Kuuliza si ujinga

There is something beautiful about harvesting corn. Standing in the sun surrounded by corn stalks, the blue sky overhead. The colors of the world are vivid and pure: blue sky, brown earth, golden corn. You peel back the leaves around the corn cobs, revealing golden tassels that look like blond hair, then the golden kernels of the corn itself.
The work is easy, repetitive. And yet it feels significant in a deep and undescribable way. Peeling the leaves off the ears of corn, throwing the cobs into piles, you feel yourself a part of the rhythm of life. In December, when you reached your village, this soil was bare but for a few stubby pieces of grass. In early January, you hoed it with a lot of help from neighbors. In mid-January, a neighbor planted corn and beans for you, because those are the crops that everyone plants. You watched the corn sprout from the soil, and then grow tall and green. For two months it formed an emerald fence around your garden. And then, slowly, it began to turn brown. The stalks became dry; the ears golden. And now you're out in the field, piling the corn cobs, breaking the stalks. Two days of work, a pile of corn drying in your courtyard, the cornstalks carted away to feed to a neighbor's cow. And now we're back at the beginning, the land bare and empty, only a few blades of grass hinting at its fertility.
The cycle of the seasons. The cycle of birth and death, growing and dying. A cycle which has set the days of all human lives until very recently, and which still measures the rhythm of life in a rural village. It can be a hard cycle, an exhausting cycle, a cycle full of blisters and sweat and hands stained with dirt. But at it's deepest level, there is something beautiful about it. In an often unstable existence, there is something calming and peaceful about being so close to the eternal cycle of life.