It Strengthens Your Heart To Be Alone In The Wilderness

Lifting the gate hatch, I cross into church territory and tuck my camera deep into my pocket. I quietly pass the monastery and walk towards the trail head that plummets to the Aegean Sea. Cold wind catches in my mouth as I begin to hike alone, down a muddy eroded staircase that twists and winds. Goats stop and stare at me, their collar bells chiming in the wind.

At the bottom of the staircase is a cave dwelling, a quiet place where monks stay on certain soul-full nights. There’s an altar set up inside with golden icons and beeswax candles.  As I continue walking, I realize that I’m standing atop a giant ancient archway that overlooks a gorge. So I swing my purse over my back and scramble down the side, using branches and roots for support. My boots  crunch against the marble rocks and the sound hurls itself like a slingshot. Slab walls tower above me. In the center of the stone valley, I’m completely exposed.

It strengthens your heart to be alone in the wilderness. And I've never been so alone. You can lose your identity in vastness.

The gorge opens onto the sea and everything is crooked. Moon-rock cliffs shoot out at odd angles from the shoreline like beached flying saucers and the sea seems to be tipping onto land.  I sit down, thinking I’ll meditate or at least contemplate this feeling. But nothing comes and I get up— almost too nervous to make the trek back. Marching through the gorge, I envision mythical heroes wandering through these landscapes, courageous people who never blurred boundaries. They kept their categories, their culture, their position, their limits, their strength. 

But with the sea crashing at my back, 

I find myself evaporating into impermanence with a rapidly beating heart. 

The Imam and his Wife

      The Imam and his wife sit as a king and queen in folding metal chairs. The young leader has long slender fingers that open and flick as he speaks. He makes an L-shape with his thumb and pointer-finger that twists by his head to express an idea. In between questions, he reaches for his wife's hand. The woman is draped in a black robe, bird-like and still. But her stillness makes the entire room fidget. Her skin is white as the walls and her painted down-cast eyes belong in an illuminated manuscript

       The audience is not used to this kind of beauty. They’re unsure whether to regard this woman as princess or slave. The California boys stare at her intently, waiting for her to move, for small signs of suffering and oppression. They are lost in exotic mystery and their ears close up as if underwater. Suddenly the wife’s laughter crashes in. She crosses her legs and the hem of her robe rises to reveal a pair of blue jeans and white socks with red hearts on them. And with this flash of red, white, and blue the boys chuckle and breathe easy.

Two Twenty Minute Writing Exercises

 #1. Description of Abraham from Jordan:

     Abraham is one of five local Bedouins allowed entrance into the touristy “Cave Bar” located right outside the gates of Petra. His dress is part gangster, part Bedouin. His jeans are slung low on his thick hips and his head is wrapped with a thin white cloth. This man constantly moves. When he sits and talks, he rocks back and forth. He acts out his stories, occasionally gripping the armchair to show someone’s surprise. He lets his words gain momentum as he swings and the tourists glare when he laughs with his tongue stuck out. His dark arms are not inked with a tribal roadmap like the rest of the Bedouins that pinpoints their site-specific heritage, their blood tie to the land. His movements are Western. He mimes out gestures from movies and magazines, but he tells me he will never visit America and he tells me he is stilling waiting to be allowed back into Jerusalem.

 #2. S.Y Agnon was the author of “Fable of the Goat,” a symbolic short story that describes the connection between Jews living in the diaspora and in Israel. In the story, a son travels and finds the Land of Israel. He sends for his father by tucking a note inside a goat’s ear and directing him back home. When the father fails to find the note, he slaughters the animal and thinks his son is lost forever. The goat represents many things, including the “easy” pathway to Israel, which has been destroyed. Below is an imagined dialogue between S.Y. Agnon, who came to Israel in the early 1900s and Abraham about the story. (Btw, the goat is magical and its milk tastes like Eden.)

           “It was stupid to kill the goat with milk and honey flowing from the udders,” Abraham puts his hands up to his chest, pats, and gestures milking his nipples.

            Agnon smirks and nods, shifting in his seat.

            “I think this goat was my brother actually.” Abraham lifts a glass of frothy beer to his lips. “The son killed my brother, sent him to his death. My goat brother, used to live in the mountains, caves—a happy life.” Abraham sets the glass down and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “The Bedouin have a saying: strong as the desert, soft as the sand, move like the wind, always free. Now his blood is spilled all over,” Abraham claps his hands and spreads them out in the air. “The old man killed the messenger.”

            “It is not your messenger,” Agnon says and takes a sip of tea.

“You see honey and milk, I see blood and sand. I cannot visit where my family has been buried. My blood,” Abraham extends his arms to show his tree-root veins.

“Yes but every Jew is tied to Israel. Deep in the ground, every Jew that has ever or will ever exist, is connected. The internal Israel and the physical Israel. All their ghost souls, all the people, belong in Israel.”

“It is my home too. Rocks, sky, water,” Abraham shakes his opened hand.

“ I am talking of a promise.”

Abraham sits back, raises his eyebrows, and cocks his head to the side. He shrugs and looks away, drumming his fingers against the armchair. “Strong as the desert, soft as the sand, move like the wind, always free,” he murmurs in a sing-song voice.

            

The City of Lions

  Tonight there is a Medieval festival in the Christian quarter of the Old City. Dancers attached to pulleys run up and down one of the ancient walls at a ninety degree angle. Dressed up as knights, they mime out a literal war-dance in spotlight.  They kick off the wall and spin, entangled.  Below, two men fight, striking each other's shields with swinging balls of fire. Deeper into the quarter, a crowd gathers around a fire breather. The man is dressed in peasant rags and spins a torch lit at opposite ends. His dark face is slick with moisture as he blows out flames. Everything suddenly becomes alive--a scene straight out of 1,001 Arabian Nights.  The peasant drops his torch to climb a suspended rope that extends into the night sky. He twists the cord around his body, folding, spinning, balancing. As he dances above us, rain suddenly breaks and I'm forced to wrap my scarf around my head like a Muslim. The rain pours down harder and harder and I cannot help but throw my head back and smile with all my heart: I'm here, I'm here.

Protest Night

      Young hipsters and middle-aged couples are pressed together holding up printed signs of protest. A student shouts into her bullhorn at the top of her lungs, her neck tight and bulging. The crowd leaves the sidewalks to start marching into the middle of the street. Above us, people are taking pictures from their balconies.  Cars honk and children wave as they watch us pass by. Police lights flash and traffic stops. I am surrounded by singing, clapping, happy people and am suddenly struck by how beautiful my generation is. Drummers beat behind us and I can feel their sound rising in my chest. Suddenly we sit down in the middle of an intersection flooded in lamplight. I never cared enough to protest before and now that I'm here in Israel, I finally feel free. I wonder about what I've been missing all this time. Why didn't I have a community? Why did I feel alone? Why didn't I take a chance? Why did I continue to listen to my parents?  Why didn't I yell at the top of my lungs? Why did I ever let myself feel helpless?

Rome

            We weave our way through cramped underground tunnels hundreds of feet below the Muslim quarter. These tunnels follow the perimeter of the Western Wall that extends underneath the ground towards the Dome of the Rock. This is the closest Jews can get to the foundation stone, the stone where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac. The wall is soft and dimpled with age. It is made up of gigantic stones with the largest being forty-five feet long and weighing more than fifty-eight elephants. Somehow, they were all pushed and lifted to form one great partition around the Second Temple. We continue through a series of branching caves until we reach an ancient aqueduct. There the tour guide explains that King Herod built the Second Temple as an international holy space. Jerusalem, you see, was meant to be a true city of peace. Unfortunately, the Romans sacked the temple seventy years after it was built. “Today, we hope Jerusalem will become a city of peace again. Rome is no more,” he says, “You will not see any Roman soldiers when we go back out. On another note, we will be exiting through the Muslim quarter and will be escorted by two armed security personnel, this is no joke.”

Our group leaves the ancient ruins far below and walks out into the crisp night air. The cobblestones are slick with lamplight and there are few people on the street. All the Muslim minarets are lit up with glowing tubes of green neon lights. The walls are lined with Arabic graffiti and signs advertising Biblical treasures. The security guard walks in front of me in jeans and a sweatshirt.  I can see a hand gun peeking out between his belt and boxers. He swaggers and turns his head back and forth.  Old Arab women weighed down by plastic shopping bags limp past merchants closing up their shops. A few Hasidic men with long side-locks and dark coats rush past. And I realize that the guns are not really for my protection for I know that we must be ok, if these religious men can pass through unharmed. The guns are to send a warning.  A man drops a load of heavy boxes behind us and the woman in front of me quickly turns around with eyes strained and scared. I want to shake her and say snap out of it, I want to stop this guard and tell him to leave, but instead we all move in closer to one another and I cannot tell if we are sheep or a shield wall. 

Resistance: A journal entry

            We sit around the table in candle light after all the dishes have been cleared. A girl mentions prospering pharmaceutical companies and I soon find myself revealing the ghost tracks between various business heads in America. The conversation zones in on cancer, and I mention some information a biochemist friend told me. Cancer is not so much the result of trace toxins in your food, your deodorant, your makeup, or your toothpaste, but your DNA breaking five times in the same place. Odds are, when it binds again it’ll get the code wrong and a mutation will occur. My friend looks at me with big hazel eyes, “So they know what causes cancer. You mean they can cure my Grandpa who’s on Chemo?”
            Our conversation flitters from soldiers, to AIDS, to animal testing. I mention a radio piece that made me cry: In the 1950s the U.S. government developed vaccinations by giving prisoners and patients in insane asylums various diseases.  One girl hesitates before she talks. “Think about it though,” she says, “I’m happy I don’t have Polio or Mumps. We’ve come a long way.”

            “You have to look at the origins of things,” I answer. “We accept these diseases as our reality, but they didn’t always exist. You need to look at how they got here. Some diseases are the result of living too close to our own shit, eating the brains of another creature, or feeding an animal its parent. Look 100 years into the future and civilization will have created one more disease we accept as a reality and who pays?”

            Suddenly, I feel I’m getting close to a tangible definition of what sustainability means. As my speech intensifies, I can see people withdrawing. It’s a fine line between preaching and explaining. As we all fall silent, I stare down at the table and can see the fluid line between government subsidies, banks, malnourished children, and wealthy pharmaceutical companies so well I could trace it. I sense I’m near the heart of the beast here in Jerusalem. And as I stand next to this wet, hot, beating organ I feel the urge to puncture it with my pen, to let thousands of years of blood spill out until everyone can see what they’re bathing in.