Ethiopia journal: Time warp

While waiting for take-out “tekeway” food to bring back to the guest house:

It’s amazing to me how much closer to the past I feel here. The distance is surprisingly (geography + time lapse), not just (time). I feels as if I have stepped back thousands of years, even though there are still cell phones ringing around me. This is the sort of thing poets try to stretch language to capture. I dare not. If the nations are a drop in the bucket and a thousand years like a day to the Lord, then only a few days have past to the holy spirit breathing inside me.

Speaking of breath, the car has stopped, breathing that is. Yosef, the driver, suspects an electrical problem. Distributor cap maybe. You can light a candle with a small match. You can light a fireball of petrol with a spark. But you need two thousand sparks a minute to drive across Addis and for that you need a spinning lighting rod, fit tight together like the marble stairs of the temple – and not one stone was left on top of the other when Titus Flavius was finished with Jerusalem. They are ground to powder now at the foot of mount Horeb. But our poor automobile may yet not have the same fate. The stroke of it’s reckoning has not yet landed – will not land tonight. I am not a prophet nor the son of a prophet. But I am the son of a mechanic and I hear it beeping its horn through the crowded alleys of Bole sub city before the sun sets again.