Keepers of the Story By Micah Springer

In 1993 when Micah Springer was 20, she, with a college friend, like so many other young USAers, when for a year long foreign adventure.
But these two very young women from Colorado didn’t go to France or Spain, they went to Africa.

They sure did have an adventure, a life changing one, but they changed those they met as well. They traveled poor, staying low to the earth, where the life, the action, is. Down were life is still connected to the earth, not sanitized and remote like the world they came from and eventually had to return to. What does that proximity to the earth mean to a human other than making one more dusty? I read here of deep and subtle things, the feel, the smell, the feet on the ground moving long distances that USAers would not even consider, especially out in the heat and wind and oh! yeah, lions. I read of transcendence from our western way, we who have lost ourselves in thought, mediating everything with our minds rather than living direct in the now. The book is about human love leading to trencendance form the thought ego. This love is not just for the person, but the world the person has emerged form, a world that is lost to most USAers.

The story is told with direct text meets the poetic, the only kind of language really functional in this kind of story. Micah Springer tells her story of deep earth love that she shares with a family in Kenya.
When I say deep earth love, it is not to evoke an image of hearts floating in air and happily ever after with something substantial to hold on to. I mean the place one goes, that place of vulnerability where all the warmth and light can reach and all the loss and pain penetrate. The place where one has to grow somehow to be able to digest it all, to find some warm peace again after the real polarity of life, love, immersion.
This is part of the sad joyous memoir by Micah Springer.

This is a blog about personal reactions to media, I don’t do “reviews”.
The book had me recalling my own very late youthful trip. It was not nearly as extreme, just Europe, mostly Spain, mostly Barcelona. And I was already older, in my 30s when I spent my almost year abroad.  
What in the book made me recall this is the intense emotional attachments that can transpire when USAers show up somewhere else. I too was with someone, actually riding on her youthful adventure, she was still only just into the 20s.This was in the mid-1980s just a few years before the main trip recounted in the book.

What hurts me now, when I think about it is what happened to the two seperate people who were a big part of our life in Barcelona. Alec and Maribel were our only friends and somehow on returning they were lost. The parent, whose apartment address they had for our USA contact moved or something, I forget the details. What matters is, we were there, we returned, they loved us, and we loved them in return, and they never heard from us again. That makes me feel ashamed and sad.
It makes me feel like some privileged USAer who was in Europe on a lark, met some wonderful open people and then vanished, as if we no longer needed and cared about them after they served their purpose for us.
That is a rotten feeling.

Things go on in the book that reminded me of this although in Springer’s story it’s more extreme, intimate, and fortunately doesn’t just end with back to USA and normal American life.
This is a thought provoking and emotionally satisfying memoir.

I came to the book through hearing Micah Springer on the podcast Tangentially Speaking, by Christopher Ryan. They had a nice chat. It’s archived if you are interested.