As the shops of the spice market open, their alarmed doors create the sense that an army of tiny mismatched ambulances are wailing through the alleyways and sidewalks outside of my apartment.
Then the garage of each shop screeches and rattles open, and dawn dips back into silence for a moment - and I back into my slumber. Each time my eyes open, the sky is brighter, and the day pacing more hungrily beside my bed.
This morning one of the three once-glossy leaves of the orchid plant on the counter collapsed from the stem that bore it into the world, and from which it continued to imbibe its personal share of the green elixir of sun, water, earth.
It was a picture of my heart a matter of days ago, quietly starved of its native language, sense of community, familiar routine - and unable to find anything to replace these nutrients. Sometimes my breath still wants to be back in Boston. I regularly notice my lungs filling only half way with air, carrying me through the day like flat tires.
My body hesitates to drink in what is around it, to bring me fully here - but rather than taking me back home, it simply diminishes me.
I went to a hooping class on the other side of town a few days ago, and did begin to feel like I was arriving. On the way there, a 5x7 note-card with directions flopped around in my right hand as I biked: each direction I had written to myself was merely an idea, some poor imagining of itself.
On the way back, my hands were empty, the not knowing was gone: the bank I'd gone to entered a familiar relationship with this coffee shop I had passed and drew me back along a street I have begun to call "my street". My immediate surroundings are becoming a place I no longer see, but know.
Life here is sewing itself together, threading me through the same places again and again: the crowded, hot sheirut (shared taxi) between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem; the muddled river of bikes and people on the seaside promenade; the street markets full of fruit, cilantro and statuettes; the smell of cumin and cinnamon sticks as I scan for the graffiti that marks my apartment.
As I'm writing this, the air has begun - for the first time since I've arrived - to trail its moist fingers down my apartment windows, and the strange low rumble in the streets has become thunder. Now, the sky is letting out a mighty sigh of rain and gathering the uniform layer of dust on the cars into bold brown dots. The second of two seasons here, winter, has officially begun.
While all my mental habits are, right now, begging my permission to experience all of this activity as a linear flow, as a wave, I'm doing my utmost to fight the urge to group these words into stories: I want them to remain snapshots, particles, moments, fragments of a whole that only the reader of these words can fully imagine.
Despite my mind's thirst for narrative, for beginnings and endings, I want to share the truth of this endless banquet of sensations as they emerge - holy, holy, holy in the vast and eternal dimensions of time and space.
Yesterday, as the orange eye of the sun began to close, I rode south on the beach, through the old Arab city of Jaffa. To my right, two quarter horses galloped eight beats of pink into the horizon behind them. I turned to ride north and looked toward the sea at the moment its cool gray crest received its solar crown. Within seconds, the red fire extinguished itself and filled the sky with technicolor plumes, and the low places began to brim with night.
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