If nature has it.

IMIENO?imieno?

Even with eyes closed, I know where I am by the shadows dusk casts. I can tell Kericho by the trees. A haunting forest where pale slugs slide across the morning dew. Bright greenwood highlands held up by cold air.

The confidence of familiarity doesn’t last long. This dreaming is housed in a ghostly amoeba. The forest uncovers its belly to expose sun bleached branches beset by otherworldly sulfur polypores. Mushrooms and slugs shelved and glued for hundreds of kilometers.

I take a step back suddenly afraid, uncertain of my surroundings.

what shadows are cast—round or sharp?

If only you were here–

where is here? Are we not together now, beloved? Too caught up in the feverish gusts of our own extended arms to think anything of the still air before us? Come.

I breathe in a bittersweet breeze. It wafts into my mouth. My nose. I can smell the acidic awning above. The plush canopy—dancing in the wind like ascending scales on a piano.

asai.

I am in the heart of a song.

Cicadas sizzle from deep in the forest. I sit at the hollow haunches of a canopy strobe light. A young tree waves wide leaves that look like hands washing and sound like a jangling. An agile black squirrel scurries up a tree. The birds have also taken flight out of fear. Sometime ago.

One cardinal and a weaver bird slowly make their return.

Mosquitoes and maggots in the belly of a squirrel. A chipmunk. One fawn. Decay in the midst of summer. I sit upon a 68-year-old felled tree. Hollow from rot. The mosquitoes have found my blood like bees find pollen.

And everything is alive in my sightlines. Anything with channels or vessels. Death is all around me. Warning signs and signs of life. And it grows darker and darker until I am clothed in it. I cannot see my hands and I feel myself rise from the log. Rising above the ground.

I walked into this hearth afraid. Uncertain if here is where I would feel safe. Towards the crisp air I asked—is there somewhere I am safe on this planet?

certainly; you compose it and determine it. yes; from soul and weariness. every living thing is born with a grief. borne from separation. every living thing is born with a warning—a sound, a sight, a scent, a texture, a topology. a chill. a truth. a unique framework for relation. every living being is born for relation. born to be in relation. born to be connected and alive to one another. born to interact and respond with the world. we are born to each other. whether we know it or not. we are of each other. we are born with what we need to meet each other.

The forest has no face. The way to know it is only by the paths to get through it.

If I stare long enough into the canopy, I can see darkened dead leaves speckled beneath like scabbing flesh. Their carcasses look like negative space next to diamonds of light. I bathe in their colourful tonality. The dead leaves remain clinging. Until they fall from stories high before joining the foliage below. Where soft mulch builds to break the fall of dying life. I observe the ground before me.

One lone ant carries a green flake from a leaf. A dandelion floats by into the nook of a log. There are no dandelions growing in this forest and all the cardinals and woodpeckers have returned now.

Hush.

White sheaths of water cloak the earth. They are large and fall upon my feet like a scattered deck of cards. Water rushes over the land in fits. I watch in horror as the muddy ground shapeshifts. Becoming lush with thick grass sprouting through mulch in double time. The dark soil turns lighter to rust. Something like the dust in Kajiado. But bronze like in Kitale.

Simama hapa.

I stand atop the kumbe kumbe dirt mound. The wind moors its back against mine while I face the first sun shards of dawn.

It is morning now. Clumps of copper manure gouge the pasture where the cows graze. I see a black cow leading the herd around the kumbe kumbe hill. They make a wide and gentle cut across the field to stop by an overrun thicket, burying their snouts in snake territory.

A river cuts the valley below north to south, and grants me the early eastward light that breaks through a gentle fog.

Come, I am just as strange as I am familiar; we must take care of each other. 

It is now the first hour of dusk. Again. Several billion jubilant black termites rise from the underground to send off their matured relatives, naturally the winged amongst them. One by one the small beasts take flight.

Village weaver birds and house sparrows swoop from their branches to steal the insect angels from their ascension. The birds call out with feverish chirps. Only a handful of saints survive the terror at 20 feet above ground. I watch them in wonderment as they flutter waywardly towards the sun.

Listen.

Water rumbles in the distance. In a blink, I stand by a frothed sandy shore and look before me. The sea has turned into a wall of water, taking the hills with it. Encasing the land in a water-logged shrine sitting heavy in the sky. The distant whistle of its song nears.

This was where the voices echo out from.

Osach kosochi gaa.

My hands reach into the wall of water and claw at the sludge of earth behind it. I pull out plastered palms and squeeze them together, over and over again. From it, the earth hardens and becomes firm clay and begins to mold faces. Of loam. And then out of black cotton dirt. And finally, into arms. I roll out the clay and the arms get longer and thicker. The fingertips crawl behind my shoulders and I am seized.

Wind brushes debris off my chest. Buried alive. No, I am a cliffside. Another part of earth the water claims.

Osach kosochi gaa.

The water wall closes in. The puffs and fluffs of green hues soft in the sunset light, now growing detailed and ferociously vivid.

I thought to myself, perhaps I will know life on these hills. I thought I would see ant-sized figures buzzing about. I thought I would see myself. The dried harvest bales like straw ponytails out of the earth. The rocket my great grandmother built. The green sun shrine. After all, we are all just waiting to forget. Or waiting to remember. Holding fast for the moment, for a courageous encounter with truth and memory. Drawing truth from a song. So, we can sing and remember and make myths and forget.

Behind the glass of water, the hills shapeshift into other hills, changing colours and textures to resemble the folds in Kerio Valley.

Osach kosochi gaa.

If this is what people call me, then they will not soon forget. If that is what people call me, then how would I ever forget?