Odds and Ends

Street Cats and Pi Dogs

To walk a dog is essentially simple.  At times it feels like a chore, but more often than not it's just really nice.  Early morning is the best time to stroll in our neighborhood.  Most cars and their stinky presence have yet to rise, so jasmine and orange blossoms creep into your nose and saturate your headspace.  Many bowabs have begun their sunrise watering routines of rinsing flowers and trees, cars and sidewalks.  You can feel and smell the wet, and imagine rain.  Harley and I are happy as pigs in shit, this perfect time of day.  But the moment the city wakes up, along with it's hundreds of feral felines and canines...  one must beware.  For behind any garbage can, beneath any parked car, atop any shrub or tree, they lie lawlessly in wait.

Last weekend, Justin and Harley came home from an early evening walk with bloody wounds and an unfortunate battle story.  A gang of fierce street cats pounced out of the woodwork, screaming their deadly howls and leaving my guys cut-up on leg and nose.  I've yet to have a run-in with cats, but have created a score of outrageous scenes fighting off the nastiest of pi dog packs.

Justin's first line of defense is carrying a rock in hand, which serves to threaten rather than attack.  My strategy is to make as if seeing a bear in the wilderness...  scream and act big.  "AH!  AH!  GITOUTTAHERE, GIT!"  I bark, flail my limbs and biggering belly, and push back.  I swear, one could ride a small surfboard on the ripcurl of these dogs' gnarly snares.

While it feels good to protect and defend my own, I realize the dogs are just doing the same.  The poor creatures have no caretaker to whom they can dedicate their hearts, so they dedicate them to the lonely streets they roam.  And when it's the female dogs who come at us, as we all bark, I can't help but feel a respect and kinship...  toward nipples hanging low and full, and defenseless pups somewhere nearby.

Beautiful People

Everywhere, there they are.

Standing next to me on the train in a black headscarf, a woman twice my age observes my pregnant self and offers me her seat.

On my weekly trip to Menar's farm, Ommy ow Magdi brings me tea sweetened with sugar and tells me to put my feet up.  Ommy ow Magdi translates to 'mother of Magdi', which is how many women in the countryside are addressed once they've had children.

A cab driver from almost two months back with a smile so bright you need shades told Justin with deep pride and affection of his three beautiful daughters, all of whom were born at home.  The youngest daughter is named May and he showed us a photograph.  "If you have a daughter, you name her May."  We are having a daughter and we have named her May.

Ostaz Gamal, a seventy-six year old man we met in February, narrates a tour through his beloved street garden on a long, wide median strip in downtown Heliopolis.  We struggle happily to communicate with one another in broken English and broken Arabic.  He names every flower and says with an endearing accent, "This one, very nice.  This one, very beautiful."  He explains that the Indian jasmine is a new transplant he hopes to cultivate into a canopy that will envelop passersby in it's fragrance...  or in what he worded as "a beauuuuutiful smell tent".  Yes!  Sometimes, flowers and other items are stolen from the garden.  Sometimes, they are simply broken and left behind.  He says it makes his heart hurt, as the flowers are like his sons.

Ostaz Gamal is an ardent gardener and beloved community activist.  In Arabic, 'ostaz' means 'mister' and 'gamal' translates to 'beauty'!  I should say you sure do exude it, Ostaz Gamal.

Ostaz Gamal showed us around for well over an hour, identifying myriad flowers and plants by name.  He oversees volunteers who help manage the Heliopolis Street Garden, a protected and multifunctional green space in downtown Heliopolis. 

Indian jasmine...  the beginnings of an intoxicating smell tent.

The Red Sea

The world's northernmost tropical sea... a home to more than one thousand invertebrate species and two hundred varieties of coral...  has now cleansed we three.

Through the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea exchanges it's water with the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.  I love to think about this exchange.  An exchange of salt water, a sharing of personal strength, a give and take of healing power.  Still can't believe my body and May and J were in it.

I have two cousins, intrepid travelers inspired by our family's older generation of intrepid travelers, with a life aspiration of setting foot on every continent.  Barb and Linda have long been on their way toward this goal.  I think now of it's complementary goal that I might take on...  to set my body in every ocean on this awe-some planet.  Click here for a few more from our day at the Red Sea.
       

 

Maps

So I've been looking at and pondering my breasts lately.  A lot.  Although they're more like road maps with their fascinating and intricate network of veins ever-developing.  Two maps on either side of my heart and above this growing baby.  Sometimes I look at them and wonder...  where would these maps lead me?  

Soaring peaks and bottomless valleys make up the landscape of our daily lives here in Cairo...  city of seventeen million people and ongoing revolution.  The best and worst of humanity punches me in the face morning, noon, and night.  I either catapult into the ether with optimism, love, and determination...  or am hammered down, pounded into polluted ground with a broken heart and spit in my face.  Justin and I have spent a good stretch of time talking about the staggering spectrum of emotion that we can feel in a single day.

Things happen and some days I feel angry, oppressed, and misunderstood.  Usually I think that if only I had more knowledge...  which would lead more understanding...  which could lead to more empathy or compassion...  then this wouldn't be the case.  Maybe the pollution, the glares, the shaming fingers wouldn't bother me so.  And what is really, actually happening in these moments, anyway?  What is lost or created in the risky business of perception?  Were the glares from that man on the street this afternoon all in my mind?  Who am I to assume what a certain look means?  Are body language and facial expression as different in a foreign country as oral language?  I feel how I feel, sit with the questions, and try to just be.

The volley from peak to valley to peak, left to right to center, love to contempt to ambivalence leaves me feeling cashed out, confused, and lost.  Staring at these weird breast maps is comforting.

This past weekend some map or intuition led us out of the city to Bahariya, Egypt.  Bahariya is a massive geological depression and desert oasis located 360km outside of Cairo.  Inhabitants of Bahariya refer to themselves as 'Wahati', 'of the oasis', and are descendants of Bedouin tribes.  Justin, Harley, and I stayed for three days.  We swam in a hot spring of rust-colored, iron-rich water.  We toured the sights.  We walked into various unmarked caves and tombs and looked at various unmarked paintings and carvings on the underground walls and chose to believe that yes, this probably is the tomb of Alexander the Great...  or yes, these probably are the Golden Mummies.  Whatever it all was, it was far out.  And it was old.  Very, very old.

Our last night we camped in the White Desert.  Sixty million years ago, we'd have been camping at the bottom of a shallow sea.  I won't try to describe this place or the affect it had on me.  Not right now, not yet.  But I'll give a shout out to our guide Hamada.  You'll see Hamada in the photos.  My time in the White Desert shifted my whole being.  I'm too afraid to try and articulate what I mean, though it was for sure away from the angry, oppressed, and misunderstood.  Hamada had to do with the shift.  The infinite space had to do with the shift.  Getting to be alone, while near Justin and Harley and the growing baby in this feeling of the infinite had to do with the shift.  I've never experienced space so vast or deafeningly silent.  I've simply never felt so close to space.

Below are a few nice photos, though you can click here to see a bigger album.  We stopped frequently along the way from Bahariya to the White Desert.  Scrolling through the photos, you'll know when you arrive at the latter.  Looks like Star Wars, looks like snow, but really it doesn't look like anything else in the history of the time and space (as far as I know).  We left our Canon Rebel at home, but the PowerShot proved itself a solid back-up.  Not bad, not bad at all!