Field notes: Trip highlights.

musakhan in Prague, a toy soldier, and 900 steps to solitude

Welcome, friends. It's been a minute!

I've been taking some intentional time to decompress and process my volunteer trip and then took a vacation (and now catching up from both.) I'm easing back into the saddle of writing on Wandering Home. I'm ready to start downloading some of my trip to the Middle East here with you! While I'm not big on trip reports and photo dumps for this kind of travel, I've been thinking about creative ways to share highlights.

I've also been determining what people might actually want to hear when they ask, "so, how was your trip?" There are people who wonder in superlatives but tragically don't care for the stories inside. You know, this really isn't a rare interaction on the heels of a life-changing journey. I've learned I can frustrate with my honesty or I can lie. I typically opt to lie for my own protection. It’s what they want to hear, and it’s what I’m “supposed to” say.

Even then, some ask and try not to let on they've stopped listening but I perceive more than they realize. The beer coozie twisting, the glances over my shoulder, the beard combing.

You should hear my inner dialogues at parties lately.

We all know small talk is not my party trick: my poet's mind, my artist's eyes, my restless curiosity, my competing nostalgia. Boiled down, I'm not a good judge of best or favorite or most. I don't even have a favorite color. (Actually, I do — it's the inside of a beet that I grew with my own hands. And now do you see what I mean about being a poet?)

"What was the one best thing you ate?"

"What was your most favorite place?"

"What was the absolute most fun you had?"

When you could ask me when I felt the most scared and I'd tell you what you want to hear. When you could ask me when I felt the most alive. It's probably right now, but there have been other times. Ask me what I still wonder the most. Ask me what felt the most sacramental. Ask me about the best ideas I have now. Ask me why? Ask me how I have to feel my way toward what's true and it finds me back.

Maybe the best thing I ate was musakhan in Prague at the Palestinian restaurant with all my Arabic and secrets inside me, sharing the plates and finding a savory way to say what I mean about what it was like. Eyeing the guys in the corner – Palestinian, I can tell – and they don't know why I'm here but I think I know why they are. The dish was two worlds colliding. It was building a bridge for me to come home on.

"Homemade mujaddara in Bourj el Barajneh, my first meal inside a refugee camp. It was delicious," I say.

My favorite place? Probably the Lebanon Civil War Museum with its show of before and after – the glimpses of life before the city was shredded from the inside. But for me it was the photography and the creative installations bursting with brilliance. Especially the toy soldier swapped in for the ballerina on a musical jewelry box. He twirls, rifle raised, and the lights were just so that the shadows cast are huge from this tiny revolving fighter and how it made me think about the shadow parts of my selves and those whirling around me and how they can unbecome right-sized when the lights are just so.

"Seeing the first responder station in Shatila Camp was interesting. They severely lack the resources they need and I admire the reasons they keep working anyway," I respond.

The most fun I had may have been the few moments I was walking alone in Petra. Sweating, burning, feeling my body quake with effort. Over that volume even, I felt relieved in my core to have survived Lebanon, and for Lebanon to have survived me. So this climb was nothing. I was thinking about the distance between the Nabataeans and the Palestinians — how we have so many questions and so few answers, too much lost to empire and erosion and time. How their surviving creations are majestic and littered with capitalism and by now I bet their best stuff was swallowed up by the desert long ago. Finally I had some space to wander and wonder and I have too much fun when I'm free to daydream, even if it's remembering what's been/being forgotten and trying to find a way to bottle that feeling.

"The hike up to the Monastery was epic," I say, and we move on.

We move on to something easier to bullshit about and that is basketball or the weather or some other place of binary distinction where there is not a crusade happening but a winner and a loser. It is sunny or rainy. It is nameable and concise unlike the interiors of an artist with her unending caves of disorienting depths, and all her artifacts waiting to be released by the desert.

Ask me about the spices on that chicken and why that means something to me. Ask me when the great war ended (and does a war ever end, really?) Ask me who I wish I'd find in the desert when I can breathe for just a second.

I have a thousand of these stories in me. And then? Then I can tell you about the utmost.

I’m not all cynicism, and I’m not all hope either. I’ve just done this enough times to know this is my way of wandering home.

That, my friend? That is the highlight.

Upward and onward,