Does it matter what led me there?  Do I even know?

Growing up among the indoctrinated who saw themselves as exemplars of freedom, I felt a narrowness, a constricting smugness, and a fear of how incomplete, how ordinary my life could become.  My maternal grandfather’s stories of his youthful travels in Russia and Asia left an indelible mark.  I would always be a restless kid.

That call of the muezzin on my first day in Marrakech, stopping me in my tracks along a narrow passageway, the entreaty to prayer reverberating against the high walls, would stay with me.

Back in the U.S., no-one was aware.  No-one had heard of the Nakba; it was just the terrorists and Israel and us.  That ignorance became, for me, another spur to return.

And I did, in the traveler’s/explorer’s various guises, curiosity-driven, sometimes on a search; at others, giving myself over to the drift of the crowd, toward chance outcomes.  I walked byways, shared food and water, looked into fissures (both physical and emotional), across vistas, into eyes.

The borders became increasingly permeable; the Other, more familiar: their insights, sensibilities and charms.  I hesitate to call it an awakening, though that’s what it was.  Whenever I left, I was different from when I went in.  Whenever I returned, I saw things anew.

All that in my childhood I had hoped hidden, so that in time I might discover, seemed hidden here.  Alongside that element of make-believe, when seen from without; a participant in a situation whose meaning is withheld.

Who knows where the wind will take us, where our dust will be spread?  So little is known, and nothing is written.