This is difficult.
I'm sitting on my bed at the Ron Beach Hotel in Tiberias, Israel, watching the light fade over the Sea of Galilee. I'm listening to Bob Dylan. I've just finished packing-- more efficiently than I ever have before, so that I can put everything back in place after Israeli airport security folk rummage through my belongings and interrogate me as they will no doubt do-- to go back home. We leave in two hours to take the trek to Tel Aviv for our 5 am flight out of Ben Gurion.
I have absolutely no desire to leave, and that's a predicament I have never before faced when setting home from an adventure. Last year at the end of the England trip, I thought I would go insane if I didn't get back to my bed and my routine and my friends, and that trip only lasted two weeks. Now I've been gone for five weeks, travelling through countries whose cultures are so very different from mine, whose languages don't even share my language's alphabet, and whose inhabitants stare at me as though my walking down the street is nude and/or heretical performance art.
But I love it here. I love the sound of strangers in the street arguing in Arabic. I love living in the tension between hope and despair. I love not thinking about myself. I love sharing food between six people. I love putting za'atar on everything. I love thinking about how much water I'm using and where it comes from. I love it so much here that I find it hard to remember anything that I love about Canada, and I don't know what to do with that feeling.
I have never been one to miss people when I go away. I get pangs of remembrance from time to time, but I've grown so accustomed to lacking the people I love even when I'm at home that lacking more people when I'm not at home is really no problem. Listening to the people in my group talk about going home makes me wonder what's wrong with me. They are all sad to be leaving, but just a little bit more excited to get back home to their loved ones and a sense of normalcy. I envy them that. My desire to be here is outweighing my every other impulse.
But I think I can probably trace my reticence back to my fear of returning home and falling into exhausted ambivalence. I have done that so many times in the past, and I have always hated myself for it eventually. But what makes my desire to come back and study in Jerusalem different from my other dreams is that I don't think it would be just for me. I think that I would become a better person, a person who plumbs the depths of the world's troubles and lives for something greater than herself, if I were to follow the path that I am seeing in my mind now. I think there's something to that.
Maybe being gone for longer than ever and in more foreign conditions than ever has simply made me forget what it's like to have a home and a family (and a refrigerator, and a washing machine, and my own bathroom, and crackers, and movie nights, and nice footwear, and men who aren't named Hannah, and people who obey traffic laws, and, and...). But whatever the reason for my current inner state, I hope that it will not hinder me but propel me forward into the unknown, into the unimagined future, into the expanse of possibility that I can feel at the tips of my fingers when I consider how many paths are continuously converging in this world and how little I know about them.
What I want is to be anchored, yet nomadic; I have seen that life is as possible in Be'er Sheva as it is in Dan, that hope still flows abundantly in the dry and desolate places, and, moreover, that the wanderer is always welcome in this land where nothing is ever certain, where even the stones compete one with another, and where history can't repeat itself because it never finished a single phrase.
It is easier to accept the life of the purposeful wanderer when Bedouins and their tea are in the picture, that I know for sure.
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