Often in the past months I would stand on the rooftop of the villa alone. I climbed up one night for a last smoke before bed. The rooftop was deserted, except for the silent Afghan guards perched in their towers. I walked over to the edge of the roof and watched the city. I was listening to its rumbling and rumor of movement and night life, pulsations and lights in the night. It occurred to me how unnatural is the habit of the predatory bipeds to be awake at hours when one does not hunt.

But there were boys outside at hunt. The battle cries subside at night, and the passionate restlessness silently begins to burns, ungratified, in turmoil, tossing and turning awake in wine and secret deeds. These young men who met in each other’s houses, womanless, the shenanigans, the unpunished sins sweetened by the shared secret misdeeds.

Here, like in many prohibitive cultures, love among the men is at the forefront. These boys dress up and put on make-up for their male friends. They do not have girl friends. They get married to procreate, for family and political reasons, but keep loving men as their mates and comrades, and lovers. In the same time, the unmarried boys dream Indian soap music, the roses drop from the foreheads into water, the sleeve embroidery flows in the air, the dark eyes cry for the desert lovers - city dreams on the dusty streets and white flesh under the young beard. A people at love and war, where every death and love is a sharing and a ripped off veil. But the blood keeps silent, heaves dangerously at every wound, until it heals. No love or death inflicts something that the next boyish kiss will not wipe off; and the blood will mean yet again.

Sensing these images in the distance, under the anonymous rooftops full of crimson passions, unrecorded ecstasies and despair, I found myself a woman, a non-woman, manless and fleshless, floating behind the walls of a fortress. I was full with unadmitted and uncommitted passions, chest-full for man’s kisses, hidden behind my own invisible walls, protected with heavy weapons and harsh vigil. I would have given myself softly to nocturnal fingers, my body would have yearningly risen to meet the heat of pure male skin. That was a secret I had to deny and pace on. I stood above the rooftops of Kandahar like a fortress within a fortress protecting nothing but the desire to love.

Everything that meets us is set in motion a long time ago. The desires, the fantasies, the little openings and soft spots in the being - they tear into major doorways for life’s blessings and disasters to enter. We summon what brings out our true nature, and it is in the nature of this world to bring out the best and the worst in us. Our destinies are already made within our hidden recesses. We know our destiny insofar as we know what is hidden inside us.

We, made of drives and dams of which we know so little. Our knowledge of our selves blindly flickers like    reflections on the ocean. Nothing new happens to us. We happen to ourselves. We just don’t know ourselves. What can a reflection know of the oceanic depths?

My hidden nature, I concluded that night, was a sea of passion fenced by a desert of fear - and the pleasures and the disasters that were coming my way, I knew, would be their exact replicas.
The moment ended, and I did what I had to do: I went to sleep.

(This is the sixth segment of Chapter 1 of the White Book of Feathers, which will be reproduced here in parts in the future. Please refer to the previous five posts on this blog for Segments 1-5 of the Book)

July came with heat increasing to hurt, but the humid shades in the garden provided a softer embrace. Sometimes sandstorms would rise and continue throughout the night. We would wake up snowed up in sand. Everything then pales under the summer sun which rises to hammer down on the world with naked force. The sun upon the fragile, defenseless sky, its innocence disemboweled by the sword of the rays. The sun is our ruling priest: it blesses and kills, it gives birth and discards us like yesterday’s dream.

That’s what we seem in our perishable form. Dreams of yesterday, lost in the nakedness of the flat day. We, on the compound, were strangers to this world. We had almost no connection to life, we were lost. We cried long and in secret of each other on the shoulders of the trees, we hid in the shallows of the noon. We waded, tracking the thin threads of dreams which disappeared as soon as one set a foot on them. We were lost, and in the morning we might not exist. But butterflies were being born each day.

Perhaps the gold is still asleep under the pillow where no one shall ever find comfort again. Perhaps there is gold, like the sun, we leave behind.  After Kandahar, I knew I would never dream again of what I used to dream. When one loses a longing,no matter how obsolete, the gold which could have shone on us is a gold unborn. Dust.

I was tired. I wished that those hard times of overwork and conflicts to be past. Time is where the gold separates from the sand, and lush rainbows shed colors on the memories. I wished all to end so I could become a new beginning. A fresh new wind smothering me in golden sand and a new sun blinding my forehead. I dreamt I was a fragile giant, a statue in a desert without oases, and aeons passed before the hand cold reach the forehead to rub off the disturbed thoughts. Eternity seemed so long that to make a single move appeared senseless, however, it is the movement that creates the meaning of being alive. That’s how I dreamt.

Days quietly went by under the heat like tender beads strung on a steel chain. The air was in embers, the pale sand dust glittered in the rays. Prior to the Hamkari operation taking sway, there was neither sound nor sight of the American military presence on the Kandahari streets in our neighborhood. After the attack on the Chemonics compound in the vicinity, our team was the last one standing in the city. I felt a siege enclosing on us from one day to another, gradually, almost imperceptibly. We could have believed that we were at peace with the world if there wasn’t for all the intelligence of assassinations, attacks, land mines, closing onto the compound.

There were days when even the air seemed agitated. Ready for escape; it would take flight under an attack, it would leave us alone and airless to finally entwine with the real violence pressing on our skin. Our security bubble would burst leaving a vacuum of breathlessness. In my mind, I saw naked white bodies dressed in crimson, limbs mingled in our last expression of love, our loyalty to each other. Our trust would lay exposed like a museum.

I saw our spirits there, hovering above our garden, slightly confused, trying to discern the bodies in the pile of generous flesh. It wouldn’t hurt any longer. We would be finally  a-flight, beyond the thoughts of good or evil. At last we would be fearlessly gentle to each other. We had not known anything beyond our shrunk selves, our slightly sad thoughts lingering abandoned in the bones. Confused by the intercession in time. Mild, like dewdrops.

And then, a gentler expanse would open in the unforeseen sky, between the twilight of the worlds of the living and the dead. In a flicker, an oceanic presence would come forth, the ancient embrace, our true heart would open to call us back. Sparkling specks of dust were dancing in the air of this city which has seen thousands of generations bury its dead. We are simply mortal.
That is what I saw one morning in a vision. I wonder whether accepting these seen visions diverted them, or they were perhaps merely figments of a weary, agitated imagination.

Such thoughts were reserved for the dawn. The workday was discipline. I preferred to leave the office and work in the garden. There were dignified trees summoning doves in their branches. Birds pecked in the grass daringly approaching our feet. The roses scented the air, and I was alone on the lawn, amidst our armed Afghan and expatriate security and service personnel. My heart was in that garden. Peace and life dwelled there and no stress was stressful enough to resist the beauty of this surrounding.

In March 2010, I was deployed to Kabul where all company headquarters in Afghanistan usually are. It was a rainy and muddy spring, heaving with vapor. We suffocated in the dust under the sun, we choked in the suspicious humidity evaporating from a soil long used to pounding by the fist of the sun. Just like the soil, we were taken aback by the cold showers. So much blossoming moisture in the sickly air, hidden floods and avalanches erupting, while the rugged summer laid in lethal ambush down the road.

After the previous years in the rainless southern deserts, I found myself confused to waddle through the mud on the Kabul streets. I stood at the rooftop balcony of the villa where I stayed, alone and foreign, while the mud water flickered on the ground. I was longing for the South. The distant horizons were as tender as always. The massive mountains descended through space like an unchallengeable curtain. I watched the silhouettes on the Kabuli streets, their sleeves and skirts flowing.

In this country, people walk with strength; the pace is simple, and everything leads to everything else. The feet are in concordance. In Afghanistan, of all places, I felt in concordance with myself. This country, hell and heaven within the same flicker of the eye. I was longing for the South, the regions of stark contrasts between light and shade, between heaven and hell, between one’s hidden depths and heights. The place on earth where one may be blessed with a true challenge. Nearly unendurable. Nearly enlightening. That was South.
A month after I arrived in Kabul, I indeed went to Kandahar, to be close to the desert I loved and to the front-lines of the project I was hired on. Perched on the rooftop in the heart of the city, surrounded by protective barriers and guns, and yet vulnerable, I felt the exposure and loved it. We were positioned like a heart on the chest, put forward for an embrace, guardedly open. I deeply inhaled and imbibed the spirit of Kandahar flickering in the air, carried by the sounds of the markets and busy traffic. It did not matter that the city could kill me. Fair enough. The beauty of its ancient spirit was truer than my sparse human life.

That year, I arrived in Afghanistan in early March 2010. It was a home-coming to this country of stern landscapes and severe beauty. Despite the harshness of the environment, I deeply enjoyed every minute of it. I greeted the snow-covered mountains in the clear morning air with a slight bow. They greeted me back. Powerful, solemn mountains, indifferent to the flicker of human life, and yet aware of us. “I am home, I am home,” my heart sang. A veil lifted from my forehead struck by the endless depth of the sky.

It was freezing beneath the turquoise blue I waited for our security personnel to pick me up from the deserted Kabul airport and I felt happy again, as happy as I hadn’t been since the last time I left the country two years before. The hidden warrior, the adventurer, the curious tomboyish child, the spiritual seeker in me - all were on the move once again, hands and boots in the dust, just where I like them. No way to tell what’d happen next.

It’s not a highly respected character attribute, but I live for challenges. People like me, slightly dislocated at the basis, push ourselves too hard, beyond our limits, because we do not really know where out limits are. Our boundaries of self-preservation have never been set or they’ve been breached long ago. Now we do not know when and how to stop. We feel fully alive only when this breach is reenacted, a pleasure beyond pleasantness or pain. We go far too inside, far too outside seeking the intensity of total exposure. With our silent secrets, we are driven to throw ourselves naked at the non-human World, into the Wild. Passionate and vulnerable, we move through our own breach beyond the set defenses, across the borders of the deserts, scorched and moving. We are shaken together with the Wild. We are nowhere under shelter because the Wild has taken abode in us. We break up and break down. We know that we can survive damage.

In 2007, in the deserts of Helmand in southern Afghanistan, far away from mental comfort, I wrote the following: “It is deluding to think of the human being as something naturally wholesome and solid. A breakdown closer to the essence of living, to the heart of Life, both soft and ruthless. The way we are, broken, we flow over. But we are all alone, unwhole, incomplete, useless and clumsy in the community of the wholesome people, of the perfectly rounded up, of the socially desirable ones, of the maintainers of order. We are outside and beside every order – at the margins, under water, above the waves, all at once. But we never resemble the perfect squares of sunlight on the surface.

We resemble life, dirty, strong, vulnerable, worn out, overflowing, from day to day, from hour to hour, we roll on without a destination, as if not by our own will. We let the waves roll us, kick us, leave us sometimes immobile for years in the forgotten straits of the world. We live with the invisibility of existence. We do not strive to emerge into daylight. We belong not. We sink and rise as if by some alien watery hand. We are not skilled at staying.

We cannot remain, not without losing our essence, our single, useless, untranslatable knowing. Simply, we are not good at it. From the fractures, however, and from the healing, rarely, something precious, something that may remain, is born.”
I had learnt to accept this. And now, three years later, something was stirring to be born, something different. For better or for worse, I couldn’t tell.

On that particular August morning in Kandahar, in one of the worst summers in Afghanistan, I had enough. Enough of a seven-day work week, late night tasks, urgent emails, lack of sleep, and most of all, enough of fighting off my colleagues.
My job was a communications manager of a major stabilization-aid project operating in nearly all provinces of Afghanistan. Kandahar is the Taliban’s pride and spiritual center, now overtaken by the Afghan President Karzai’s allies of often dubious honesty and by foreign military forces of often dubious success, both contested by the native Taliban, a motley array of their supporters and independent criminal gangs.
Unlike the military and civilian personnel encased in military bases, we, the handful of foreign civilians lived and worked in the city observing in the colorful side of Afghans, their complexity and humanness, for better and for worse. We lived amongst them, in an environment in which they outnumbered us. We were relatively and voluntarily vulnerable. Part of our exposure was based on the guarantee of well-armed private security company and part was based on trust. Having survived thus far, it seemed that we’d had a good reason to trust our Afghan neighbors and employees. Or luck. Probably both.
Afghans are extraordinary people and I have enjoyed it tremendously many times to examine them about their lives, customs and beliefs. Most of them are proud, admirably resilient and ingenuously adjustable characters. I admire their culture and traditions, although I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of it. I don’t agree with many aspects of the Western culture either. I have been in Afghanistan on four assignments thus far, mostly in the Pashtoon South. A single Western woman, I’ve always treated my Afghan colleagues with sincere respect and have been regularly humbled to receive nothing but warm generosity, protection and respect from them, unlike the demonization of the Pashtoons in the media.

(continues)

My book on Mewlana Rumi in Macedonian, with an introduction (book attached).

Skapoceniot kamen na vodata - Rumi Izbor stihovi - Ana Pejcinova 2010

Why travel?

I could, as I have done before, list a dozen reasons: the destination, the exoticism, the adventure, the money (ha! - this one makes me laugh the most), the insufficiency, the career (whatever that might mean)….

I could say so and lie, as I have done before.

There is no reason to travel. There is a cause, many of them, any lie would do. Traveling is a drive to set everything on movement. Oneself, in the first place.

The voyage is something created deep inside the core far before the emergence of the thought or the circumstances that beckon travel.

Traveling is an invisible but real stroke of movement between two inner poles of the being. The tension between them is the strength with which the bow of being launches the traveler amidst the distances.

Often this string trembles without the person consciously sensing it. He believes, “I want to be there,” and this rational belief makes it easier for him to stretch himself across the strained abyss of the being. He starts, but after the first uncertain step, the bow in him lets go: he resounds and the sound dazzles him. The arrow never hits the target, as there is no target. There is dissolution of the outer peels of the being, consumed by the deterrent of the inessentials. The resistance of the slow faith in permanence, in perpetuity, in promises and necessities.

Once the arrow dissolves its body, the sound remains, below hearing and shattering, to tremble through space, in the mind’s core.

There is no arrival.

Aging. I do not have a feeling of lost time; no youthful age is dearer than the peace, the harmony and the exercised, skilled life-fulness of these years. This is experience: the art of living, both visible and invisible.

As we make a difference between ‘to love’ and ‘to be in love’, so we should make a difference between ‘to live’ and ‘to be in life.’ To live and to be in life is not only a qualitative change, but a change of perspective as well: in love and in life, to observe the world from within and experience from under the gush of love and life. However, to love and to live is to have these as attributes of another existence, whose essence is neither love nor life. There is something beyond which escapes speech.

So, aging? I lived, I was alive, I was not so much “in life” then, and certainly I was more naïve and more unaware. More fundamentally ignorant… Time passed more quickly then, it fleeted. Now I can stop it and dwell within a single moment. Wonder within it.

Sometimes I watch the reflection in the mirror, especially when I lack sleep or have passed through a number of time zones all too quickly. It looks as if the wind of time had been blowing straight into that face and it had been lashing it with streams of sand. Yes, the freshness of transience is here, it makes the eyes water and these may wash themselves in the reflection of the dawns passing us by, the dissipating ones. But the sand trail remains as streams rutted around the eyes. They call them “raven claw prints”. I have them, some from laughter, some from the sun, some from the habit to check what the sky is doing, to look into some shining imaginary or real arch.

Somebody stands still, a dark silhouette amidst the streams of time; mild is the stream so long as he stands facing it. When he averts his gaze, the stream strikes at his knees, breaks them, he may even fall. But he gets up, out of habit. His figure has become sharper, bruised and faceted by the flowing sands. Dust gathers in the folds of his sleeves, and he brushes it off, but new waves arrive. Here they are, these words, grains of incessant dust. Fertility or futility, what are they?

I know we stand thus, weightless in the world of sand and time. The sand glimmers golden under the eyelashes. To age, to mature, to face up, to pass by, to let go and to let oneself go. Humbleness in the midst of time.

We shall all become sand and wind one ordinary, mortal day.

All of us here are alone. Each one of us bears a void that drives us away from home, and something overmuch that demands to be passed on. We have all been fractured and, this way or another, put together again. It is doubtful if we are wiser or better hardened for that. Perhaps  the broken shape enables us to move more smoothly in this fractured, scattered world of shapelessness. The true face of the world is rugged and ruffled.

The fractured and the broken people are not the same. The fractured ones carry the basic experience that breakdowns are survivable. The broken ones  could not  survive their fractures, and they still walk the world with a rift whose drought is felt by everyone but themselves.

It’s an illusion that the human being is whole and solid. The breakdown is closer to the essence of living, to the heart of Life, both soft and ruthless. The way we are, we can flow over. But we are all alone, un-whole, incomplete, and useless and clumsy in the world of the “wholesome” people, of the perfectly rounded up, of the socially desirable ones, of the maintainers of order. We are outside and beside every order – at the margins, under water, above the waves, all at once. But we never resemble the perfect squares of sunlight on the surface.

We resemble life, dirty, strong, vulnerable, worn out, overflowing, from day to day, from hour to hour, we roll on without a destination, as if not by our own will. We let the waves roll us, kick us, leave us sometimes immobile for years in the forgotten straits of the world. We live with the invisibility of existence. We do not strive to emerge into daylight. We belong not. We sink and rise as if by some alien watery hand. We are not good at staying.

We cannot remain, not without losing our essence, our single, useless, untranslatable knowing. Simply, we are not good at it. From the fractures, however, and from the healing, rarely, something precious, something that can remain, is born.

Landing in Kabul again, a view from the air over the scattered roads of this two-million city that dully teems and boils. Dearness and terror simultaneously. The scent of the desert seems to be penetrating the airplane already. Dear, dear dry scent. My heart lies close to the heart of the desert.