'The empty handed painter from your streets, is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets... the sky too, is folding over you... and it's all over now baby blue....'
See, times pass. The 60's are over. It is 2014 now, and it happens weekly that I look up from my routines and think 'this is it. I've been here, Nairobi 2014.' We are living history. We are shaping history. This music is transporting a myriad of meanings through space and time.
For a while I was at a loss to make sense of my years in Los Angeles. I wondered what the hell I had been doing there. If it had been a big mistake, leading me astray, delaying what really is important to me. And, as time passes, I realize that it is not so. Every little thing I have experienced, gone through, shaped is informing my very steps I am taking now that make me so happy, that are leading into deeper and deeper meanings. Nothing was futile. I can't deny that music plays a huge role in my life. I can't deny that the emotional landscapes I wandered through during those years are what I am working with now. I can't deny that this love I have known, so infused with all this music, was so insanely beautiful and meaningful. I can't shake it. This young man touched me so deeply, I can still feel it in every piece of my soul. My friends from that time continue to touch my life deeply. The things I learned about life, love, loss and art give substance to everything I am doing now.
A friend asked recently 'with all your years in Kenya - are you finally settling for a consistent career?'. I can't blame him - the strands of the things I have done seem so disparate, if not random. I have wondered a lot about my path, myself, I have doubted that what I did was right or whether I missed out on very important aspects - but I feel now so clearly, that it is all true. That it is all right. That it all comes together, in the end.
Who knows, if I can know this kind of love again. Who knows if I can leave the dead behind, and if they will stop following me. When I kissed you, I had a flash back and wondered how it was to kiss him. And I realized, I would never, never, never again kiss those lips I so dearly loved.
And that's ok. Because it's all over now Baby Blue.
