This morning, I was enjoying my usual journey to the Hebrew U campus when I realized that the sights and faces that were so familiar to me had turned into symbols of themselves, and symbols of other memories - and then I realized how the distance was growing between me and this home. So I sat back and enjoyed watching the stream of consciousness drama unfold in my mind, this thirty minute journey that turned itself into a vignette of my life in Jerusalem.
I walked out the door of my little flat and several birds flew from the courtyard to the roof; I continued along Armenian Patriarchate road and stopped in to chat with my friend who paints Armenian pottery; walked past the police station with the men who help me kill my bugs; walked down past the Palestinian vendors, some of whom offer daily appraisals of my choice of clothing, past the guards posted at the gate, and then through Jaffa gate and up along the city walls, glad it was early enough that there was still shade. Already I had passed thousands of memories, of celebrations at the gate, of meeting friends there, of the policemen and the problems of security and how I am so critical and how I feel shame sometimes and need to temper my critique with appreciation, of buying treats while I wrote my paper, walking home from the market every Friday dripping with sweat walking to church learning to walk on the cobblestone in heels remembering arrow slits and crenelation being annoyed by tour groups walking home late with my shadow projected against the city wall Palestinian children flying kites like in Kite Runner...
Once I was on the bus, everything became especially vivid - like by sitting down I had really become a passive audience member enjoying the pictures of my mind. We drove up the hill and had to wait at the light behind a bulldozer, my heart jumped a little and I assumed we all had the same fleeting thought and I watched the driver to make sure he wasn't going to back into us and thought what a shame, this seemingly subconscious judgment that is tinder for the fires of injustice. I thought how divided the world beginning at Jaffa Street is from the world beginning at Damascus Gate, even though it's only a 5 minute drive between the two. We went down the road turning from Road No. 1 and I saw the Mount of Olives and the BYU Jerusalem Center and marveled that my world included a hill where Jesus Christ taught and how odd it seems that BYU owns one of the most beautiful buildings with a perfect view of Jerusalem and how so many people who see the Mount of Olives also see the Jerusalem Center, which is mine, and how these two places are right next to Hebrew U where I had studied and which was again an entirely different world - and how the very scene I was looking at right now, and which is now a part of who I am, is also depicted in Amos Oz's Tale of Love and Darkness and is sacred to Christianity and an Arab village and was controlled by Jordan and overlooks the Dead Sea on a clear day.
Do you see? Here you have the passionate objects of three massive religions and their many permutations, you have the history of many different nations conquering and being murdered and trying to conquer again, you have a confluence of cultures, you have life as a religious person, as an American teenager, as Russian olim, of a million trillion different people and religions and cultures and times and ages and perspectives. Ha, life is so thoroughly layered here and that can feel a bit intoxicating and a bit heavy, like you can let it wash over you or crush you or you can ignore it or you can try to understand it and somehow internalize it is some way, let it change you and realize that the little bit you understand is only a thread of something gigantic that you will never ever fully experience. But still, it's part of me, and it's like a virus or something, it's part of me but I don't know precisely how, I don't know the full extent of what it is. Ok, but what can you do? - you keep yourself on the rack, you let the wheels keep turning that stretch you a little more, a little more, haha, because that's what life is to keep your mind and your eyes open, to never feel comfortable anywhere because you don't want routine to close your eyes to how extremely differently other people live their lives, but you also see that alllll the differences also point to fundamental similarities, how everyone needs kindness and how inside everyone, whether it's articulated or not, echoes a long and lonely, desperate cry for love, for warm, calm, all-enveloping love. And after a bus ride like that to campus, I don't really feel like working for the day, I feel like going outside and talking to people all day long, living life with them, and falling in love with them and telling them that and then going to bed and waking up the next morning and doing the same thing again, day after day until I am finished.
