A Journey, Part 7. Perspectives
May 24, 2013
Leaving Masada behind, we drove north, skirting around the Dead Sea before crossing back into Jordan at the Allenby Bridge. Getting into Israel at this border post had been such an ordeal a few weeks earlier, but crossing back to Jordan was a breeze. Jordan had become a kind of home-from-home for us, as we used it to stage our expeditions into the neighbouring countries. This was our third time crossing into the country and each time we’d encountered the same friendly reception. Getting back to Amman that evening, we checked back into the same hotel where we had stayed previously and I noted in my journal;
The mood in Jordan is so different from that in Israel. More easy going and laid back. Everyone seems happy despite the fact that most are poor. Israel was great, but I must confess that it’s good to be back.
The next morning we set off early for the Saudi Embassy, hoping that the visa applications would have been processed in our absence. This was, of course, wishful thinking, and the next few days saw repeated visits to the embassy, all to no avail. In the end, we managed to get the phone number of Madame Nadia, a member of staff who would serve as a point of contact for status updates, and we took the Kings Highway south toward the Red Sea port of Aqaba.
The scenery on the journey south from Amman is spectacular with vast wadis and canyons. Like many countries in the Middle East, Jordan is an archaeologist’s dream, rich in ancient history. From Amman, we’d day-tripped to the wonderfully preserved Roman ruins at Jerash, and also to a few desert castles, including Qasr Azraq, a fort used by T E Lawrence during the Arab Revolt. Now journeying south, we stopped to visit the crusader castle at Kerak, with its warren of subterranean passages and chambers, but of all the historical treasures in Jordan, few would dispute that the Nabataean city of Petra is the jewel in the crown.
Located in a hidden valley with the only access being through the Siq – a winding and narrow canyon – Petra remained unknown to the West until 1812. It’s hard to describe the first sight of the Khazneh as one emerges from the Siq – one really has to see it to appreciate the impact it has. Standing 14 storeys high, perfectly balanced and precisely carved from the rose-coloured sandstone cliff, it’s without doubt one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring of human creations. Somehow it’s managed to escape the ravages of time and almost two thousand years on it remains in near pristine state. We spent a day wandering about the ancient city, trying to absorb as much of it as we could. While Nabataean culture vanished many centuries ago and little is known today about these ancient people, we do know that to them Petra was the cosmic navel – the very centre of the Universe and the source of all energy and life.
From Petra, we continued our journey south to Aqaba and once there, set up camp in a seaside campsite a few miles from the Saudi border. We would spend the next few weeks there, taking daily trips into Aqaba town to phone Madame Nadia at the Saudi embassy in Amman and to get our daily fix of mint tea and Kunafeh. The campsite was a hub not only for for travelers passing through, but also for Jordanians who would come on the weekends to spend time with their families, and for Saudi men who would come across the border to ogle at Western women less modestly clad than legal at home.
I have so many memories from the campsite, including a Bedouin pop song that was played so many times by the caretakers that it remains imprinted in my mind and I don’t believe any amount of therapy would succeed in removing it. I managed to get through both Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield while we waited. There was a coral reef a short distance offshore and we would snorkel out to break the boredom of the day. It may sound like an idyllic location, but in reality the campsite was a desolate and windy place more reminiscent of a scene from Baghdad Cafe than Blue Lagoon.
Written near the back of my journal, in Western and Arabic script, are the names of four Arab men that we met and shared stories with in while there. Their names were Ali Mansoor Abu, Mohammed Ali, Eid Amer, and Daifallah Ali. I vividly remember sitting around a fire that they had invited us to, and using pieces of pita to eat chicken with yogurt as we talked about their lives and ours. As inevitably happened in these conversations they talked of how wronged they felt by Western hostility towards Arabs and the misconceptions in the West about Arab and Muslim culture. How strongly they felt that the news reaching people in the West was biased to Western views and perspectives and undermined Arabs and the truth. This same perspective was something that I had felt since entering the Middle East a few months before; It’s almost as if we become so used to one-sided stories that we come to accept that the side we know is the only side that exists.
If there is one truth that I have learned, it is that truth is elusive and those who claim to always know the truth are inevitably either fools or fanatics. I like to think that most people are neither and yet, despite that, we can and do have vastly different perspectives on what is essentially the same truth. In reality it’s difficult and often impossible for us to completely set aside the biases that our cultures, experience, and circumstances impart on us when evaluating the facts in order to arrive at we believe to be the truth. Even so, if we are aware of the impact that our predispositions can have on our analysis of the facts, we can try to take them into account and we will inevitably arrive at an approximation of truth that is more accurate than would have been the case had we not done so. As the world becomes ever more driven by corporate and political spin, so I think that the onus shifts to us as individuals set aside any desired or supposed outcomes and to be responsible when searching for the facts and determining the truth that the facts reveal.
Empathy is what allows us to see as through the eyes of another. The world will always be full of people with different opinions and perspectives and we should be thankful for and celebrate that diversity, or at the very least tolerate it. We can empathise with those that suffer if we allow ourselves to and I believe that as human beings we should always try to do so, equally and across the divisions between us. While it’s easy to say this, I find I have to remind myself, for instance, that the brutal killing of a child is no less a crime against humanity when it happens in Baghdad than it is when it happens in Boston. Increasingly, I find that the only attitude that I have no tolerance for is intolerance itself; It’s intolerance that ultimately brings about the lack of empathy that divides us and leads to hatred, mistrust, fanaticism, and violence.
For me, travel has always been about expanding horizons and new perspectives and experiences. Although I had great difficulty with many aspects of Arab and Middle Eastern culture, as our time in the region drew to an end I found myself rejecting many of the stereotypes prevalent in the West and accepting that many of the views held in the West are based on misunderstandings and a perspective that is fundamentally one-sided and flawed.
Despite our attempts to pass the time in the campsite, which included a spectacular day trip across the open desert to Wadi Rum, as the days marched on and there was no progress with our Saudi visas, we became increasingly restless. Despite weeks spent waiting and numerous promises, there had been no progress at all with the Saudi embassy in Amman, so we decided on a change of plan. We had heard that the Saudi Embassy in Cairo would issue transit visas to travelers sailing by sea from Suez in Egypt, to Massawa in Eritrea, allowing them to change ships in Jeddah, but not allowing them out of the port. We didn’t want to take our car into Egypt because of the enormous expense, so we decided to go to Cairo to buy passenger tickets, preferably fake, then get Saudi transit visas before returning to Jordan and using the visas for overland access.
Finally, on 16 May, we boarded Santa Catarina,the slow boat to Egypt. Once there, all went according to plan and a week later, on Friday 23 May, we arrived back in Aqaba. With Friday being the Muslim equivalent of our Sunday, we guessed that we would have less chance of encountering red tape at the border post, so we headed straight there with our not-valid-for-overland-travel-and-obtained-with-fake-tickets Saudi Arabian visas in tow. As if by miracle, they let us in.
It would take us two days to reach Jeddah and on this day, 16 years ago, we spent the day on the road south. In mid-afternoon, we turned inland off the coast road and drove a few miles across the open desert to free camp. The reading on the GPS was 24° 32.49N, 37° 29.83E.
May 24, 2013
May 17, 2013
You have to be willing to give up the life you’ve planned for in order to live the life that’s waiting for you.
Joseph Campbell
Alchemy
May 11, 2013
It’s settling now
This alchemy of stirred up souls
and long-lost dreams and longings,
that found me unprepared, alone
I’d thought I wasn’t wanting.
But in the magic of a moment,
to the rhythm of an ancient song
my soul took flight and with it went
all deeds undone and songs unsung.
Then as the flames drew it inside
and silently released the spell,
the sun and stars seemed realigned,
the mortal world a distant shell.
Then light, as through a lens refined
was sharpened bright, to show in time
the veil, as from a radiant bride,
being lifted up on the design.
And all the beauty was revealed,
all the mystery laid bare,
what wonders in plain sight concealed,
what miracles are everywhere.
And in this realm of ecstasy,
where spirit reigns and souls converse,
I found myself at last set free
at one with all the Universe.
Now as the residue subsides
and stirring currents dissipate,
the light can reach the depths inside
to shine on the precipitate
of gold hard-forged from fire divine
and reunited parts in time;
The heart-of-hearts, a crystal grown
from essence of the truth I know.
So I will sing of what’s within,
of forests, fields, and fountains,
of crashing waves on storm-filled days
and barren, wind-swept mountains,
of dancing light on starlit nights
and space that’s never-ending,
of hopes and dreams and hearts on fire
with truth and love transcending.
April 21, 2013
Incredibly rich rhythms in this song from the misplaced Americana band.
March 27, 2013
When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are the tools God uses to show us the way.
Paulo Coelho
March 20, 2013
To help solve the problems facing us, we need people of vision with huge dreams and determination. Elon Musk exemplifies this and should be an inspiration to people everywhere about our true potential as human beings. I can only admire his bravery and self-belief.
February 7, 2013
He who is brave is free.
Seneca
Live like a Mighty River: Ted Hughes’ Advice to His Son.
January 6, 2013
This moving and heartfelt letter from then poet laureate Ted Hughes to his son Nicholas, written in 1986, sums up so much of what I feel life and living is about.
Dear Nick,
I hope things are clearing. It did cross my mind, last summer, that you were under strains of an odd sort. I expect, like many another, you’ll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking.
Nobody’s solved it. You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you’ve tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
I came to America, when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock — I lived in there with your mother. We made hardly any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do.
(It meant, Nicholas, that meeting any female between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother banished all her old friends, girlfriends, in case one of them set eyes on me — presumably. And if she saw me talking with a girl student, I was in court. Foolish of her, and foolish of me to encourage her to think her laws were reasonable. But most people are the same. I was quite happy to live like that, for some years.)
Since the only thing we both wanted to do was write, our lives disappeared into the blank page. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn’t I explore America then? I wanted to. I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner.
So take this new opportunity to look about and fill your lungs with that fantastic land, while it and you are still there. That was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations.
Nicholas, don’t you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate — except in a very special way, which I’ll try to explain.
When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. And your self-reliance, your independence, your general boldness in exposing yourself to new and to-most-people-very-alarming situations, and your phenomenal ability to carry through your plans to the last practical detail (I know it probably doesn’t feel like that to you, but that’s how it looks to the rest of us, who simply look on in envy), is the sort of real maturity that not one in a thousand ever come near. As you know.
But in many other ways obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle.
But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it.
So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’.
But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But when they too, sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.
Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced.
Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim.
And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful.
So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner.
And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears.
And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy.
That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember.
But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells — he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.
The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems — he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.
And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people — by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate — and enjoy.
End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.
January 5, 2013
When we learn how to fly,
We forget to how walk
When we learn how to sing
We don’t wanna hear each other talk
When we know what we want
We forget what we need
When you find who you are
You forget about me
Train