In 2010, the time had finally come for me to make my way to Africa. I had felt drawn to the land and spirit of the African people since I was a teen. But personal, professional, and financial circumstances came together that fall, and I knew it was right to step away from my practice and teaching to travel to a different place. I would find another part of my self there.
Asked why I was going, I simply said, “To be touched.”
I sat in many sacred places; I listened to an array of world travelers speak of their courageous and magnificent works. Each experience touched a place—of deep humility, of pride in the spirit of human triumph, of historical significance and meaning—in me. The world seemed that much closer and smaller…my sense of human story, larger.
But it was one day, sitting on a stoop outside a simple hut in Zimbabwe, when I felt the most profound kind of touch. A quiet little girl with the most beautiful dark eyes came to sit beside me. After watching the activity around us for a while—children running,
women cooking, men carving—I put my hand out to touch her hair. It was coarse and curly, of a very different nature than mine. After some time, she got up, faced me, and reached out to touch my smooth and long hair.
I put my hand on her heart, she on mine, and I felt this knowing that what was in me was equally in her, what was in her was equally in me.
I reflect sometimes on what it was in the Nature of those moments that moved me to a place where I could sense more deeply and expansively—where I could see. I was open to being touched; I had no assumptions or expectations. I wasn’t preoccupied with busy-ness. I was not fearful in my heart of that which “looked” different from me. There was space; the space was unadorned: huge granite; straw, stone, and mud huts; paths of fresh straw for the many bare feet; raised edges to protect new sources of food; medicinal herbs growing naturally. I held a strong belief that we all have a soul; I didn’t assume that the “God” I knew was contrary to what Mollyn named as living in her soul. A shared curiosity to know opened a common sense that made us reach across generations, races, and continents.
- Colleen MacDougall, Seeing through the Greater Lens (a URI member group in Quebec, Canada)
See more stories in this series: "Being What We Want to Become."
