a different time

Because in Gaza time is something different.
---Darwish.

You are sometimes stopped in your tracks. Not by an image of death but of a few days before it, when a face is hidden as it recognizes the inevitable. And yet, we carry on, as if our faces were forever bright and fresh, unmarred by future grief, as if our lives, unlike everyone else's, will this time be something different.

Attentiveness and indifference. Reading, books, are neither necessary nor sufficient. What are words but stones thrown in the great stream? A key is not a door is not an open field.Attentive to what is real, of value. The ability to hold on, the understanding that tells you what to keep. Indifference: the equanimity to let go, to realize what isn't necessary after all. Freedom: from anxiety, expectations..the rarest of qualities: a heart free of bitterness (Camus).

The natural history of the heart. Occupation, the boundaries redrawn. Land that was formerly (formally?)yours now not recognized or acknowledged. Time is not linear. This feeling of destruction comes around again. Latch on to the world and its lists, maps. You are one of the unfortunate ones that belongs to the select group of people that belongs to no group. Not this, not that, the Hindus would say. The frontier within (Hopper), to be exiled in your own living room. 

Gaza, Kashmir, is not a place and never really existed. A song, a fleeting, sad gesture that my grandchild will copy without knowing why.Only the memory of it exists, in a different time. And what of it? Tell me, what shape is the human heart, again? Oblong?

(image courtesy of P. Joris, 'nomadics')