Even when it feels like you're running in place a little bit, life goes on and there are things to say. Even when you work a job with regular hours in a cubicle in an office...in Israel. I shouldn't understate the uniqueness of the work I do. It is office work, yes, there are papers and filing and bureaucratic processes to be followed as in any office...but it is special. Lots of people describe and remember their pilgrimage as the experience of a lifetime or a turning point in their lives, something that they sacrificed and prepared for over a period of years as they saved up the money and tried to understand the meaning and purpose of undergoing a pilgrimage. It is a difficult concept. I've travelled to a fair number of places now and I feel that I've learned that the importance of "where" in life at large--in a world in which the lines between cultures and societies grow blurry, and which is rapidly shrinking with the growing ease of communication and transportation--is diminishing, if it ever really carried much importance in the first place. But pilgrimage is all about where. You can't successfully undertake a pilgrimage inside your head. And this country is known as the Holy Land. That means that the land itself is somehow holy. It is itself special, because the messengers of God have lived here...and I suppose because there is a certain power of evocation in the sensory experience of seeing the holy places, feeling the heat and the ground under your feet and hearing the call to prayer issued from the mosque in 'Akka that the figures of the faith must have heard as they went about their affairs. There is a certain power to that which supports and complements the power of the imagination to recreate the experience of the events of long ago.
I've been doing a lot of a lot of things:
I've been experimenting with cooking as though I had a picky family of four to feed, with kids who will only eat healthy food in disguise. I'm my own picky kid. And I'm finding that healthy is not so easy, particularly when you have just discovered how much you love puff pastry dough on a roll. Last week I made empanadas, and to my amazement, they both looked and tasted good. First I roasted sweet potatoes, then mixed them with cooked beans, tomato and onion to serve as filling. Then I just cut the puff pastry dough into rectangles, spooned in the filling, folded them over, sealed them with a fork, trimmed their edges and baked them until they went golden brown (and, if I may say so, looked like they belonged more in a baker's shop than in my kitchen...puff pastry will make anyone look good). Next week Thursday my department is having a collective breakfast to mark the end of another pilgrimage season (October to July each year) and I am thinking of further developing my puff pastry prowess by making pains au chocolat, known in Spain as napolitanas, which are definitely the thing I miss the most about Spanish breakfast. If I could start work at 10:00 in the morning, in close proximity to lunch, as I'm told is not uncommon in Iberia (and if I weren't as health-conscious as I am), I would probably have a napolitana and a cup of coffee for breakfast every day.
I've played around with making other foods as well, such as pumpkin waffles, stuffed bell peppers, homemade lemonade, coconut rice pudding, and homemade guacamole. The Latin bent can probably be explained by the Mexican cooking class I took recently with a Mexican friend of mine. I've also taken Indian cooking classes here and I seem to be getting much more enduring inspiration from the Mexican cooking class, probably because the mix of spices in Indian cooking confuses me and the amount of oil used to cook anything depresses me.
I've been listening to the soundtracks of a lot of musicals.
I've been walking a lot. I like to go for an hour-long walk every morning because I find it really clears my head for the day. I've experimented with making it shorter and I've found it's something that I can't rush. The benefits are lost if I rush because the whole point is taking the stress off by taking at least one thing easy throughout the day.
I've been doing a fair amount of writing. I'm going to start a writer's workshop next week or the week after and I am really, really looking forward to it. I've always liked writing but have never been able to find like-minded people to share my interest. It is in the end a solitary activity (though I've taken some of the isolationary edge off the activity by initiating an occasional writers' space)...but the outcome is something that's meant to be shared, and I am enjoying sharing it very much at the writers' spaces as well as the informal lunch critiques we have had.
I've been thinking a lot about going to Norway and Sweden in winter because that will probably be my first significant change of pace since May. (Maybe I expect too much from changes of pace. A change of pace once in six months is not so bad.)
I've been doing a lot of preparing for my qualifying examination in Spanish translation (I've set a date, finally, 15 August...after that I can either stop worrying or start worrying about the formal application processes). I don't really know how much I have to worry about, and whether I could take the exam tomorrow, or before I started preparing, and pass; but I want so badly to be admitted to the program that I want to put things into place to make sure that happens. And it can't hurt to go in with more rather than less background knowledge.
All in all I've been having a good time. My mental state is sort of shifting to the future and I don't mind that. I could leave Israel tomorrow feeling that I've seen all I wanted to see, particularly since I been to the Dead Sea. The sea itself was amazing. I can forget about the "spa" and the amazing, shameless bodies I saw far too much of for my taste and the fact that as a result of spending a few hours there, my hair smelled like sulfur every time I got it wet for two weeks. But I loved the sea. I loved the intense heat and the buoyancy I had when I went swimming and even the oily residue that such a strange sea leaves all over your skin. And I loved that the beach was nothing but ridges and bubbly formations of solid salt. I never did go on the tour of Haifa I mentioned because the trip was called off, but I think I can understand why people who live in a certain place tend not to go to the tourist destinations there. Tourism is not real life, and real life is in its usually quiet and rhythmic way a lot more interesting.
