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!