In Search of Silence. In Search of Stillness. In Search of Peace.

I am made for movement. Sitting still in simply not for me. Which is why, in my reckless youth I sought out everything that moves: sports, the sun, and the sea.[1] But now, with the years passing with the same suddenness and speed that was reveled when time was taken for granted and rebelled against now that I know for certain how little can be done to stop this time from passing, it is stillness that I seek; a stillness that can be found only in mountains.

And yet, even as I drag thirty behind me kicking and screaming to meet its fate of forty I am unwilling to give up my youth, just as I am unwilling to give up my love for the sea and that is why, in the beginning of August I found myself in the northeast corner of Spain about to begin an adventure that I knew so little about. Most days I did not know where I was going or how long it was to take to get there. I did not know the terrain over which I was to cross or the names of the towns that were to be passed through. I only knew that along this coastal route there was to be mountains and there was to be the sea. And that was enough.

Walking the Camino de Santiago was always the intention of this journey; I just began a little further east than most. But I chose to walk El Camino de Norte, a solitary route along the north coast of Spain instead of the heavily trafficked Via Francese because after four months of traveling through city after city, country after country, and walking among millions and millions of people, I needed silence, I needed stillness, I needed peace for I am solitary, I am stubborn, and I am competitive. Socially, these are not the most endearing qualities but when it comes to crossing almost an entire country on foot there is no other way I would rather be.

But it was not just the physicality of this pilgrimage that I was after- the demands of this trek were enough to make me question my sanity every morning when the alarm rang before sunrise, every time I strapped twenty pounds on my back just to carry it with me for miles on end, every switchback, every ascent, every descent, every step, every day for thirty days- what I really sought was the e-motionality of this journey because it is only here, between mountains and oceans that I was left with no other choice but to reflect upon these very same heights and depths within myself.

And reflect I did as I walked up and down, down and up for four hundred and eighty-eight miles, sometimes cursing and damning the days that were difficult (which were many), but mostly walking in wonder and awe of this world. I walked over unnamed mountains, across beaches so long that the tide changed as I made my way from one end to the other, down backcountry roads that make you care little of the existence of cities, passing vineyards whose grapes will one day yield Rioja and Txakoli, and through wild fields of wildflowers that make you realize how unnecessary it is to be tamed.

And with every step I learned, like mountains, like the sea, when it is better to be rock, when it is better to be water, and when it is better to be something in between. And with every step I learned how exactly it is, as we move through mountains, as we swim through the sea, that WE FIND WHAT WE SEEK. So much so that when I arrived at Santiago de Compostela; the place where it is said to be not the end of this journey, but only the beginning, it was the mountains I wished to return to. I wished to return to the sea. Because it was only there, in the space between all that makes me hollow and all that makes me whole, where I finally found stillness, where I finally found silence, and where I finally found peace.

[1] I know that the sun stands “fixed” in the sky and that it is the earth that revolves around this big ball of fire, but please do not take my love of alliteration away from me.

The Becoming

Zawj: one of my favorite words in Arabic. I love the hardness of its beginning and the softness of its end. Translated into Turkish the word is koja and in the Balkans it is suprug. I know these words because for the past three months, as I have travelled through these countries, I have been asked the same question using all of these different words, which mean the very same thing: husband.

As in:

"Where is your husband?" 

This question is followed quickly by a second question: 

"Where are your children?" 

And then the third, asked in a disbelief unheard of since the proposition of the roundness of the world. 

"You are alone?"

And even after being asked these questions over and over again I still do not know exactly how to answer. 

Do I speak of my divorce? My abortion? My uncertainty, as the years quicken and my cycle slows, if children are to be found in my fate?

Do I say that my former husband is somewhere in South Africa with a new wife and a child of their own? 

Do I offer my singularity in a world of duplicity and even multiplicity? 

And how do I graciously admit the absence of a husband and, with the same grace, deny the proposal of marriage that inevitably follows?

I am neither uncomfortable with these questions nor do they offend me. More often than not they come from a place of curiosity and not condemnation. But what does concern me is how can it be that in 2017, a woman alone in the world is still regarded as an all too modern phenomenon? How is it that most of these men (and often women) have never heard of the forces which are Freya Stark, Ching Shih, Laskarina Barbailno, or the countless other women who dared to call the world their own?

Perhaps were we taught that history abounds, has always abounded, will always abound with women who have set out into the world alone without husbands, without children, and without any care given as to what society thinks of them, then these simple questions would give way to more important inquiries:

Where did you go?

What did you do? 

What did you see?

Who did you speak to? What did you speak of?

How did it change you, transform you, give shape to the woman that you have become?

For I may not have simple answers to simple questions, but man oh man, I sure as heck can tell you of the woman I am forever becoming.

Riding in the Cars of Strangers

I have come to rely on my extremities: my feet for walking, my ears for listening, my hands for breaking bread,  and, most recently, it is my thumbs that have been put to good use for I have come to realize that there is no better way to get from one place to another, one country to another in the Balkan mountains without a car than hitchhiking. 

And so it is in the middle of July, in the middle of these mountains I departed Bosnia in the same way as I arrived: as a unexpected passenger in the cars of two women who separately, but somehow together, refused to leave another woman stranded on the road. 

They were so very similar except for one stark contrast: Lubicje is a Serbian Orthodox and Adina is a Bosnian Muslim. Other than that their differences were few. They were about the same age; one had only just entered her sixth decade and the other was soon to leave it. Like me, life had rendered them single and they both traveled alone to the mountains of Montenegro and the coast of Croatia and I had the sense that when the years continue to pass as they have in my life I could be either one of these women. 

In their English, which they spoke with the quiet confidence of those that learned this language not first, but second, they asked me if I was scared to be traveling alone to which I always answer no. How else am I to have these experiences and these conversations? 

And so our conversations came with ease, escaping from and returning to the past as the miles and the mountains unfolded before us. 

Neither woman spoke of those three years and eight months of war between their countries; only the years before and the years after. 

With reverence they spoke of Tito and how their experiences with communism were better than their experiences without. So much so that I began to believe that, given the opportunity, they would go back to the way things were before the death of Tito, before the wall fell, before the wars began. I sensed their longing for one country under one leader rather than what they have become: a once great nation now divided; former Yugoslavians against former Yugoslavians. 

With the kilometers came comfort and Lubicye began to recall eighty-seven days in 1999 and Adina told how she fled Bosnia in 1992 and sought refuge in Germany. She has been there for twenty-five years. She has been there ever since. 

These are the days, these are the years that are not only remembered, they are counted. Perhaps it is only the ticking of time that keeps people sane during the madness. 

They both shared the belief that it is politics and not people that wreck havoc on this world. They both understood that war was not the answer and that perhaps there were no answers, just as there is no truth. There is only life; complicated cruel beautiful life. 

And as we drew closer to our destination I began to count all of my blessings on all of my extremities for being able to share this journey with these women, to be able to share in their histories, and their presence. 

And I thought that maybe this lonely lonely world would not seem so lonely if only we stopped and picked each other up every once in a while for it is only by having these conversations that we learn to understand one another; it is how we get from one place to another. 

What Has Been Promised. What Has Been Broken

"Isn't it amazing?" she asked, expecting my answer to be as enthusiastic as her question. We were standing in line at a bakery near the sea in Tel Aviv where had brought her bicycle into this already small space as if it was the most natural thing in the world.  Perhaps from this neighborhood she could not see the wall that had been built between the State of Israel and the disputed territories of Palestine. Maybe at so early an hour she had yet to have the conversation with the Palestinian cab driver that I had only days before in which he welcomed my mother and I to his big prison, which some days were blessed with electricity and running water and others were not.  And maybe she might never have the conversation that I had in Lebanon with another Palestinian man who carries with him papers of an inordinate size that speak not of citizenship or a country to which he belonged, but of his lack thereof. Perhaps she might never hear the ache in the voice of a man who longed for a home that he would never ever see.  Maybe concentrating only on her coffee she is able to ignore this world that collapses and not expands all around her. Maybe from the height of her bicycle seat she sees the way in which children carry the weight of the metallic world so recklessly across their shoulders as a means of protection and not as I see it: a phenomenon so unnerving that my skin crawls and my heart breaks. Maybe, from the freedom of her bicycle she is able to breathe the air that suffocates me here in this place.  

So as I sit on the plane and scroll through photographs of these past ten days: a desert without end, a sea without life, graffiti over a decade old that tells the story of a conflict that is too old to be forgotten, grounds of persecution, crucifixion, and ascension in the name of all that is holy transformed into spirituality as spectacle, I, too, have a question I would like to ask the world:  

"Amazing, isn't it?"

A Call to Prayer

Sometime after noon the call to prayer comes rising over the sound of the engine that carries me from one continent to another across the Bosporus. Since arriving in these lands these have become my favorite hours in which time both stands still and an eternity is passed. 

Most days I find myself leaning out of windows or against the rails of the ship resting my chin on the tops of my hands and allowing the wind to pass through me, thinking only this: if there was a a sound made by peace, then surely this is what it would sound like. At least for me. At least for these moments. 

I close my eyes and open them and close them again in an attempt to distinguish what is real and what is a dream. Somewhere in the middle of this closing and opening I stop and allow myself to experience a beauty that I have never experience until now and in my heart I know that this is as close to the truth as I will ever come; a truth that cries out like the wind, like these prayers across the water:

You will pass this way only once. Only once. Only once. So keep your eyes open. Keep your heart open. That is how the light comes in.