“Why are you going there?!?” she asked when I told her of my plans to travel through the Levant and spend a significant amount of time in Turkey. This was only to be a small portion of the journey I was about to undertake, but it was these regions, the ones where peace often seems an impossibility, which apparently alarmed her the most.
“It is so dangerous.” She continued as if her words were going to deter me from departing on this pilgrimage that I spent years dreaming of and months planning.
They did not.
But the thing is, I could have listened to her, I could have believed her, just as I could have believed that America needed to be made great again or that the world was flat, but I have learned, sometimes with ease and sometimes with difficulty, not to believe all I have been told. Besides, watching the news here in America one learns all too quickly that acts of terrorism are not merely relegated to the regions in which I intended to travel, but are also being carried out randomly and devastatingly across American soil, mostly by citizens of this country.
So with all of this in mind I offered to her my own safety concerns regarding my own country after which she just repeated again and again, “It is not the same. It is not the same. It is not the same.”
And perhaps for her it is not the same for sometimes the enemy within is so much easier to ignore than the supposed enemies without. But I did not leave America because of enemies. I left America because in this life I have been burdened and I have been blessed with this thing called HOPE. It is a burden because it might render me naïve when faced with the realities of this world, but it is a blessing because in the face of these realities it allows me to persevere. And this hope was what called me out into the world because for the shortest amount of time, in the wake of last November, I had lost my hope and I feared that it might never return.
And so in April of this year I set out on a pilgrimage haphazardly tracing the Templar Trail from the Levant to Santiago de Compostela in the hope that this hope, thought to be lost, might be found somewhere out there in the world, even among the ruins.
And while this journey first led me to India, it was in Lebanon where my pilgrimage truly began. Only two people I know have been to Lebanon before. One, an Israeli soldier with the special forces sent to fight against Hezbollah during the invasion of 2006. The other, an American friend who found herself in Lebanon at the very same time admiring, from a rooftop, all of the pretty fireworks exploding in the distance, only to be reminded that these were most certainly not fireworks and that if she were to stand just a little closer she would learn that these so-called fireworks are the furthest thing from pretty.
Now I could have brought with me to Lebanon my fears, but that is not why I went. I went by myself, alone as a woman, quitting her job to pursue even greater passions: that of writing, that of learning, and that of speaking to strangers. I went to listen, to learn, to witness, and to be made aware of all of the realities that exist that are so very different than my own so that I might understand this world and its people just a little bit more.
In Arabic, the word for this region is Mashriq meaning the “place of sunrise", the name is derived from the verb sharaqa, which means (شرق) "to shine, illuminate, radiate" and "to rise" and it was my hope that this land would do the very same thing to my soul.
I touched down in Beirut on the 8th of May and as I left the airport it was not in the rising, but in the setting of the sun over the Mediterranean that I first glimpsed just how beautiful Beirut could be and as I rolled down the windows to take in my new surroundings the scent of jasmine so profusely permeated the air that I wanted to stop the cab just to beg spring to stay forever for this is what spring does to a soul: it gives it hope.
But you soon learn when zigzagging through the streets of Beirut that all is not beautiful. Even twenty-seven years after the end of the war, there are still buildings riddled with bullet holes, shattered windows, broken glass, and houses never to be lived in again, some still with laundry hanging from their balconies.
And so it is that on the streets of Beirut you find yourself standing somewhere between beauty and destruction trying to make sense of it all, which can’t be done all on your own. It must be done with one another; this is how we get through it all. Because alone, those first few days in Lebanon were just too much: too much war, too much destruction, too much sadness, too much, too much, too much.
As days progressed I grew more and more brave and began to seek out those conversations that would help me to understand just how resilient we are as human beings even when faced with our own destructiveness.
And I spoke to everyone. I spoke with John who owned the shop on the corner whose family arrived from Armenia to escape the genocide. I spoke to Mohammed who was born Palestinian, but not in Palestine. I spoke with Syrian refugees who told me time and again that the beauty of Lebanon was nothing compared to that of Syria. And I spoke with Lebanese who remembered the war. How could they forget? They too believed that everything was too much, but they had such a way of saying it that rather than allowing your heart to be broken further, they set your heart at ease.
These conversations continued as I traveled through Jordan where I spent time with Bedouins who shared with me their views of the world. They told me what they thought about religion and love, war and Daesh. And not a day went by on this journey that I did not speak to someone new and learn about their lives, their dreams, their hopes, and their histories.
In Israel the conversations grew more difficult because the confrontations became more apparent: in walls and settlements, at bus stops and in taxicabs, and even at the holiest of sites. It was enough to bring tears to my eyes and take the breath from my lungs, so much so that I felt a suffocation that I have never felt before and hope to never feel again. These were the days when I learned that sometimes too much is just that: too much.
But no matter how difficult these conversations became I still continued to seek out these ever so necessary exchanges for without these encounters with near and distant histories, without being made aware of just how ugly this world could be, I might never have been able to see its beauty either and as time wore on in these travels I learned what other things could also be too much and, at the same time, never enough.
Before departing for Turkey I was left to wonder how it is that both are possible; how can too much and never enough be sometimes one and the same? How can I walk down the streets of Beirut and in one moment see what is left of a hotel that still rises high above the city despite the holes in it that were never intended as entryways and in another receive a flower from a complete stranger just for saying hello as I passed? How can I stand with my feet in the River Jordan and know that for some that this is the closest that they will ever come to the other side? How can a concrete wall divide the world?
Perhaps it is because this whole region lies on the seam of two worlds, a seam that can just as easily be ripped apart as it can be sown together and perhaps it is only by titillating on this edge between that which is light and that which is heavy that somehow we find balance in our lives.
Now, had I allowed this fear of the unknown to eclipse my excitement for it, I might have kept my eyes closed and not seen all that must be seen when traveling throughout the world: war and genocide, oppression and grief, sorrow and sadness. And, more devastatingly, I might have kept my heart closed and not felt the other side of it: the intensity of life, its beauty, its light, and its grace, and with such a closed heart I may never have opened it to a happiness that I never knew existed until the moment I arrived in Turkey when my heart swelled just at the sight of Istanbul.
A city, too, that lives on the edge of past and present, east and west, modern and everything but and for the rest of my journey I continued to dance along this edge, even going so far as to walk five hundred miles across the north coast of Spain to reflect upon it all. And it was there among mountains and somewhere beyond the sea that I learned that it is only here, in the place where balance is found, that there is no burden that cannot be borne, not even that of hope.