Written

 Lovely to enjoy a "picnic" gathering at Chris M's homesite.  So nice to get a tour as final steps are finished for certification of occupancy.  Great home and wonderful views!  Thanks to all for the shared foods.  As always, delicious!

This month's read was an adventurous memoir "Written in the Waters" by Tara Roberts.  A history of African slave trade, expeditions of sunken slave trade ships and a deeply personal search for home and self.  Beautifully written, you end up feeling like you know the different locations visited as well as having an understanding of history that you were never taught in school.  

The author gives you the opportunity to see life from a different view, not from that of a privileged American background.  While she was trying to find a send of home, she learned that she had to change how she defined herself in this global world.  We all have to reckon with the legacy of colonialism and the history of slave trade.  "Are you looking for Utopia?  Where in the world is there a place where those things are not happening?"  One needs to go beyond the anger, pain, guilt and shame.  "Africa was never static; it continued to change and evolve culturally....there are new possibilities for imagining the present and the future as a dynamic group - a moral home rather than a physical one."  "I have begun to think of my journey as one that travels a wavy path.  The design of my life doesn't run narrow and straight."  "All my life, I've been shaping myself like water, writing myself within her waves."  "I realize just how much of our stories have been written in her (Yemaya) waters: lives lost but also lives started, all those lines of connections that we are just beginning to see and understand."