Threading the Needle

At the foot of the street that leads in one direction to the spot of Jesus' heavenly ascension and in another to the cemetery of The Mount of Olives, I watch two Arab boys ride atop a stallion and part the stream of honking cars that is going nowhere soon. The horse is perspiring; you can see it's been overworked in the heat, its pulsing veins telling a story of how its sliced the traffic in two, time and again.

The boys yell something that's lost in the swell of burning coffee and pilgrims and camera snaps, and then a white kefiya is thrown in the air. Stark against the stallion's midnight skin, it hangs above the cars, the heads of the boys, level with the ground from where Jesus might have jumped. In its dust, Jahelia. What air it claims is majnoon -- the inspired madness of the desert. The dust -- what flies from skin to skin to mouth to hoof is the same holy indivisible companion of those who first rode this mountain on horseback, wearing kefiyas, stopping for water, only to abandon one promise and begin another: The City and its Walls. Modern, sublime, loose, infirm, always, always turning to the wild for origin.