Days of Miracles and Wonders

Day: 50, October 12th – October 26th

“’I used to think everyone believed in God,’ I said.
‘There are many gods,’ Cico whisphered, ‘gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards – but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones.’”
~ Rudolfo Anaya in Bless Me, Ultima

In the last few weeks, I’ve woken up to an ongoing conversation between my head and my heart. Each morning, I wrestle free from anxious dreams and slip into yesterday’s resolution to be better, wiser and kinder. Each evening, I settle down to my laptop, determined to drag these mustang thoughts out of the corral and send it bucking and braying across the bleak beginnings of a blog post. I’ve since learned that a spirit in conflict with itself will rarely entertain a ceasefire long enough to sneak some creativity past the remains of fallen deities and through the labyrinth of false walls and barricades. Here’s a few of those thoughts that I started then and have just barely concluded:

--> Of all the need-to-have gadgets I lugged six thousand miles from home, I wish I had brought a bible. Mind you, this is a very awkward confession seeing that both my mother and my priest will read this and wonder what insignificant object replaced the bible in my suit case. The answer: my ego. Last Saturday, we traveled to the spiritual center of the Christian world and to the history-heavy ruins of my family’s faith. We band of tourists held our cameras close and strolled quietly through a tangled forest of mosquitoes and Tamaris trees (supposedly the same kind of tree Abraham planted as a peace offering). Eventually we emerged from the Shire-like thicket and came upon the baptism site. As is reflective of my current relationship with God, the site was a large, unadorned, vacant and muddy pit sculpted by a few men with pick axes attempting to salvage any relics before the winter floods reverse all of their work.

The throng of tourists left the site and rarely strayed from the well marked trail leading to the Jordan River. A local group of Orthodox Christians have erected a gorgeous church directly beside the twisted green river (the word Jordan literally means “twisted” or “winding”). The walls and high arched ceiling are draped in the iconographic and brightly colored dreams of hermit saints and virgin mothers. At the river, my peer and I split fresh pita and performed the Jewish tradition of casting our sins embodied in the bread upon the slow-moving water. In retrospect, the performance invoked a sense of spiritual cognizance that had not been present before that point. At the time, it seemed like a waste of good pita and a bit of an eye soar when one looked upon our penance strewn across a dying river.

At that moment, I realized how much I missed blind faith. There are so many fewer questions when you can explain away car bombs and barefoot babies with a solemn prayer and the will of God. I miss the finality of a Calling that will end up in one of two ways: a seminary or a minivan.

I suppose it’s appropriate that I left the resting place of saints and gods more than a bit conflicted. The search for answers from silent heaven-dwellers is often cumbersome but it helps to use what you know. I know stories of a man named Jesus who came to separate the sheep from the goats (why he preferred that docile, cowardly and fairly stupid creature is still a point of tension between him and me). Regardless, I know that he carried a message of courageous Love.

I know he jammed cultures and scriptures, rarely wore shoes and appreciated good red wine. I assume he smiled with his eyes and exhaled deep and uproarious belly laughs that excite the spirit and ease the heart. I imagine that he would tear down heaven’s gates because it gets lonely on celestial thrones.

My father once introduced me to the power of place. It seems that the spiritual weight or condition of one’s geography will often overtake one’s own spiritual person. Conflict is as much alive in the land as it is among the people. As a result, Jordan is both beautiful and hostile, a dichotomy that has seeped into my thoughts and dreams in the last month.

Thankfully, I found solace in the memoirs of a cultural deviant and the grandiloquent prose of yet another Latino author. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel rekindled the passionate voice of a truth-bloomed woman. Please look her up. She is a very controversial character in terms of her opinion of Islam as an inherently violent religion. Although I disagree with her on a very fundamental level, her life story is a clear example of how faith can act as the justification for the worst human atrocities (ie. femal circumcision...a reality for over 6 thousand girls everyday). She brought me a profound sense of solidarity and offered a new regard for someone associated with a neoconservative American think tank (yes, Pop, neocons occasionally make sense). I closed that book and immediately picked up Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima. Anaya tenderly lured the sacred feminine and garden gods from their hiding places in New Mexico and painted them circus-tent colors in the autumn skies that billow over Amman.

Anaya and Hirsi Ali didn’t provide me with answers, but they diverted my wayward heart and reunited her with a childhood friend; Hardheaded Hope.

“Her hand touched my forehead and her last words were, I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful. Always have the strength to live. Love life, and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills. I shall be with you.’”
~ Rudolfo Anaya

At peace.

Photos for you!

Postcard Companions

Day 32: September 24th, 2008

The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.
Who am I? Who am I?
I don’t want to answer yet.
May a star fall into itself,
And may a forest of chestnut trees rise in the night
toward the Milky Way with me, and may it say:
Remain here!
~ Mahmoud Darwish

Lately I’ve been wandering along my memory bank and rediscovering the value of so many moments in the company of genuine and tenderhearted people. And while my eyes translate the poetry etched in rock faces and my fingers trace the footprints of vagabonds and unsung artists, I’m convinced that when I turn around I’ll find my mother, my father, my lovers and lovelies just as dumbstruck and awe inspired as I am. Thus, I’m constantly disappointed that you are not there beside me and that I could never fully articulate the wonder that is sun and sand kissed gorges or calm waters dividing and uniting conflicted nations. We have yet to invent a lens that captures the taste of a breathless heart when the rose rock tomb suddenly emerges from its disturbed resting place. I don’t have a word in English or Arabic that describes newfound peace in the echoes of silence while lying on star studded sand. How do I squeeze former ocean floors, table top mountains, the intoxicating rhythm of a camel’s steady pace and the sand dunes in my shoes into a tidy three by five?

In the midst of all these wonderful sights and ponderings, poverty and the deterioration of land, language and culture lurk not-so-quietly in the background. As is custom with globalization, the Bedouin in Petra have their children sell jewelry and postcards to tourists for the “pity buy” that it will inevitably acquire. Each stall sells the same assemblage of Chinese beads and fake turquoise that we demand, consume and pawn off on unknowing relatives and friends. “It’s Bedouin silver,” we’ll say, “Got him to give me a 75 percent discount!” What is the cost of a bargain to the sixteen year old saleswoman? How much is a seven year old entrepreneur with functional English, attitude and a touch of basic math? How much is heritage and hospitality to a people devoid of culture?

Mind you, that last note was not intended as a lecture for other travelers as I am no genuine authority on the subject. It’s more of an inward-bound reprimand for what I did not resist when faced with the choice to consume or to question.

I should mention that I am convinced of the blanket of soul matter that wraps all beings in a web of electric thoughts and sensations. When we pull the memory of a loved one toward the center of our hearts, we embrace whatever part of their soul we’ve acquired and surround them with all things warm and splendid. The other person experiences that ecstatic embrace in a stranger’s smile, in open arms, in unprovoked giggle fits and in the sudden awakening of a misplaced memory. So, I suppose you’ve been there all along exploring Petra, Aqaba and Wadi Rum with the same wild-eyed spirit and love for life that surrounds my favorite memories of you.

Mom, Pop, I miss you.

Peace.

P.S. Happy Birthday, Papa! I beg the world and God grants you a great many more years to spend in the wild world of new dawns and never yet seen horizons. Everytime someone hands me Turkish coffee, I think back on how you sip it at home and dream of your days in Gaza. Then I think on how blessed I am to be following in your Titan-sized footsteps. My Papa, it's a new dawn, a new day and I sure as hell hope you're feeling good. Happy Birthday, you delightful old fart. :)