Finally, the woman at the exit gate takes a stand. She’s maybe-twenty-one in army issue, red-hair tight into a bun, right ear noticeably smaller than the left.
Why have you come to this country? She asks.
Tourism, I mumble. Then: Jerusalem—beautiful, no?
I see you’re going to Egypt also. Why?
Pyramids, I respond. Beautiful also.
We barter. When she’s incredulous, ready to disbelieve everything, she asks:
Do you know anyone in Jerusalem?
My wife, I say. Then with more force: She’s Jewish. She’s come on a research grant to write poetry.
Worse I continue: Her grandmother lived through pogroms, uprisings, Auschwitz.
This takes me to the first sutra of the Magnetic Travel-for-Poetry Kit:
What a gatekeeper wants—the price of your passage—to acknowledge that you do really belong. You may disrupt only if you also, at-once, continue.
So shapes my first key to the Holy Land. The woman I love is also a seeker.
*******************
When Elana surprises me at the airport, she’s come with Shaadi a Palestinian Priest and a friend from Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam (an intentional community where Palestinians and Israelis live/ make community).
Since it’s Shabbat, there’s few cars. Even then, Shaadi takes the long quiet road. He carries the heaviness of peace-workers who’ve suffered setbacks, who refuse to quit.
Along the way to Jerusalem / Yerushalayim / Al Quds he points out settlements and Arab villages. Many of the settlements are newly built. Walls spring up on both sides of the road. From one vantage point, the walls are without character, the same peach-white as the stones of the mountains around us. As we rise into the steppes: an occasional glimpse of a soldier at a checkpoint, a powerline, two children in kipas jumping on an old well.
In a few places, Shaadi mentions, the Wall is enlivened. In Ramallah graffiti speaks between stones. At one crossroads, a sliver of Tibetan prayer flags lull. Call.
Even Jerusalem, as we drive through the Old City, recognizes us first through its ramparts, towering fortress walls throughout history destroyed, re-imagined again.
As we come upon Damascus Gate, where a boy is waving a tee shirt for sale—Visit Palestine, Free Palestine it says—I can appreciate what the Gatekeeper whispers in my ear. He wants what I want. He knows I’d rather have my brew hot, but not scalding.
Sutra Dos:
The City will ask you to forget the graves under your house.
In exchange, the Gatekeeper will offer beauty, and why should you not take it, and why should you refuse such human gold as what the City’s memory wills to forget?
When Elana surprises me at the airport, she’s come with Shaadi a Palestinian Priest and a friend from Neve Shalom/Wahat al Salaam (an intentional community where Palestinians and Israelis live/ make community).
Since it’s Shabbat, there’s few cars. Even then, Shaadi takes the long quiet road. He carries the heaviness of peace-workers who’ve suffered setbacks, who refuse to quit.
Along the way to Jerusalem / Yerushalayim / Al Quds he points out settlements and Arab villages. Many of the settlements are newly built. Walls spring up on both sides of the road. From one vantage point, the walls are without character, the same peach-white as the stones of the mountains around us. As we rise into the steppes: an occasional glimpse of a soldier at a checkpoint, a powerline, two children in kipas jumping on an old well.
In a few places, Shaadi mentions, the Wall is enlivened. In Ramallah graffiti speaks between stones. At one crossroads, a sliver of Tibetan prayer flags lull. Call.
Even Jerusalem, as we drive through the Old City, recognizes us first through its ramparts, towering fortress walls throughout history destroyed, re-imagined again.
As we come upon Damascus Gate, where a boy is waving a tee shirt for sale—Visit Palestine, Free Palestine it says—I can appreciate what the Gatekeeper whispers in my ear. He wants what I want. He knows I’d rather have my brew hot, but not scalding.
Sutra Dos:
The City will ask you to forget the graves under your house.
In exchange, the Gatekeeper will offer beauty, and why should you not take it, and why should you refuse such human gold as what the City’s memory wills to forget?
Thanks for sharing these experiences, brotherman.
ReplyDeleteI wish you and Elana all the best and hope to see ya soon.
Word.