Pre-Departure

Dreams are such strange things. Indeterminate times and places, strangers, people you haven't seen for eons showing up in the oddest of places, people who are thousands of miles away walking through the halls of your high school as your sixth grade teacher appears in a doorway. "Mrs. Baylor?" I was just as confused in the midst of the dream as I am on this waking side of it. These uncanny nocturnal trips of the mind have the ability to leave you in an odd feeling haze for the first few hours of the morning. Feeling like something happened, yet knowing it didn't. Feeling like you just had very important conversations with people and yet in reality, those words have yet to be said. 

Most things these days are occurring in the context that I'm boarding a plane in a few days for a far away, rather volatile place. I've maintained a grounded sort of peace, until one or more persons say words that effectively rip that peace from my spirit and leave mild panic in its wake. Sometimes it isn't easy to tell who can be trusted - who has knowledge I should listen to and who is speaking out of their own fear. These mental gymnastics are exhausting. After a night of dream-addled sleep, I awake and the peace is back, the reason and the sense of being grounded having returned, only partnered now on the periphery with the lingering, uncomfortable remnants of the dream.

I wonder why our mind creates these stories - if they have anything at all to do with reality or are just the mind's way of coping with too much information and emotion being thrown at it in a 24-hour period. Daylight and strong coffee seem to be an effective cure. So I go back to re-packing my suitcase for the eightieth time and continue facing this thing head on. At this point, it's all there is left to do. 

Sunshine

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I could eat sunshine for breakfast. So long as it isn't accompanied by that wet, wool blanket kind of humidity and is at an appropriate angle in the sky: as in not directly overhead and blazing down on me so hard that I think someone up on a cloud somewhere is playing with a giant magnifying glass and giggling. But, if it's up there in the clear blue sky and you throw in a cool breeze, rustling leaves, and a thermostat that never crests 75º, I have found my bliss.

Right now, I'm sucking up as much clean air as I can, because that state of being is about to change. I love this weather, I love the shiny green of the tree leaves, the dappled patterns on the brick sidewalks. I'm taking it all in, because my every day is about to look entirely different. 

Love & Hate

Love makes the world go round. And hate brings it to a screeching halt. I am losing my faith in humanity and the ability of one person to do good. It seems that someone can try to start a movement of benefit and peace and it takes so painfully long to get off the ground. Yet one person can provoke hate and within a few short days, it's reverberating in every corner of the world. People stop thinking, they stop seeing other as humans and see nothing but their own rage, and the world, this planet that we all have to live on together regardless of belief or cultural upbringing, begins to fall apart at the seams.

It's a silent, deadly undercurrent in the human condition. We're all afflicted with it, only it lies more dormant in some than in others. You never know what will strike and awaken the darkness within. What cure is there to this vast illness but Love? Genuine Love, authentic Love, more than just word service Love. Loving those we don't understand, loving those that do things to hurt us, loving those that everyone expects us to hate. Because that pushes back the darkness. It cannot stand against Love. Hate cannot win a war, or even so much as a battle when it finds itself face to face against Love.

How do we learn this? How do we overcome our thoughts and opinions and words and actions with the only defense we have against this rampant onslaught? We stop fighting each other. We start listening to what other people have to say. We start trying to understand each other instead of taking for granted that we already know things that we actually don't have any idea about. We start loving our neighbors as ourselves which means we don't run away when things get ugly. It's uncomfortable and it's messy, but we have to Love. It is the only thing that will heal these gaping wounds. 

العربية

This language is slowly telling me its secrets. I'm only frustrated that it isn't telling them to me faster, or that I read sentences or hear different dialects and the secrets are being withheld. There are moments of standing in front of insurmountable walls, and then, with the onset of another day, the walls aren't quite as high anymore and the next thing I know, I'm over them. The only problem is, even if I can't see it right away, sooner or later another one pops up in front of me. Normally it isn't visible from afar. If I could see it coming, I could avoid it. Usually I'm looking off to the side admiring a tree or gazing up at the cotton candy clouds when BAM! I find myself rubbing my forehead and growling at the thing in front of me on which I just smacked it. Painted all over this wall are unfamiliar combinations of squiggles and dots that hold fast to one another's hands and refuse to tell me what they're saying. They don't even look at me. Just go on about their business, traipsing like soldiers back and forth from wall edge to wall edge. I shake my fist at them. I sigh dramatically. I even grab tightly to my scalp, thinking maybe if I pull hard enough, some unforeseen comprehension will come seeping out. It doesn't though. And that curvy script just keeps sluicing across stone. I'll get you, my pretty. You just wait. One of these days, I'll get you.  

Other Than Courage

People keep telling me I'm brave. I speak of what it is that I am doing, simply because it inevitably comes up in conversation, and I get a lot of raised eyebrows. Then they tell me that I'm brave. And I want to contradict them and say something to indicate how it really feels to me, but usually these conversations are just in passing, and the words don't come right away. But sitting here, in the safety and comfort of my home, on the eve of this endeavor that is slightly unlike any I've undertaken in the past, I realized exactly what it is. 

You see, when the one I've given my life to reaches in and grabs hold of something inside of me, He tends to not let go until I've followed. Doing anything else, choosing anything else when this cord that He has tied around my heart is constantly tugging me, would be like playing a record backwards, running a palm against the grain of a piece of wood, or petting a cat from tail to perky ears. It would sound scratchy and off, the palm would come away with splinters, and the feline would endure no more than a millisecond of that abuse before giving the offender a very clear piece of his mind. 

So is this bravery? Not to me. It's obedience, but more than that, it simply must be. I know of no other way to put it. I've spent my life searching for these moments of clarity, and they've been few and far between. I even told someone once that I was just waiting for things to make sense, and his response was that things would never make sense. He was right. Sometimes even the pockets of clarity are peppered with questions and doubts and nights when I feel like I'll never stop leaking tears. But that feeling in my gut, the instinct, the call: they never go away. And while they run around the room preparing to jump out into space, Logic sits in his wing-backed chair, silk robe tied neatly across his chest as he sips Cavartier and says "You guys have lost your minds." 

Because you can look at the ocean and appreciate its beauty if your toes are firmly grasping wet, sandy earth. But you'll never truly know the awe, the power, and the current; never feel the split-second heartbeat of fear from a gathering wave; never taste the salt on your lips or know the weightless peace of floating unless you dive in, head underwater and feet beyond the reach of the ocean floor. Logic can have his agreeable chair and solid ground. I'll take the ocean any day. 

Land Without Time

It was dust and unfinished brick tenements. Garbage City was everything I'd seen in pictures and videos only in 3D with a bit of an added stink and a million more flies. Yet underneath the piles of garbage and dirt was a burgeoning, efficient, joyful community of people crowned at it's head with the ethereal Cave Church - stone crosses and carvings emerging out of the massive, jagged edge of a sandstone mountain. A priest had begun this back in 1969, following his calling to minister and take care of the people of Manshiyet Nasr, a displaced group of Copts from Upper Egypt. 

A tour of this small city set apart from the hustle of Cairo showed a slice of daily life. Children ran everywhere, scruffy and laughing, and their elders sat on crates or bins, eyes a bit surprised, hands barely ceasing the motion of sorting trash. We were an anomaly, mostly pale skinned and streaming through their midst like water through oil. We were seen from every nook, cranny, and upper window, the children excited to try their five words of English: "Hallo, welcome, what's your name?" This place leaked joy. 

Amid the chaos, we saw the organization, the different families responsible for plastics or aluminum or tin, the small businesses lining the main drag - a street that blended in to all the others unless one took a closer look. There were shisha cafés and fruit stands selling yogurt parfaits and sugar cane juice. Small children dodged the endless succession of pick-up trucks loaded to three times their height with bales of trash; mangy dogs skulked around looking for scraps; older children drove through the melée on flat carts pulled by donkeys. And from the guest house roof, the skyline was dotted with countless pigeon coops - boxy tree forts only accessible by a series of ladders from rooftops that housed small herds of livestock, chicken and goats. When the sun crested the mountain in the mornings, the birds danced and dove in its light, a winged ballet against the blue. When night fell, roosters crowed oblivious to the absent daylight, and mules brayed in indignation. They kept us from sleep in tandem with biting insects and air conditioners that rattled through the night. I wouldn't have had it any other way. 

This place taught us the true meaning of the word flexibility.The only thing that happened regularly and on schedule in this land without clocks or agendas were our mornings in the largest of the Cave Church auditoriums - a daily exercise in feeling small, our diminutive bodies dwarfed in the rocky chasm, the sky endless overhead. It was the beginning of the extermination of our pre-conceived notions. 

At the orphanage, we were as verbal as we dared even though we were standing on opposite sides of a language gap. Fortunately, love crosses borders without even having to go through security and within half an hour, it was as if we'd always been there. They sought us out at every turn, eyes searching our faces, hands reaching for ours, every smile a reminder that we were family despite never having met. We had been asked to come play, and like every child waiting on a sleepover guest, their excitement was tangible as they showed us their domain. Paintings of cartoons danced on the walls and the classrooms boasted colored pictures and low tables scattered over Eastern carpets. The sun was hot and the flies persistent, but we were in a children's oasis, a place where they learned what it meant to be served and loved through kindness and attention. For a few moments, we were allowed to be a part of that and it left none of us unchanged. 

Of course, a trip to Egypt is hardly complete without a visit to the pyramids and a ride atop a humpy-backed camel. Our last day was chock full of sightseeing: the most intense souvenir hawkers I've ever seen in my life, huge triangular piles of thousand year old stones, a trip to a Bedouin fragrant oil tent, kisses with the Sphinx, more shisha smoke that I could handle, and a rather interesting dinner cruise down the Nile where we all starred in the Egyptian version of Wedding Crashers. I understand now, after a solo performance of one of the wedding guests in Egypt's version of So You Think You Can Dance, why they usually don't, and my head is still in knots over how such a conservative culture allows for belly dancers who wear what amounts to a negligé. Despite the idiosyncrasies, the land and the people in it crept into our hearts and stayed there. Egypt is not easily forgotten, and this world that creates its own pace taught all of us a little more of what it is to be human.