Sinai, March 1974
We sat down on the desert floor to wait,
Each shaded by a strip of tin on stilts.
The signs read “Danger!” “Mine Field!” “Do Not Enter!”
The tour was scrapped, what with the War and all,
But we were pilgrims not to be denied,
And so we journeyed from Jerusalem.
Our aim was to be lifted to the Mountain:
Sinai! Jabal Musa! To walk where lore
Had Moses stand and speak to God direct!
We rode on transport lorries with the troops,
The soldiers armed and ready, businesslike,
Yet seemingly indifferent to our plan.
Four days’ thumbing rides had brought us here,
This god-forsaken spanse of emptiness.
One more leg to go, dirt road, due east,
At every compass point save to the east,
Where mountains dwarfed by distance profiled low -
Flat emptiness unto a flat horizon.
Far to the west, mere scribble in the sky,
An oil fire in the Gulf of Suez roiled
A silent plume of poison heavenward.
We walked toward the meager source of shade,
The lorry fading out of sight and sound,
And found ourselves surrounded - by a hush.
Instinctively, we chose to sit apart,
Affirming wordlessly a pact of silence,
Constructing isolation with our backs.
We had come into a stillness wide and deep,
Imposed upon our senses with a start,
Dwarfing us with its immensity.
No wind, no voice, no sound that could be named.
Ears stretched to the horizon - Quiet!
Only a hovering shimmer, the sound of haze.
This vast, open, immense volume of space -
Completely still! And we, as if adjured,
Became that stillness’s co-creators and guardians.
Co-creators, yes! For I sensed others
Silently observing in that calm.
When crickets cease to chirp upon approach,
That quiet has a different feel than silence.
For they are waiting, watchful, listening,
And what you hear is crickets being still!
Just so, I felt perceived by fellow beings
And, likewise, I perceived their listening.
And all of us together, so it seemed,
Were eavesdropping – alert, intent – upon
The earth itself, as if to hear it breathe!
A living stillness, made by living beings.
As though confirming Life’s ubiquity:
The very faintest scratching sound, and, lo –
A beetle, of an inch in size, on march
Across the sand some thirty feet away,
Trailing hieroglyphics in its wake.
But somehow this small ripple only served
To mark the depth of stillness even more.
Perhaps because I’d come for revelation,
The hope of conjuring some trance-like state,
Some taste of the miraculous, a vision;
Perhaps because no landmark of my life
Was even hinted at within that space,
I was, for moments scattered here and there,
Able to untether from my self,
To lay aside all details of my life,
And be but one more creature of the earth,
On equal footing with the scrabbling bug.
And in those moments of pure blessedness
I sensed a whole to which I added naught!
And came into the shining cognizance
That beauty, meaning, majesty and awe
Are not mere constructs built within the mind
But features part and of the world itself!
If "revelation" be its proper name,
It was the most unsupernatural
Event of my experience, then and hence.
Once only was the stillness truly rent:
A burgeoning commotion, coming fast,
An unfamiliar sound, alive, alarming!
Flamingos, hundreds strong, in rapid flight,
Yawping, squawking, flapping overhead,
Their long legs trailing like the tails of kites.
I thought so vigorous a fusillade
Must surely break the spell beyond repair,
But as they dopplered out of hearing range –
Almost to the limits of my sight –
The stillness swooped back in to fill the void
Created by the parting of their noise.
And now, I had an added visual mark
With which to gauge the volume of that quiet,
And entered once again, yet deeper still!
Thus four hours passed as a single breath,
Before the bus arrived, worn and rugged,
On its way to Sinai, to the Mountain.
A thank-you tour for Swedish volunteers,
(Of which more than a few were beautiful)
At a labor-starved kibbutz in the Galil.
In a single tick, we were returned to Time,
And life resumed its context and its flow -
Small talk, food, desires, the War and all….
For forty years and more I have returned
To those four hours spent on the desert floor,
Understanding growing over time,
To gain release, perspective, wakened sense,
To know again, to feel with certainty:
The world is real! Existence is complete!
And I and all my human kin and kind,
Can join the greater peace or run away,
Can be a part of it, or stand apart,
Remote, removed, on lonely mountain tops
Of history, and creed, and copious deeds,
Hearing nothing but our own hollow roar.