Where I Live. What I live For
The caterpillar thinks that the world is ending, and then it becomes a butterfly.
US made Saudi Air Force F-15 fighters take off from the airbase five or six miles from al jamiya petrol, the oil university, meaning KFUPM, regularly over the course of every twenty four hour period now. One can tell because they are so near as to be exceptionally loud and the sound that they make as they cross the sky is different from that created by the passenger jets which take off and land at King Fahd International Airport, which is perhaps fifteen miles from where I now sit on my back patio. The F-15s are making bombing sorties against the Houthi rebels and AQAP fighters (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) in what here is called the Yemen, the small Muslim nation on KSA's mountainous border to the southwest, the corner of the Arabian Peninsula that forms the northern mouth of the southern entrance to the Red Sea.
The Yemen has always been a special part of Al Jazeera Arabiah, the Arabian Peninsula. It has been one of the key points along the established southern, ocean going trade route between points west, including Egypt and the Levant area, Turkey, Europe, and those east, Persia, India, China, the East Indies. The northern route has always been the overland route that passed not through Arabia at all, but rather through Persia and the area now known as Iraq and up through Istanbul. As for the deserts of the peninsula, the Rub al Kali, the empty quarter, the driest, hottest portion of this arid region, international trade has never flourished. The central and northern parts of the land here in the Eastern Province, the Hasa, where I live, the Najd, controlled by Riyadh, and the Hijaz, where sits Jiddah, Makah (Mecca), and Madina, have ever had smaller trading routes from oasis to oasis by camel caravan for more local, tribal, Bedu commerce, dates, rugs, sheep.. But the Yemen, abutting the most southeasterly of the Saudi regions, the Asir, is separated by a range of mountains that make it easily defensible by the Yemeni people, by the Houthi, the Shi'a populations which even today control the north of the Yemen, the group that had a separate state, North Yemen, from ......
Here in Al Hasa, the Eastern Province, the oil rich region, things move on with no disruption. There is no chatter amongst the folks I work with about the troubles with the Yemen, it really has no bearing on our lives whatsoever. We are not living in the midst of some war torn society. Nope. I went to work today, prepped for classes, corrected essays, had a subway sandwich for lunch with two colleagues followed by a large Arabic coffee to power up for my afternoon class, then walked home and am now writing on my back patio listening to some blues. Will walk to the co-op soon between evening prayer times to get some groceries, make dinner, write some more, watch some TV from my hard drive, read, brush my teeth, set my alarm and get my eight hours horizontal.
I am eager to fly back to my little hovel at 209 S. Anderson St. for the summer and get on with playing catch up on abusing my liver. Got a righteous road trip planned with my two beloved sons out to the Midwest, down to Austin, Texas, to visit my mom, step-father and brother and his family. Can't hardly wait. And I am excited to return back here in the fall. I like it here. It is like going away to work camp where you make friends, do your job with a great ability to focus on doing it right, and it is also a great place and way for me to be able to concentrate on my writing, hone my craft. It is just now that I am setting up some other, bigger writing projects. I have had enough time to make some friendships, to learn my job, to set some routines, to make some money, to start to acclimate to this new place with its weather, its natural beauty, and its people and culture. I have, in essence, built the platform from which I can properly live and work next fall for my eight month academic year before what will be, due to the positioning of the month of Ramadan, a four month summer holiday. Al hamduh lillah, praise be to God.
My teaching this module is two sections of level three students, all of whom have just failed three and are repeating. It is my kind of challenge replete with lots of motivational speeches and innovative classroom tactics aimed at addressing their collective academic needs. I gotta say that I am really finding it appealing. I have always liked working with the underdogs. I think I am seeing some of them catch the spark, become engaged with their own education, as there is a tendency for them to be pretty unengaged, to not work hard. In KSA they say, "there is no such thing as bad students, only bad teachers." The administration, unfortunately, not only agrees with that, it is they who propagate that truth.
As I have ever been somebody who writes the words, at least when they come next to each other in this order, self discipline, in about six point font, being here is every bit the writer's weekend retreat, just, you know, packaged into two year contracts. Maybe that is just exactly what I need to get outside of my own copse of trees long enough to see the forest. Slowing down, facilitating quiet time for myself, thinking and constructing ideas for writing projects in my head in lieu of socializing, being sober enough to find myself sitting in front of a screen to write, allowing peace to manifest within me--these are not usually part of my real world. Sure I value them. And yes, I have found them at times, but no, they are not close friends that I spend much time with, more like great friends that I chide myself for not keeping in contact with as much as I ought to.
From here the world that I inhabit, externally as well as inside, seems more assessable and manageable. I can chew on something for days, weeks even, before I act on it or before I decide it best not to. Time is one thing I am rich in now and that has been for many years my goal. Money is easy to find, time so rare. My father always told his three children that making money is easy but that the price one pays for it is steep. So it is. Here I have both time and money. Money enough to gift my eldest son ten thousand dollars to pursue his, and, frankly mine for him, dream to study and to live abroad. Teo, my eldest, twenty one years old, will graduate with a BA in GIS/Geography this spring and will be attending Northern Ireland University in Galway this coming fall. Wow, a dream come true. For both of us. You go, son! Make your life extraordinary. Don't you ever let those who believe it can not be done get in your way while you are out there doing it. From living in Ireland already and now again, to walking across Spain. Good for you, T. Carpe the fuck outta that diem!
Recent days have found me working on a writing project that my younger, twenty year old, son, Paolo, and I have been cooperatively pecking away at for some time. This brings me joy in that it is a collaboration with my boy and in that it is me self actualizing, creating, writing. It is a great project that Paolo began and let me join in on. It is the tale of Judas Sycamore, Vampire hunter, set in Manhattan at the very beginning of the twentieth century. I am also working to help my father edit and revise his opus, The Conspiracy of Silence, what he feels is his last great project. The blogging is a perfect vehicle for me to get down the work of writing, to pound away at the keys and to learn to do the writing, not just to come up with what may or may not be great ideas for projects, but to actually give them life in the material world. It has been through the blog work that I have put pressure on myself to actually make the time, roughly an hour each day, to write and rewrite pieces. They are never actually polished, but I usually work on about two or three simultaneously, getting a start on one and then going back to add to another and then back to finish one. Juggling them all so that I can let them sit a bit like a good dish in the fridge, the flavors all getting cozy one with the other before returning with a fresh eye to taste it and see what it needs. Working to find small bits to save for the end of a piece, learning to recognize that bit as I go, set it aside at the bottom of the page to re encounter when I write my way down there and then, rediscovering it, work it into the ending. Learning to see it and know it when it comes up and then having the presence of mind to set it aside and then to work my way to it with the rest of the piece to set it up for that punch line, that is something I have learned over the roughly hundred posts that I have put together between the three blogs that I have kept: autenticexperience.blogspot.com; pilgrimpeb.blogspot.com; and this one, expatpeb.blogspot.com.
Checking on my pilgrimpeb blog today, The Pilgrim's Way, was a fascinating experience. I started by typing "pilgrim who calls you" into google and saw my blog post of that name pop up in the number one position, what a great tickle that was. Then went to see that last month I had 44 hits on the blog which I have not posted on for about seventeen months. Immortality achieved through the synaptic pathways of the world mind. The internet. A small patch of ground in cyberspace that I hold title and deed to.
There is not much in my life today, outside of sharing consciousness and space/time with my sons, that causes me as much endorphin/dopamine excitement as forging a piece of writing that I find satisfying and real. Not that all of them come out that way for me, but like pulling on the slot machine, some of them come out that way. Intermittent reinforcement. Ya gotta love it. What do they say about obscenity? It is not easy to define but you know it when you see it? Same goes for me as I survey a bit of writing. When I feel it has worked, that my goals have been met, my expectations and hopes for it realized, it pleases me something fierce.
Inside there are so many very different aspects of myself, so many troubling cyclones still so unsettled, great mountain tops of joys, perfect moments as yet unrealized, goals, sorrows, unresolved disappointments, triumphs, so many sunrises still to see from so many different places. Here Saudi is functioning for me as some manner of sensory deprivation tank, a container that will hold me comfortably, will rein in my impulsive drives as well as my tendency to over stimulate myself, will uphold an imposed sobriety, will aid me in keeping some focus on my physical health while my emotional self is able to take long, aimless strolls through waist high summer grasses, will provide for me the writer's cabin on the shore of my own Walden Pond.
A few things have to happen for me to be satisfied with my expressing of myself through the written word. One is it has to be true, meaning that it has to be real, it has to be me being honest about what and who I am and the words have to be the bricks used to build that Taj Mahal of a structure that is me on the two dimensions of the page. Two is that the language which I best adore is a language that exists some place between prose and poetry; mushing around the rules of syntax and grammar; turning one part of speech into another; juxtaposing words and images on top of or next to each other; ignoring rules of common usage as it suits me; boring deep into a gobbledygook of language messy like mixing cookie dough with your fingers, emotional content and finger licking good strings of syrupy, heavy, rich syllables; and then like they say about a director making the same movie over and over again, I am inexorably drawn to issues of intra and inter personal connection and loss, alienation from self, from other, from the universe, and the subsequent or simultaneous, but existing on a different plane, recovery of said separation. Seems to me that the latter stated aspect is, in the end, the heartbeat of the human condition, the center of mass of all of us and of all of It.
While like every other being I have not the ability to stare directly into the heart of the sun except but for a brief moment, the flirting with it, the attempt to capture its flavor or any resonance of it, to put a small bit of it like a lightning bug in my glass jar for just a small part of a humid, summer evening, makes it all worthwhile, dumps the endorphins into the bloodstream and makes me run straight back to the end of the line to wait my hour to strap myself back into the roller coaster seat one more time.
While money has pretty much always been something that I find not much use for, the need to pay off my sundry debts and to, gasp, sock some away for the rainy Mondays of my latter years, are concepts that at the age of fifty begin to coalesce into more than just phantoms playing about unformed just beyond my ability to make them out. Here at King Fahd University in a part of the world that I never imagined that I would live, it all seems achievable without threatening the Tarzan and the Buck Rogers inside of me that will not seem to leave, nor, truth be told, that I in any way encourage to depart. From here the cost of flying to Europe is about half that from Washington State. Istanbul but a hop away. Sri Lanka. South Africa. Greece. Croatia, the land of my paternal grandmother, a relatively inexpensive destination for one of the many paid weeks off that I have and which I can now afford.
So the question then is what is the price to pay in social costs to be here. So far those costs, to pursue the analogy, have been not bills paid but rather money earned, for I truly love it here. Today for example, like pretty much every day so far, is about eighty four degrees, sunny, a ten to twelve knot breeze blowing steady, and lots of smiling and friendly people to interact with all day until I come back to my flat to write and think and correspond and cook. Now I have a cat with her four kittens and I have had two friends stop by for fifteen to twenty minutes each to chat. No, I am not really finding myself in the place of trading good things for bad. Not being close to my family, especially to my two gemstones of children, that would be the rub. But at their ages I think I serve them best by stepping away, allowing them the opportunity to not be in my shadow, to garner their own sunshine, to spread their branches, create their own shade and from here I can drop financial packages seemingly from the sky into their laps for the chance to make their lives extraordinary, to pursue dreams that make sense to them, to feel not the sting of too much debt, to not just dream as they work a nine to five job and acquire dross and sloth or to whither under the soul baking sun of too much too fast.
If asked what I believe that the meaning of life is I guess I'd have a couple of different responses. On the purely biological level I'd say it is to replicate one's DNA and to do one's best to ensure that it continues on. On a deeper plane, a more spiritual, quantumly physical level, I'd say that our time here has been given to us to learn to merge with others of our kind, not just humankind, and to share our awareness and our beings and becoming with other parts of the universe, the ineffable, sublime, always changing and dynamic matrix of energy that we are an aspect of. I have been reading some teachings of the philosopher Osho recently. He spoke of this idea of the "meaning of life." These are his words,
"Life in itself is so beautiful that to ask the question of the meaning of life is simply nonsense."
For me Osho's words are not The Answer, but like science and spirituality in general, it seems that the asking of the questions is the goal, for certainly there are not really any answers in a universe that neither ends nor stops changing. We define our edges, our places, our boundaries of self through this constant process of experiencing and questioning, seeking to answer only to find more questions to ask, this ongoing curiosity sated by more data, more connection, more seeking.
No, I feel that the choice I have made to come to this place, to learn this part of the planet, to give some space between me and my last years of befuddled not understanding of what transpired in my marriage, what happened to my friendship with my wife, to give my kids some room to spread their wings, it's a good and obvious and ultimately seemingly predestined, inevitable choice. The angel was already in the marble, I am simply setting it free.
I can't help but be reminded of Cat Steven's masterpiece, Father and Son, a song that has always, always brought tears, a song that I have spent most of my life viewing from the perspective of a son working to cope with the pain of separation from the one being that has always held the most power and wonder and desire for me, my pops, but which more and more I understand from the place of a father.
I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy,
When you've found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.
All the times that I've cried, keeping all the things I know inside,
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it.
If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me.
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away.
I know I have to go....
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