Week 4

My first few weeks in Tel Aviv have been razor thin like mountain air. The warmth and nourishment of expected social contact - a dear roommate, a real "neighborhood", too much class-time - is gone. In an effort to pace myself on this hike, I've begun to learn how to move both more slowly, and without resting for too long so my blood can drink from the atmosphere without crystallizing into microscopic ice clumps that would otherwise slide slowly and painfully through my heart.  In order to scale this mountain, I need equipment and the presence of mind to shatter any illusion that I'm walking on terrain I know. This is a new place for me - a new place in my life and in the life of this place; only with this patient awareness might this experience reveal its True Name to me. Therefore, I've learned to equip myself with items to survive my trek into unknowing:

1) Sound: To protect my heart's hearing from the urban discord that races through the streets, throwing trash and scattering spices as it howls along the cement and ricochets off metal and brick with no grass to tenderly gather and soften it into itself. My soul needs songs it can belt out or a subliminal hiss that lets it coast into the shapeless place before dreams: white noise during the nights and early mornings when trucks grunt below and shuk doors yawn open
- and music that evokes memories of kitchen dancing with friends during the hours when hundreds of strangers mill and surge below in the labyrinth of these market streets.

3) Touch: I try to let my flesh quietly absorb the occasional contact (hugs, kisses, handshakes) I get from friends and acquaintances here, but sometimes it can't muffle its excitement: at moments I can feel my heart race, and an irrepressible smile bolt across my face. When I have the opportunity, I make my food out of a dozen tiny embraces, preparing otherwise simple recipes with as much of my body as I can: grinding spices, tearing leaves, acquiring a basil plant so I can offer the water and experience the light that is going into my food. My arms and legs drink in the adjustments that the yoga teacher makes in his class, and the dance of the hoop on my arms in my weekly hula hooping lesson. Rather than the cool, weightless cotton of conditioned air, I need to feel the movement, voices, and energy that the breeze lifts up to this second story dwelling - even if it leaves behind the gummy aftertaste of sun-warmed asphalt.

4) Worthiness: This sense came to me with the beginning of the rainy season here: as the clouds released their sweet burden onto the ground below, happiness began to flood my desert, and the cool water trickling from the spaciousness above into the congestion below woke me with its smell, like eucalyptus oil. As I breathed in its aroma, I felt like I had been found by myself, at least for a moment. For the first time since I arrived, I was worthy company of the smile and then laughter that bubbled out of my heart and sweetly sighed my face and mouth and spirit open. This piece of equipment overrides my almost obsessive concern with not spending money: worthiness trusts me with doing what I must to thrive.

5) Accountability: I can't use this piece of gear without worthiness. Together, they help me put myself to bed on time, set clear daily goals for myself, take myself on bike rides to new places, keep my feet awake to the earth while navigating the jarring gesticulations of the shuk, make appointments to meet people whose work in the world excites me, attend (and sometimes tolerate) dance classes, breath into the heaviness of my limbs in yoga, treat myself to drink from the fountain of regular spiritual practice. From use of this quality, my temporary dwelling is beginning to arrange itself into a constellation of meaning, objects moving out of desert spaces into glowing huddles of order.

6) Dates: The other day, I rode my bike with Nisan, and we spread our picnic of leftover Indian food, saggy salad and warm olives across his white shirt. We watched the sea. After we finished, few words between us (his English is a bit better than my Hebrew), we biked to the Yarkon River. As we retraced the paths I'd biked along my first few weeks here, his company somehow roused my awareness, heightened the color of this road's tree-filled, river-framed surroundings. We climbed over a locked gate to see the "stone garden" which he'd last visited as a child: gentle green hills framed with henges and piles of sun-warmed rocks from all over Israel. Afterward, though I protested, Nisan decided to pick a prickly pear. He said he learned in school that this fruit (tsabar in Hebrew, also, commonly "sabra") is like the Israeli: prickly on the outside, but sweet on the inside. I said I didn't want any. He cut it open with a fork and dismissed the spines that were beginning to clump on his hands. When he handed half to me, I grasped it between two fingers by its flap of flesh, placed it on a rock, and poked at it to please him, making half-hearted attempts to express the wonder of its flavor. After he ate it, he said he had gotten stickers in his mouth.