Thought Picnic: The Power of Desire II

The path to it

It was a path I never walked for almost 16 months of my being there and it led to a house that looked decrepit, visited by some who wore drawn faces and made you wish the world had something to offer besides waiting for God and heaven.

Indeed, at Sunday school we had learnt of the sweet by-and-by taught by teachers whose sadism pretending to discipline would have made the devil smile with glee.

This was a different crowd, almost hip and quite urbane studying art and exhibiting creativity that just blew you away. How they did it, I could not tell but I found myself walking up the path with them and for all the African initiated histrionics I had seen and heard my mother display, calling names of angels from beyond a place yonder comprehension, these guys were in a different place.

Rituals and victuals

They knelt to pray and suddenly started speaking in languages I could not phantom but it sounded Middle-Eastern, the questions came later and with that came a conversion from the faith I once knew.

Now I was caught amongst the throes of establishmentarian High-Church Anglicanism, the unschooled atrocity of prophets, psalms, potions, candles with ritualistic practices that gave evil the palpability to scare to death and a new living way that still had many scrambling to find true direction and purpose.

The incisions were too many to count and as to what one was fed, after chewing and swallowing a new Tiger brand razor blade under the supervision of a witch doctor, one probably had the constitution for anything that could be offered on a plate. Don’t contemn African animism, they don’t do illusions and once you visited the grotto, Harry Potter will be kindergarten with docile kids.

Desires that tore

With this came new friends, many challenges, serious misgivings, deep conflicts and worst of all familial friction. At a time that I really did need help I found myself alone, ostracised, abandoned and cursed – yes, cursed for deviating from what had become the norms for some but made the bizarre look tame.

From that day, desire battled with desire, the battleground being my mind and the burdens it grew to juggle between the good, the bad, the ugly, the unmentionable and much else.

You never arrived, you were always on a journey as perfection and imperfection traded with your soul and each faltering step forward seemed to bargain with a precipitous fall from grace. You were caught in the pincers of the power of desire to be who you are and be what you want to be.

Nobody told me that it would be this hard and at the same time it could be so easy. Trust is what matters and the knowledge that comes with that will help make the desire to be good come true.