Land of Fever. Home of My Heart.

I have lost count of columns as I walk down streets that once walked emperors, kings, beggars, and thieves, but now few feet find their way along the broken cobblestones where only weeds grow and no seeds are sown. The caws of crows echo down empty corridors as I stand alone among the ruins of these once great cities in awe of man's defiance of time for thousands of years have past since these empires have fallen, these cities have crumbled and all that remains are ruins, all that is left are their names. All is impermanent. Even this. 

Sometimes I like to close my eyes and imagine what these places were like at the height of their glory, but most of the time I like to keep my eyes open and gaze out across a landscape that knows no time, for there lies the desert: land of fever, keeper of eternity, home of my heart. 

Here there are no structures made by man, only mountains carved by the wind and if you stand in silence you can still feel the sea. Here lives a beauty so raw that it has created a raw vulnerability within me and although my days here are brief I have allowed myself to get lost in this land of endless eternities and in this getting lost I have found what I have been seeking: silence, stillness, peace. 

The wind lifts, creating a small tornado that lasts no longer than a moment but still long enough to arouse me from my reverie and in this awakening I gather a handful of sand and allow it to slip through my fingers, watching each grain fall, like civilizations, back to the earth with the name Ozymandias upon my lips, remembering, always remembering, that my time will come to an end and to this sand I will return and I will be home.

Where the Beauty Is...

I have forgotten how to tell time. Days pass and I neither mourn their passage nor care where they go. Hours have become arbitrary and the only indication that the world continues to spin is the transition from light to darkness or the darkness to light. Beirut does this to you, Lebanon does this to you; so warm its welcome, so fervent its embrace that the past and future collapse into the present rendering any notion of past or future unnecessary. 

This is not to say that the past and the future have no place here for reminders of near and distant pasts are found in partly excavated Roman forums and building riddled with bullet holes near collapse that have been abandoned since the war and the future springs forth in the building and rebuilding of a city that has stood for as many millennia as my feet has toes. And so to walk in the midst of this is to have no choice but to live only in the present; the space in which life happens, a life I had only wished to live until now. 

Here is where jasmine so profusely permeates the air that you have to stop and beg for spring to stay forever if only just for this and the purple petals or the jacaranda brighten the very same streets that for fifteen years only knew war. This same sweet welcome is mirrored in the disposition of those who call this place home and also those who have no home to call their own and their kindness after kindness extends like the coast of the Mediterranean the length of this small country with only the biggest of hearts. 

But I will not remain ignorant and paint a picture of Lebanon filled with only sunshine and rainbows. Like all nations it is host to a myriad of problems that is only exacerbated by the war in Syria and the continued conflict with the state to the south, but it is its resilience in the face of all of this, its adamant refusal to be hindered by its history and its inability to hold the future in certainty that makes it so easy to fall in love with Lebanon and in love I will stay and Lebanon will be the standard to which I will hold all other countries on this pilgrimage for it is in Lebanon that I have learned not to live in the shadow of the past or in fear of the future, but to stay present, always present, because that is where the beauty is.

Before the Beginning

India was never a place that called my name. I never longed for it in the way that I long for the lands to come and still I am here nevertheless. I live without regret, except perhaps for having chosen April as my month of departure for the sweetness of spring, which had only just begun in New York, is no match for the swelter of the subcontinent. 

Since my time in India is but brief, I will not be so arrogant or ignorant to speak of things I do not and may not ever understand. I will only tell of what I have witnessed. For so intricately entwined, so deeply entrenched are the history and culture of this place that it is no small wonder that it was Alexander who was conquered by India thousands of years ago and not he who conquered it. And even now, having forgotten the chrysoprase necklace that I meant to wear around my neck, I realize, like Alexander, how easy it is here to step into the arms of fallen empires to be embraced one moment only to be shunned the next. 

In Jaipur I encountered palaces of pink and forts of amber. In Delhi there were Muslim mosques and Mogul mausoleums standing side by side with Sikh and Hindu temples. In all of these places I cannot help but imagine what India had been like in all of its majesty, but who am I to say that there is not a certain majesty to India at present?

In Varanasi, when both the sun and the heat were at their highest, I visited a slum along the river where children were covered in sand and little else. How they reached for my hand before I even realized that they were there. And so again and again I threw them in the air as they shrieked with laughter. How light they were. How light, how heavy this is. After the setting of the sun I wandered down to the ghats to witness what I have never witnessed before. Here, children jumped into the dark waters as men prepared the dead for their final ritual. A young Indian man, born in this city of Shiva, sat by my side. He spoke of happiness, he spoke of energy, he spoke of peace

At the Taj Mahal, my guide walked slowly and it was only later that he revealed that he had been in an accident; thrown from the back of a motorbike and now has metal rods rather than bones in his legs. And so together we walked slowly and our conversation flowed between the history of this place and the story of his life; somewhere on the brink of past and present, life and death. Of the place of his birth, he repeated the words written by Persian poet Amir Khusru:“If there is a paradise upon earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.” And for a moment I am jealous of his home for I have yet to find a paradise of my own. But it is only a fleeting jealously until I remembered that I was standing in front of a centuries old wonder of the world weaving my hands through latticed screens and tracing my fingers around floral patterns made of agate, jade, and onyx and that this, too, was paradise.

That night the rickshaw driver, long used to these wild and reckless roads that make even thunder road look tame, drove the wrong way down a one way street, expelling any doubt that I might have had that he had no idea what he was doing with these few words:

“This is India, Madam. Nothing is impossible.”

That is why I now find myself at the beach in Goa, my paradise, my place of possibilities where the sound of the ocean echoes in the night. Although it is past midnight I do not sleep; awake with the awareness that I am on the wrong side of the sea. For it is the lands across the way that call my name in the darkness. Soon enough will I be there for that is where this real journey will begin. But for now, I am here. For now I am India. 

Eventually sleep does arrive, ridden on the backs of waves that roar and whisper only this:

“This is India, Madam. Nothing is impossible.”

Desiderata and Dustscweag in Delhi

Thirty six years, seven months, and twenty days: that is how long it has taken me to arrive in this place, in this lifetime. And yet, since my arrival, it feels as if entire lifetimes have been lived. 

At night, always at night, I entered this land of Bharata Varsha. Over and over again I return to these places of convergence seeking refuge in all that rises from this earth in the hope that I, too, shall riseIn the morning I awaken to all that is Delhi. Here resides a population that swells and surges like the waters of the coming monsoons, which makes finding oneself among sixteen million people both a madness tempered and a madness unleashed.

Before the temperature crests over one hundred degrees I walk through the throngs of the crowd in air so thick with heat and history that it denies any and all ability to move forward. Amid the dust and refuse that scatter the street, there is movement. Even held in the sway are buildings left unfinished, architecture incomplete, and ruins which speak of an unstoppable entropy, a physics divine. On their walls is written words in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, English, and Arabic. Reading them from right to left and then from left to right they become a dizzying spiral of language that had once been borne from this land and has returned once more. 

Now unwilling to move I stand in wait of the flood, but it is not water that washes over me, rather it is the sweet scent of sweet breads that rise with the heat. A moment after comes the pungent aromas of spice and incense which mingle with the clouded exhaust of diesel engines. On the beds of carts drawn by horses and camels and the hands of men is found papayas, watermelon, pumpkin, and lime; all cut open to reveal the life within, their rinds strewn on the ground to be grazed on by sacred cows, both swollen and sunken, and wild dogs who will never know what it means to be tamed. From somewhere near or far, the frangrance of frangipani in full bloom strengthens and softens with the comings and goings of motorbikes, rickshaws, and taxis passing from here to there. 

The breaking of the levy finally occurs in the rushing and sauntering of those I am surrounded by: men in lunghis, women in burkas with charcoal lined eyes, others in sarees of saffron, crimson, aurelian, and sage, all with henna laced skin. There are listless men with black soled feet who lay on their sides wherever shade might be found as children walk through traffic carrying the weight of the world in their arms in the form of another child; what ease and heaviness there is in their burden. 

In this stillness, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth all vie to be the first to discern what is seen, what is heard, and what is tasted. But I know that to attempt to take it all in is to rely on the belief that one breath of air, one sip of water is enough to sustain all of life; an impossibility. 

Still I close my eyes. This is how I commit such moments to memory. 

And then, a horn blares, returning me to the reality in which I am now immersed. It is issued from a bus that is filled to capacity, the driver barely visible behind the soot stained windshield. 

No longer silent, no longer still, I see that all of life is here on these streets, but it is only a patina, simply a scratch on the surface and no more. It, too, barely visible and unable to reveal all that is concealed below. 

Knowing that the brevity of my stay here will not allow any further passage into this world still I cling to this breath, attaching all other breaths to this moment. I drink from this cup. It is empty and it is full. 

Derive

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it is still, perhaps, the greater.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Fellowship of the Ring

In America, in New York, on Long Island it is November no longer, but since November barely a day has passed that I have not awakened before sunrise on the verge of tears wondering just how long this darkness will last; how long before the arrival of light.

And then I remember that after the passage of winter and the presence of spring, soon it will be summer, the softest of seasons when even the wildness of the world might be forgotten when this darkness is exchanged for light, if only for a little while.

And when June arrives it might be easy to stay here in this place, but to stay for summer would create the opposite in my heart and to remain on this island is to remain as an island itself: isolated, remote, and closed off from the rest of the world that it is has no other choice than to be a part of, a world it cannot remain separated from; a world ravaged by war, disrupted by disease, and plagued by politics over which we often have no control, but a world where also is found beauty and hope and passion and perseverance. Away from this island I know I will encounter both and both will be embraced. Many miles away from this island my pilgrimage will begin.

It is difficult to explain the meaning of this journey, for a pilgrimage is a most sacred and intimate endeavor. One day, words will come, found in all of the places in which they have been waiting: among the dust and ruins of ancient civilizations, in sunrises over seas and sunsets over deserts, in languages I do not yet speak, and in silence, always in silence. Until that day I will follow the lines of the earth and the reflection of rivers in the stars above. I will follow in the footsteps of wayfarers and wanderers, troubadours and Templars, rovers and roamers, on a pilgrimage through all of the places that pilgrims have passed. And when words do arrive I will invite them to stay just long enough to be written down and here they will be shared.

Until then…Ultreya.