The crabs were replicating the myth of Sisyphus on Zanzibar’s eastern shore: they sprinted sideways, drilling perfect holes the tide would erase by noon. From the hotel’s sandy beach, I recognized the pattern: build, erase, repeat. They seemed happy dancing, fighting, and flirting across their temporary kingdom. Time moves faster at fifty; if I can’t slow the clock, I can at least choose the course. When time speeds up, attention has to slow down.
This beach was my choice. As my birthday approached, I decided Athens could wait; I wanted that morning to arrive with unfamiliar light. My husband, three daughters, and mother came too because a milestone birthday is better when celebrated together. We chose Tanzania for its ability to encompass both sea and land in a single week: Zanzibar’s reefs and shores first, followed by the Serengeti’s plains. I also carried a private thread from fifteen years earlier, when Kenya first taught me how Africa reorganizes light, a memory I didn’t want to reduce to nostalgia but to build upon with fresh eyes. As a visual artist, I needed to see how this light would reorganize my work.
The Blue Lagoon reef delivered on that promise of unfamiliar light. We paddled in transparent canoes over glass-clear, turquoise water and observed the fish: Parrotfish flashed electric blues and greens, trumpetfish hovered like driftwood, clownfish burned orange against purple anemones, while giant clams opened their velvet mantles. As we snorkeled, the coral rose like miniature cities that were close enough to tempt a hand, close enough to forbid it. Beauty has rules here. Look, don’t touch. While the sea taught us focus, the city would insist on respect.
Changing Scales
While the sea taught us focus, the city would insist on respect. UNESCO-protected Stone Town compressed centuries into two hours. The carved doors, many studded with metal, carry layered patterns worn smooth by salt and touch. Histories stacked in wood rather than a tidy code. Each door a declaration: I survived, I prospered, I remember. Freddie Mercury was born in one of these houses; his life was another story of transformation, another kind of escape. We continued through the smells and noise of the food market and headed toward the Slave Trade Museum. A mixed choir was singing in the Anglican Cathedral; their voices carried into the street. Nearby, in the museum’s slave cells, the rooms are so small that you feel the walls closing in. Outside in the courtyard, a sculptural installation that honors the memory of Zanzibar’s dark history. We left with our voices lowered; the next lesson wouldn’t be volume—it would be scale.
And the Serengeti indeed changed the scale. A turboprop set us down at Seronera airstrip, and two giraffes were grazing the trees just outside the tiny airport—indifferent to us and unforgettable for it. From above, I’d seen the circular order of the Maasai settlements; on the ground, a savanna of sparse trees and long planes of color stretched out. It was a different vastness than the ocean, both drier and tougher, which reminded me of the West Texas drive my husband and I had made to Marfa. Our unfenced lodge is perched on a hillside, with baboons appearing near the rooms in the morning as if conducting inspections. My mother delighted in their boldness. At night, we slept with the balcony door open. The first time I heard the lions, I thought someone with deep bronchitis was coughing in the dark, and then the chest answered back and the night rearranged itself. A roar does that—it tells you whose house you’re in.
We had a half-day drive and one full day to understand the plain’s topography. Lions dissolved into tawny grass, invisible until they shifted. A leopard draped over an acacia branch, her gazelle slung below—a composition in counterweights. Under a single tree, elephants held to the shade. Two calves slept while the adults stood quietly nearby. Seeing them unhurried in their own territory, not performing for us but simply existing, made me feel properly small—a visitor who could be dismissed with a single head shake. Here, they had the power; we had only permission. Zebras created a live Vasarely painting—Op Art in motion. The Kigelia trees hung sausage-shaped fruit like giant pendulums. Buffalo watched us with quiet suspicion, hippos submerged to their nostrils, monkeys with their babies, ostriches, solitary hyenas, a still crocodile, impalas and gazelles with their tails flicking like metronomes. Everything moved with purpose until the road decided to hold us still.
Night rain had turned dirt to deception—our jeep sank twice into puddles that looked ankle-deep but swallowed wheels. While we waited for rescue, two other vehicles joined our mud meditation. Our guide used the time to teach: “The leopard we saw? She waited many days for that kill. Patience.” The plain doesn’t negotiate, it explains. “Pole pole,” everyone said. Slowly, slowly. In Swahili, it’s not just advice but physics: at the right speed, you actually see what you came to visit. Speed decides what exists; rushing deletes half of it. Back in my studio, these experiences aren’t just travel souvenirs, but working tools: ‘Pole pole’ is now my studio motto. The work knows its own timing; I do not need to force it.
If there’s something portable here, it’s simple. Choose your speed. Rushing isn’t efficiency, it’s erasure. Build for impermanence, not despite the tide but because of it. Back on Zanzibar’s shore, the crabs kept drilling their vanishing city. That isn’t tragedy; it’s choreography. The Serengeti runs on the same loop: gazelles feed the leopards, which in turn hunt them again. Different ecosystems, same instruction. Renewal depends on what is taken away. Like Sisyphus, they’ve turned repetition into ritual. Having completed 50 orbits around the sun is enough to see patterns repeat and break. I carry this home to my works waiting in Athens and Houston: build, erase, begin. Again.
Add a Comment