As soon as I arrived, I remembered the last time I'd been there a few years ago. It always seems as if I am the only foreigner in the building and it feels a bit like one is in the middle of a Jackson Pollock painting with everything swirling around you and nothing static to hold on to - not even the language. But everyone smiles when I surprise them and speak a few words of Arabic.
Read MoreLetter From India
Looking out my airplane window, the clouds below suddenly gave way to reveal the sunlit peaks of the mountains of Afghanistan. The view below was breathtaking and I kept my face close to the window first following the gentle but rugged pattern of snow capped mountains – not dramatic like the Alps – but certainly desolate and beautiful in its own way.
Read MoreNew Year's in the Desert
But then, out of the darkness appeared a belly dancer. The Bedouin musicians began to shout and call out to her as they played, and she enjoyed the attention and began to wiggle every part of her body…After a while some of the men also began to dance and then at midnight, the foreigners let loose and the desert was filled with 100 people dancing away to the sound of the drums…I slept outside the tent on both nights in the lunar-like landscape and was able to watch the half moon move across the sky and finally set followed by the stars of Orion.
Read MoreLetter from ATHENS
I watched the storm pass over the mountain and move out to sea towards Athens – the sun arriving preceded by white fluffy clouds and blue sky. As I sat by the sea watching the sunset, I looked behind me at the darkened sky and was treated to an amazing lightning spectacle that went on for at least half an hour out in the distance over Athens. I remember watching lightning over the ocean from the window when I was a child in Rockport, Massachusetts.
Read MoreLetter From Beirut
What sticks out in my mind from my trip to Lebanon is the bright red color of the poppies that dot the green landscape of the countryside and the color of the red hats of the emergency security force that dot the cityscape. I am used to living with soldiers.
Read MorePoetry of exile
...ranging from Palestine to Chile, from South Africa to Kurdistan from Nigeria to Belgium to Jamaica. They were a mixture of the sad, the poignant, and the humorous...
Read MoreLetter From Aswan, Nubia
In Aswan, one feels the strength of the desert pulsing up against the shores of the Nile. It is a calmness, and a scented air which mixes river water with flowering plants with dry desert. One can smell each breeze separately whether it comes from desert, river or plant life, and these separate smells intertwine with each other in the same way that the criss-crossed red streaks of sunset stood out as separate against the various blues and purples of the sky and the black silhouette of palm trees.
Read MoreEclipse in the Desert
And then it began to get cold. Although it was still light, the heat was not there any more. And someone pointed out that we could see the star Venus shining bright in the sky...I had never seen such a cold, strange light outdoors before. And yet it still wasn't dark.
Read MoreLetter From Morocco
"I feel as though I would need twenty arms and forty-eight hours a day in order to do a reasonable job and capture it all...At present, I am like a man in a dream who sees things he fears he will lose." – Delacroix, Morocco, January 25, 1832
Read MoreLetter From Abydos
As we came near to the town of Abydos, traveling from Luxor through Qena, incredible rock cliffs rose up to the sky. Our tour guide announced that the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had been found at the bottom of these rock cliffs; it apparently washed down from where it had been hidden by a monk in one of the caves.
Read MoreVisiting Salah Taher
Sometimes they would translate for me the words of the songs which seemed to be all about longing, the moon and the stars and ultimately about love.
Read MoreThe Locusts Come to Cairo
Although I have read in the Bible about plagues of locusts, I had never experienced them. But last week, for the first time in 50 years, the Cairo skies were black with these insects.…all we could see was swirls of these creatures…these red winged grasshopper-looking creatures that were about 4 inches long and an inch and a half wide…
Read MoreLetter from Siwa
Sometimes you see a donkey wandering around pulling his cart with no owner in sight, or roosters running by with no apparent place to go. Siwans still make olive oil by hand pushing wooden pestles that grind the olives; one feels as if the place operates as it has been done for centuries.
Read MoreView from the Prairie
From the Prairies of Kansas
Caves in the Desert
But to my surprise, this little hole lead to an enormous cavern with shafts leading deep below the ground of the desert. Unfortunately these shafts have been filled with sand, so it's not possible to follow them, but the cavern itself reminded me of entering the dark space of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on a hot summer day. It had that same sense of cool expanse of enormous space and of elegant grace.
Read MoreThanksgiving on Mt. Sinai
The tall cypress trees, the domes and the amazing rock cliffs were engulfed in a quiet harmony and the rest of the afternoon we had the place to ourselves. The monks living there gave no sign of their presence.
Read MoreOut of the Desert
Apparently there is only place in the world where you can find the purple stone, called porphyry which comes from a remote quarry in the Eastern desert in Egypt. Quarried by the Romans, there are still gigantic columns of this stone all over Rome and the 8 columns that once stood at Baalbek, in Lebanon are now in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Apparently Napoleon looked for this quarry which was abandoned by the Romans 642AD and never found it. But there we were looking at the ruins of two Roman temples, and picking up the purple stone which was strewn all over the mountainside.
Read MoreGoing to Sohag
An Italian group of conservators (ones who had restored Assisi and also Nerfititi's tomb) were busy uncovering the real color removing the black grime that gave it a certain patina. While the vigor of the work still managed to communicate through the black, I was astonished at the brightness of color which showed up in the one area they had cleaned. It was almost circus like in its decoration and the message seemed to be one of happy jubilation.
Read MoreLetter to Hawaii
To me, that’s an indication that the place changed me, and the profundity of the effect a trip can have on an individual. It is so different from the experience of a tourist where you stay outside the culture and simply look.
Read MoreSandstorms of Cairo
I was woken up this morning by a sound which, through my haze of sleep, I interpreted as a chain saw or a lawn mower. I must have thought I was either in Vermont or in Rockport and it was summertime. But as I woke up a little more, I realized that at 8 am on a Saturday morning in Cairo there would be neither a chain saw nor a lawn mower and maybe I should go see what was this unusual noise.
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