Tara Starling – Kenya 2014

There are some stories that can only be correctly begun by starting at the end. And so it was that today, as I looked out the window of the tiny two-prop plane that was carrying me away from the Mara and back to Nairobi, it was all but impossible to see the receding landscape of the shrinking earth through the blur of my uncensored tears. Even though a jagged patchwork of brown and green carpeted the miniature ground 10,000 feet below me, the only image filling my eyes while I pressed my sunburned face against the thick plexiglass was that of my 7 ebony-skinned brothers waving goodbye as the wheels of our small charter plane lifted off of the red earth.

Somewhere down on the faraway ground I caught a tiny flash of red among even tinier flashes of white…a lone Masai tending his heard as they grazed. And the silent weeping began afresh. The Masai could not be more different from me and the life I had grown comfortable with. Their cow-dung huts and primitive lifestyle were a far stretch at best from the tapestry-draped, chandelier-clad home and quasi-frenetic existence that had come to to exemplify my world, half a planet away and what felt like half a lifetime ago.

But in this wild and beautiful land where roaming elephants are the neighborhood menace and hungry, prowling lions are the things that go bump in the night, I witnessed a simplicity that left me dazed and dazzled by its purity. I experienced a connection– not just to life but to actually living– that not only called into question every excuse I have harbored for not creating my dreams but also the very longitudes and latitudes of my own soul’s mapping. I had traveled across many oceans and continents to come and teach, not knowing then that I had actually arrived in this strangely magical place to learn.

As we climbed higher into the cloud-dressed Kenyan sky and the orange-leaf tree corrals fell deeper into the growing distance behind me, a sharp aching in the center my chest have rise to a new wave of tears. It was family that had lined the side of the tiny airstrip, waving until our plane was gone from view. I was not only leaving behind my cow, gifted to me by one of my new Masai brothers in a gesture of unfathomable honor and generosity, but I was leaving behind a sizable piece of my heart. And I suppose that ache will remain somewhere inside me until I walk the trails and roads of the Mara once again