Week 8

As the tiny strip of land between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and the sea began to lose the sun in its myriad mountains, hundreds upon hundreds of cranes began to call to each other even more loudly and urgently.  My parents and I were in Hulu Valley to watch the fall migration.  I reached up, plucked a eucalyptus leaf, rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger to release its scent, and handed it to my mom.  She breathed its cleansing perfume and it disappeared into her hand.  When we finally arrived at the best observation area in the valley, I saw three birds walking on water: each time their legs touched it, their bodies hovered fully above it.  "Those birds are walking on water!"
My dad didn't believe me.
"Some birds can do that!", I stated, impatiently - though I was mostly trying to convince myself.

*

The ways I've gotten to know people here have been mostly incidental: on Tuesday, I went to my landlady's parents to drop of the rent.  Though I've never met Noa, I've now slept in her bed, used her olive oil, read her dispatches from India...and had tea and cake with her parents.  I listened to their
journey to Israel, and shocked them by being a rabbinical student who isn't fat, lacks peyes and doesn't wear glasses.  As I look for a temporary space to live for my remaining two months here (December and January), I'm enjoying meeting people on the pretext of looking for potential roommates: a talkative gay Parisian man who wears a kippah and works in the French Consulate in Jerusalem, a young woman who spends time depressed at home and jobless after volunteering her marketing skills in Chile for a year, a freelance programmer who eats raw and moved here from Minneapolis.

I feel like I've let go of so many expectations, fallen through so many levels of dream, fear, and anticipation, that 5 weeks into this journey, everything is collapsing in on itself like a dying star, creating a sense of matter, of gravity.  On this new ground, I allow whatever false imaginings are left sink into the silent center, and begin to quietly observe what's actually around me: the hidden places where I find freedom to compose my outer self in a way that gives me a wide range of inner movement.  The recesses where I hear my voice more fully, the tranquil waters where I see myself more simply.

It turns out that the faint clicking sounds I'd been hearing in the kitchen for the past few days was created by dozens, maybe hundreds of little beetles that pulsed, droned and fell in one of Noa's three quarter bags of tiny herbal tea leaves.  After watching them in stunned silence for a few seconds, I looked at the zipper on the bag, shook a few emerging critters beneath it, slid my thumb and forefinger along the seal, and threw the sack into the garbage.  I believe it was the same day, that I reached for my basil plant to make dressing, and noticed the leaves had begun to turn into limp, green lattices, surrounded by an army of guerrilla black spots.

Holy impermanence, chaos gnawing at the edges of basil leaves!  Holy impermanence, suffusing the pieces of this broken Universe with light and life!

*

A woman with a telescope allowed me to peer through it.  Determined to prove my point, I reached out to turn it toward the birds that continued to walk delicately above the water.
"Lo l'gaat (Don't touch it)" she said, firmly and kindly.
I asked in broken Hebrew if those three birds were walking on water.
"Birds can't do that", she laughed, "They're on stilts".  She continued, "Only Jesus can do that.  And Jesus birds."
I was angry, and feeling a let down by Creation.
As my parents and I walked back to the valley's entrance, the last embers of the sun cooled atop the mountain, and we allowed ourselves to be lost in our own private worlds of thought behind the haunting blue trills of the now invisible cranes.