.

I’ve decided that when I write a scene, it’s actually fine if nothing happens, as long as there’s a person and a verb and feeling. Time anchors are useful, to stretch beyond the once-upon-a, but I call bullshit on the pressure to advance a plot. Guess what, we’ve lost the plot. Fragments and figments are their own kinds of happenings, and that’s the kind of non-story I need to tell at this point, about anything real or imagined. And I’m still circling the track—I’ll be back.

Why did I leap from poetry to the journalism? Some naive idea about justice and the facts. I spent about a decade thinking I could comb for them carefully and come up with real gold for the people. But the newsroom is a blues room with the same 12 bars. The stories got predictable, though the players often changed. We rarely riffed or reflected, rather put together and scrambled the same puzzle parts over and over again, until many of us got laid off.

“To be a writer is to betray the facts,” writes Christian Wiman, in his very dark and difficult essay, “The Limit.” It made my stomach turn, the scenes and the story. But I kept reading to mine this reminder: “to cast an experience into words is in some way to lose the reality of the experience itself, to sacrifice the fact of it to whatever imaginative pattern one’s wound requires.”

My wound requires a wind-up and a let-down—I want the story to come in pulse beats of sensation. I am not a puzzle maker or a heart-breaker, and I certainly realize at this point that memory is a make-believe game.

I’ve read and thought about much too much darkness before noon. It hurts my heart. My transit slips are slipping from my grip. I’ve collected all these mental notes for scope, but I’m not obliged to analyze or file. Wiman says we can work with memory as little stones we “smooth and polish with the waters of imagination.”
​
Transit Slips, #25
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Swahili hip-hop, healing hospitals, and other ripples in the memory field

2/24/2026

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Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa. How is it there? Is it OK there? Yes! It’s quite alright. Great Swahili hip-hop, the early days. I met Professor Jay once at a talent show in Arusha, a bunch of teens packed into a community center, spitting rhymes. Outside, I sipped on a cold Kili with the other teaching artists, star-struck when Professor Jay came out and took a selfie with us. Years later, he became a hip-hop member of parliament. Poetry and politics, it clicks. 

I taught theater classes to high school students for a summer in Tanzania. Even then, I wondered if arts education was not unlike missionary work, I arrived with such evangelical fervor for the fire lit by creativity, and justified my presence there by invitation. We ate our stews by candlelight, trekked to waterfalls at dawn, zig-zagged through the market in our strange bubbles of whiteness, met our students’ families on their coffee farms. What kind of messenger was I then in the early days of my delusions? I still don’t know.

“I find myself still softly searching for my delinquent palaces,” writes Emily Dickinson. Me too, sister, me too. Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa. Such a catchy song. I would end up spending all kinds of time with students in Tanzania. No one ever tells you that a safari entails a great deal of time riding around on rugged roads in dust clouds of hot silence. Most of our time at Mikumi was spent protecting our picnic food from bold birds and their hell-bent kleptomania. They snatched our sandwiches right from our hands. Some of us tried to hide in the green jeeps but fled when it got too hot in the metal box.

I took my students on all kinds of field trips that left me tripping in the open fields of an inner sort—like that healing hospital near Mwera.

Deep in the forests inland from the main road, healers treat sick patients unresponsive to Western medicine—mute children, grief-stricken widows, women with a distant gaze and slack arms. Much of it felt like a performance, if I’m honest, for the wazungu. They’d take us into small huts and reveal their trays of herbal medicines, explaining each root and branch. They tied red scarves around our heads to ward off shetani.

One remedy: write a passage for the Koran on a piece of paper with black ink, then boil water and mix it with herbs. Dip the paper in the herbal tea, and drink it. Yes, drink the words, that’s the medicine.

I didn’t know what I believed. In Arusha, the kids loved Jesus. In Zanzibar, the kids loved Allah. In Skokie, the kids loved Moses. My father and mother hoped we’d worship prairies and also know the gist of Genesis. And so I studied my little heart out when I was a teenager and hoped God could tell I was attempting to make contact, through poetry and songs.

“Is God merely a synonym for gone?” That’s a question Christian Wiman poses in his essay on taking a trip to Tanzania with his father. A trip to visit missionaries. A trip in which he trips on faith and when he had it and how he lost it and what it felt like to find it again. Good question, Wiman. Hapo, vipi? Hapo sawa.

How is it over there in the inner fields of one’s own doubts? It’s OK over there. I have enough to eat and the big-picture view is splendid. Wow, this daily writing thing is a wild ride. I could keep on going but I may lose the plot and every time I mention the Mwera healers, I tend to sense a ripple in the universe.
​
Transit Slips, #24
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On the paradox of paradise, policing and releasing what's lost

2/23/2026

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The paradox of paradise—what’s left to say about it, in life or literature? I didn’t move to Zanzibar for the palm trees or the sea breeze, but I learned to seek refuge in it as I tried to dodge the darkness. The place faces paradise pressure beyond measure. Islam and its angels wave in the wind like peace flags. But the daily conundrum is one of culture and clash.

Until I lived in Zanzibar, I hadn’t had any reason to spend so much time in police stations. But during those years, life plucked me from ocean views and fresh fruit smoothies into dimly lit offices where men and women in beige uniforms listened to transistor radios blaring Swahili news, perfecting the art of blank-faced boredom.

I’ll never forget the time I took a taxi to a police station out of town to bail out my ex, who’d been picked up the night prior for fighting at a bar. The taxi driver asked me what business I had at the jail; I clutched my fistful of shillings in the backseat and told him I had boyfriend business. I cranked open the window, let the wind whip my scarf into obscurity, and felt nauseous with shame.

When I arrived, I spotted him in a cell packed with other men, like a can of sardines. He was standing there clutching the bars, wearing his “I heart Chicago” T-shirt—the one I bought for him at Walgreens back home. He thanked me profusely and promised me better days ahead. Eventually, I would file a restraining order against him at a different police station, where the officers all spoke in sideways glances and shuffled their feet—a death dance of doldrum and despondence.

When we realize we’re with the wrong person—that we were the wrong person with them—it is to fall through the cracks of one’s idea of paradise. And in this falling, there’s also the feeling of flying—away or toward what’s real versus what we imagined.

I’m reading an essay by Christian Wiman, his thoughts on reading Milton’s Paradise Lost in Guatemala. In the essay, he talks about the moment in the poem when Eve falls for her own image. I don’t know quite what to make of it, but this line reverberates: “She is everything the will can’t control, an expression of the appetite and passion for a life more intense and eternal than the one that reality offers.”

Talking about this place as a failed paradise is not helpful, to me or anyone else who lives there or remembers what it was like to stay for the duration. But I do think it’s useful to forgive oneself for wanting and imagining so much that you end up drifting very far from the shores of a more solid reality. And sometimes it’s hard to accept that we were never really there the way we thought we were—in body, perhaps, but somewhat unconscious. 

And when that happens, “you might find that the hardest things to let go [of] are those you never really took hold of in the first place,” Wiman writes.

One year, a young Spanish couple were on the island for Sauti za Busara, a big live music festival in town. I was working as the interim managing director, doing my best to manage the impossible mayhem of those four days when thousands of tourists flocked and frolicked with total abandon (and disregard for local realities). The couple came to me in a panic; their bag, filled with expensive equipment, had been stolen while they were dancing in the Old Fort. Thieves were afoot, grabbing bags left at the feet of careless foreigners dancing in the thick heat.

They rushed me to the side and begged me to file a police report. The young, tanned man was a self-proclaimed journalist; his curly-haired girlfriend, a sensitive filmmaker. They were there to tell stories and share them with the world. They needed their equipment back. They’d offer a reward to the thieves. I agreed to take a taxi with them to the nearest police station and file a narrative report, written in blue ink that smudged the lined paper. But I knew, as we were filling it out, that this couple would never see their treasures again.

This was the price they paid to play in paradise—things would get lost.

​Transit Slips, #23
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On literary ambitions and tiny rituals on the road

2/22/2026

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A thousand stanzas ago, I was a poet. Think about it, a verse as a unit of time. That makes sense to me, someone who once had crazy literary ambitions. I blame my brilliant poetry professor in college, who sat me down once in her office and told me that I was living a life of “self-exile.” The idea intrigued me—what did she mean? Let me live it.

I, too, wanted black kohl beneath my eyes, to accentuate the green. I, too, wished to wield magic in the middle of Michigan corn fields. Take me to the ecstatic place where surrealism is the song.

But I never made it as a poet. I sat with them in restaurants called Prairie, I took classes with them in grand art deco buildings downtown, got critiqued by the big ones as they peered into my poetry behind their desks of pomp and influence. But I never got the library or the swivel chair, the delirious devotees or the tour of prairie state bookstores. That’s fine, I traveled instead. And so it’s said, a poet can learn from other poets or she can travel.

(It didn’t have to be an either/or, but life’s questionnaires are tricky and make you think you have to pick.)

I smoked my first cigarette at an archaeology camp in southwestern Colorado. You’d think I was being naughty but no, we made our own cigarettes from bamboo and stitched a leather pouch to carry our tobacco, as part of a lesson on Indigenous habits and customs. I even beaded a little red heart on the front.

Smoking is a spiritual act, they taught us. At 15, that was the kind of message that landed straight like an arrow in my soul. I would connect smoking with consciousness expansion for the rest of my days, ignoring all obvious threats to my sweet, innocent lungs.

Marlboro reds in Jerusalem. Nyala in Addis. Sportsman in Dar es Salaam. I never mastered the fine art of rolling one’s own cigarettes, but I loved watching my friends and lovers roll me one as a gesture of good will, a manifesto of slow living.

Organizing a smoke at an outdoor table in the morning with the sun licking your face, a hot cup of coffee of some kind, a book opened to lush language, the ultimate ritual, and I welcomed theses scripted moments of reprieve from an otherwise chaotic day. If I heard the call to prayer, I knew I was far from home, and that made the ritual even more critical to my mental health.

I have a smoking cessation mantra now. It works and it goes like this: “I love smoking, but it’s not for me.” You won’t believe me unless you’re trying to quit and then you try it and you’ll tell me that you entered your dream and disrupted the ritual and the world didn’t fall apart.

The world never falls apart, at least not how you imagined it. There are always a few loose strands holding you to it. I used to be the leaver, who then felt for the rest of her trip that she was left. How silly is that? Christian Wiman writes in “On Being Nowhere,” that even if you never return to a place, that place returns to you. It's true. I left Zanzibar, but Zanzibar returns to me. 

Philosopher Simone Weil describes it as being “rooted in the absence of a place,” feeling at home again—in exile.

There’s that word again. Shouldn’t use it lightly. Some who leave may never return. I left and keep on trying to come home. Perhaps, Wiman posits, we can only inhabit wholly those places we already left. “No scene so gorgeous as the one that’s gone.” That’s so far been true enough for me, home a thousand stanzas so far, at least. But if I write about the land, I stand to sink a little deeper into the now.

Let those dream places return to me if they need me. Otherwise, I’ll be here.
​
Transit Slips, #22
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On presence and absence, the faces we see in the sea of time

2/21/2026

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Presence, absence, proximity. The paradox of writing alone with a mind crowded with faces. Riding a wave hoping to be seen by adoring crowds on the faraway shore. I close my eyes and imagine the expressions of those I’ve loved and lost to time or death, they defy any known science of the body, their ongoing, continuous insistence on being felt, if not seen.

An island inevitably invites encounter. Whether you are stepping onto its stage or already an actor in the play, the split between land and sea draws a boundary around everyone, and we meet—in coffee shops and hotel lobbies, beach parties and midday living rooms, the office supply shop, the leather shoemakers’ hovel, the daladala depot, boisterous markets clucking with chickens and hawkers selling silverware—we face each other in the heat and wipe our brows as we greet and say goodbye.

Salam alaykum, I practiced with the utmost reverence to the sheha with the protruding belly and a huge mole on his cheek. Mambo vipi, I shouted to the fishermen seated on broken red buckets in a shady spot under a friendly tree. One always called me mwalimu—I worked at the university—and he knew the romance between me and his mate wouldn’t last long, but he continued to say hello to me with genuine respect, long after I had to file a restraining order against his friend.

These guys would wait by the shore in the early morning when the day’s promise hadn’t been weighed down yet by stifling, debilitating heat. The birds chirped, tourists rambled in flip flops and bathing suits, hoping to catch a boat ride to prison island to see the ancient tortoises. My ex and his buddies had a beautiful command of the sea and often took groups out for the day with fresh cut pineapple miraculously appearing on silver trays. The way these guys orchestrated a fantasy that unfolded like a slow-release pill for wary travelers was just remarkable.

Something about prison island bothered me because of its history, perhaps, or its vapid current state. It was set up as a love affair between tourists and tortoises, pay to feed them but not ride them, was the promise. But the prison held the haunted stories of enslavement and disease. I never got over how the tortoises themselves were prisoners of a kind—they’d been brought to Zanzibar as gifts from the Seychelles.

I remember dizzying arguments with my ex on this island when I’d catch rides with him and the innocent tourists he’d take for the day. We’d get there and realize we didn’t have enough food or water for ourselves; the hotel always seemed to be closed or at least closed off to me in my mind. I resented him for taking me out there without a plan, when all he could do was point to the starfish and tell me not to touch it. He offered me smokes and we ate them like bread.

I see his face when I don’t want to see his face, because the encounter closed in a series of violent episodes still too embarrassing and murky to reveal with any clarity. But when these faces from our past lives come into focus, I try to look back as if looking in a mirror—the fear, the fury, the fallibility. And when I do, which is not often, I marvel at the clever ways I found beauty in those days, even when I was suffering and refused to admit it. I'd place a frangipani flower behind my ear and pose for a portrait for a future self. 

One last thing I’ll say before I take the dog for a walk this morning—I was often sea sick on these rides. The diesel fumes. The sticky sand on my sunburnt skin. My face puffy with regret. I threw up more than once into the roiling ocean. My stomach would flip if our engine stalled, my mind immediately flooding with fear that we’d be stranded indefinitely. And I have to say, I learned over the years that my ex and all his friends who organized these rides—who called themselves fishermen—knew exactly how to convey a sense of shwari—of total calm.

​Even if I never trusted him on land, I always trusted him in the middle of the ocean.

Transit Slips, #20
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Mama, malaria, money, and sitting in the rocking chair of one's feelings

2/20/2026

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To sit in the rocking chair of one’s feelings. Sleep in the bed of one’s regrets. Wake up in the house of one’s dreams. Tend to the fields of one’s history. Gather the smooth stones of one’s hopes. Alphabetize the memories of one’s many lives. I’ll start with the letter M.

Mama—how you called me from the lobby of a Landmark seminar with your scripted apology, how you sounded like you’d been held hostage by strangers, how that calm, sweet voice wasn’t you but someone hoping to find you, how you wished to make amends but had to go, a new session was starting soon, how you later told me you were washing toilets for discounted sessions, how you later said it was all in your head, how your Clearwater friends were murky.

Malaria—how you got so sick your muscles might have snapped in the midday sun, how you broke into a sweat during the night and woke up soaked and delirious, how your boyfriend walked you to the clinic at 8 a.m. and you read those medical journals from Muscat to distract your mind, how they poked you with needles and pumped you with fluids and smeared you with ointments and told you to stay a week; how you feared you’d never feel hungry again, the pungent smell of rotting garbage outside the clinic window made you gag, how you made it home but your mind was still maligned; how you swear you can still remember the exact mosquito that bit you.

Money—how you made it, saved it, spent it, resented it, hoarded it, scored it, shared it and bared it, how it’s not fair that you carried loads of it to and from air-con blasted banks on the islands while everyone around you clicked their coins for porridge; how you had to watch them count millions of paper shillings; how you waited for hours in lines at ATMs, stuffing those bills into your kitenge cloth pouch, walking through town hoping no one could sniff your wealth; how your ex got kicked out of one for waiting barefoot by the door; how you tried to give as much as you got but you didn’t have much, it’s all relative, right? how you watched your wealthy friends withdraw so much more than they needed and kept it all for themselves; how the requests kept coming, for funerals and weddings, graduations and trips abroad for pharmacy school, how you complied, how you lied, how you hated to need it, how you longed to have enough.

What about those “self-serving liberal illusions” we all suffered? It all gets revealed to the traveler who tries to make herself at home. Zanzibar changed me, and maybe I changed the lives of a few folks I met there, even if that doesn’t matter now. I’m sitting in the rocking chair of all my feelings, alphabetizing memories for the records.

You might ask me what my mom’s brief stint in Landmark had anything to do with suffering from malaria or my fragmented thoughts about money. Not much, I’ll laugh and say out loud if you’ll listen, not much! But that’s what’s beautiful about writing into the void. The editor can take off her coat and loosen her grip on reality. And when this happens, so much appears to us out of the infinite mystery—phantom feelings, a myriad of forms and phenomenon—all it takes is a bit of madness to catch it all when it comes flying through the mind-sky.
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Transit Slips, #20
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The spirituality of decisions and getting to the near from faraway

2/19/2026

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Picture
Is the past a foreign country, or just a closed room inside the mind’s mansion?

I open the door from time to time to rummage. Sometimes I open a window. Other times, it requires a flight and a passport to get anywhere in the before times (if now is the measure).

I met foreigners like me who landed on the islands of Zanzibar with a lack of clarity about their plans. Some spoke with such disdain about the ills of capitalism and the “West”—their moral righteousness at a fevered pitch—all while situated in their neocolonial lifestyles, living like kings with servants. 

This stung but I could never name it then because I was also playing along. There’s much the “resident” must ignore to make it through their days.

I’ve suffered from chronic back pain since I was 16, but I mostly had it under control until I was living 8,000 miles away from home and feeling stuck in the life I’d sunk into as a freelance writer. During this period, I often stayed at the fancy boho chic resort owned by a friend who’d gotten burnt out in banking and fled to live a luxe life on her own terms.

One weekend, my pain exceeded all knowable limits and I was laid out. My friend called me a taxi and her staff helped me fold my distorted body into the back seat to see a chiropractor in a village further down on the coast. He ran a pay-what-you-can clinic in this idyllic fishing village that had not changed in thousands of years but was now starting to strain under the weight of reckless tourism.

The chiropractor worked on my back in the quiet, clean room with the fan whirring overhead. And then he whispered something to me that I will never forget: “Are you afraid to make decisions,” he asked.

I was caught off guard with my head faced down on the table. I waited for him to say more. He went on to say that although he hesitated to share spiritual insights with clients, he was getting the message from on high that my back pain had to do with my chronic indecision about whether to stay longer or go home.

I cried. I thanked him. I left. I returned to my friend’s fancy resort and heard her scold her staff for speaking Swahili in front of elite guests from (white) South Africa. I often felt sick to my stomach when I lived in Zanzibar but never knew to name it anxiety.

The truth is that indecision often gripped me on the road. But I’d have a good day—an extraordinary day of simple sensory pleasures—and congratulate myself for staying.

Then I’d have a miserable day—like that time my ex left me alone on the ferry with a chipped tooth just before it took off because he was angry with me for berating him for getting there so late—and I had to visit the dentist in Dar alone, walking around like a zombie afterward with numb lips, waiting for the ferry back at dusk.

I wish I knew all those days before that any decision is the right decision, we make it right through our memories—meaning comes later, experience comes first.

Rebecca Solnit talks about this in “The Faraway Nearby,” this distance between the near and the far of every life. At some point, through an old photograph, a talk with an old friend, an old letter reread, we realize, “without noticing it,” we have “transversed a great distance.”

“The strange has become familiar and the familiar has become if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.”

The door is open or the door is closed. Opening a window expands what any of us sees on the horizon. It also means we also risk letting the world “out there” see what’s within.
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Transit Slips, #19
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    Essays by Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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