Approximate sunlight.

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed." - Joshua 10:13

"Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas

I watched the sun rise over the Mediterranean at 5:30 in the evening. Both of us were fighting for a few more minutes in the day.

I knew going in that this was it. My last international trip for about a year and a half; the semi-retirement of my passport. When I returned to America I would begin a job with my dream television show to work for, starting at 2 days a week and being constantly on call to work the other 5. Eschewing vacation requests and treading as lightly as possible in the hopes of parlaying this opening into a full-time position. Which meant I had to take a pass on the $360 DC to Peru deal I saw online. Say no to my friend's suggestion of Radiohead in Berlin in July. I'd been the personification of Dylan Thomas' words for three years, but for the sake of my career, of my adulthood, I finally had to acquiesce to the tedium that is responsibility.

While I was grateful to travel again, this trip to Israel was itself already a segue into domestication. Gone were the hostels and followed whims that come with total sovereignty. Israel wasn't even my choice, nowhere near the top of my list for a next destination. But this trip was instead a special request by my aging mother, who wanted one last international vacation before her chronically bad feet gave way. With my memories spent with my deceased father now finite, I recognized how precious a week's worth of new ones with my remaining parent would be later in life. But a trip with her, especially in the Middle East, meant playing it safe. And aside from some freedom in Jerusalem and a day trip into Palestine on our own, we'd been on the pre-packaged tour group itinerary for the past week. With 12 hours left in the country, most of which would be consumed by sleep, the backpacker in me was fiending for some freedom.

I saw none of Tel Aviv. 10 minutes after our tour bus arrived in the city, I had abandoned my bags and my hobbling mother with her severely swollen ankle in our hotel room. With less than an hour of muted sunlight left in the yawning day, I was determined to make it the two and a half miles down the Mediterranean coastline to the old city of Jaffa before returning in time for a final mother-son dinner. The walkway contoured along emptying beaches, most people having long given up on the shy sun. Solitary shafts of frail light extended down to the water, propping up the cloud-laden sky. Every ten feet was a potential postcard landscape that I snapped off a shot of before resuming my brisk pace down the beach. 

It was an exercise in absurdity, so characteristically me. The same person who'd been to 29 countries in 150 days, who'd been to 11 cities in 6 days on this trip, was now trying to walk 2 miles to Jaffa, see its scattered highlights and be back on my way north all in under an hour. Because on the first go-round, denial is always more comfortable than defeat. 

With the sun setting rapidly, I checked my progress on a crude map that mostly highlighted the unending major hotels along the water. I was about two-thirds of the way to Jaffa, the spire of its prominent St. Peter's Church growing visible along the water. Reason, restraint, even relaxation finally settled in as my hurried pace slowed to a stroll and came to a stop. I began simply breathing, enjoying, truly seeing what was in front of me. Which meant I paused in time to fully see the clouds' defeat as the sun emerged, higher in the sky than it had appeared for the last half hour. The remaining twenty minutes of sunlight on my trip would be clearer and stronger than any of the ten hours that had preceded it. Day was breaking over Israel, the Mediterranean, and myself. Again.

With almost year and a half until my next journey, it is as distant and abstract as the names that will comprise it. Sarajevo. Belgrade. Mostar. Piteşti. Cluj. It's impossible to know how different my life will be by then, where eighteen months of infinite variables producing variables will lead me or those close by. I don't fear change (I don't think it's conceited to say I've rolled with punches better than your average 20-something) but I'm experienced enough to respect it. Especially as I'm reaching the precise age when potential leads to either payoff or failure. The point in the day when either the clouds or the sun wins. My traveling is ending for now, but the undercurrent that has propelled it, what has left me with something deeper than Facebook albums to show for it, is still continuing. As evidenced by the words and experiences here, and future others, I'm still teaching myself how to live.

If I'd succeeded in my absurdity, Old Jaffa would have gone down as the end of my travels. Just a luck in the draw of itineraries. Instead it was a sunset, by an energy with renewed intensity. I've watched plenty of sunsets in different cities, but staring west over the Mediterranean, I felt for the first time that the sun wasn't setting, it was just progressing forward. On its way to burn brighter in the lands to the West. In New York. And I'd be catching back up with it shortly. Once I came home.

Brick by brick by brick.

It could only have been a wall. 

I was late once. On an organized bus tour of nearly 60 people, it's as rude as it is inevitable. But when you're dealing with mostly gingerly-stepping retirees, it's to be understood that at least one will at some point be late. As it happened each time over the course of six days, some people around me got frustrated, my mother definitely included, but for the sake of change alone, I didn't mind that I was killing time waiting for someone on the streets of Nazareth rather than the avenues of Hell's Kitchen.

I let myself be the culprit, once, for about 45 seconds. And I was a little shocked that no one else had picked this moment to do the same. That I was the one that had pushed it farthest. Or maybe I was shocked that I still let myself be shocked.

They were late for different reasons. Missed wake-up calls at the hotel, a Southern preacher haggling down the price of a 3-foot-long ram's horn to bring back for his office wall, several people getting turned around in the folding alleyways of Tsfat. My excuse is I got lost in conversation, with no one in particular.

I didn't like Jerusalem. It was everything I thought it would be and less. Bad souvenirs, clueless snail-paced tourists, nonstop pitchmen, an approach to history either apocryphal or apathetic. The ancient that has survived into the modern day is incredible to behold, as long as you can put aside the lingering doubts of its authenticity, and ignore the great deal more of history here that has been completely destroyed. The capital of three deeply-related faiths practicing an alternating cannibalism, of both followers and foundation stones for the past three thousand years. Obsessed with the fallacy that destruction of the tangible will eradicate the transcendental. Adamantly asserting the dogma of Jesus, Elijah, Muhammad, but really just underscoring the gospel according to Tyler. That on a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everything drops to zero. Solomon's temple fell, as did Herod's that replaced it. The Via Dolorosa, the path of Christ dragging the cross, isn't the actual path he took, but one that a group of 14th Century Franciscan monks particularly liked, and hence the tradition was born for unaware pilgrims to follow centuries later. Temples, truth, and theology.... all inevitably fall victim to time. Nowhere more blatantly than Jerusalem.

Aside from the Temple Mount, which is now accessible only to Muslims, the oldest public site is the Western Wall, the most holy in all of Judaism. The sixty-plus-foot high wall that surrounded the ancient temple courtyard. The afterthought of function now turned center for faith. Here believers stand with palms and foreheads against ancient stone, asserting pressure that gets them closer to God. Hoping the physics behind coal and diamonds carries over to prayers. Here they jam wadded scraps of paper into cracks of the wall, believing the words of the petition inside will then stand a greater chance of consummation. Caulking the gaps- in their lives with hope, and in Herodian limestone with notebook paper. 

I didn't write a prayer, as I had nothing to pray for nor to. Instead I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead into a contour of the wall and thought of the four-thousand years of men that had occupied that exact groove before me. Of what they might have asked for. And I thought of the walls that had come before in my life. My visit to the largest of the few remaining portions of the Warsaw Ghetto wall, tucked away in a courtyard between two more modern apartment buildings, its ten feet of height now helping to provide shade for a playground a few steps away. The only time in my travels that tears came absolutely instantly rather than a gradual buildup. 7 miles from where I stood now and a day earlier, the Israeli built security wall that carves the entire border of the West Bank, covered in painted protest by Westerners demanding its destruction and the creation of a Palestinian state. How history is as cyclical as it is ironic as it is cruel. This Palestinian barricade so reminiscent of the iconic wall in my favorite city of Berlin and its East Side Gallery. Four months earlier, my Thanksgiving day spent hiking atop the Great Wall of China at Gubeikou. My nontraditional if still entirely appropriate observation of the holiday. The John Lennon Wall in Prague, covered in Beatles lyrics birthed from cans of spray paint, that my best friend and I had added to in 2008. He tagging "Here Comes the Sun," which his mother used as a lullaby in his infancy. Among the three I contributed was "Nothing's gonna change my world," and within the year I had said unretractable goodbyes to my home, a parent, a love, a number of friends, and stability. But the absence of each only pushed me onward, propelled by a vacuum.  And still all the other walls, the Khmer-carved ones at Angkor Wat, the fragment in a Hiroshima museum stained with the blackest streaks of atomic rain, the bricks used as canvases throughout Europe, in Naples by Banksy, in Kreuzberg by Swoon, in Glasgow and Valencia and everywhere by nameless others. In Jerusalem, I was remembering these other walls and how this oldest one stood here as those others were only being built. I wasn't trying to invoke some holiness away from these bricks, but add some needed contentment back. I wasn't saying please. I was saying thank you. To whatever this is we are all a part of. If not necessarily God, then life, energy, samsara. For everything I've been indescribably fortunate enough to do already. And for everything I plan to do next.

I took my forehead away from the wall and carefully walked backwards, as is the reverent custom, to the entry gate, deposited my borrowed informal yarmulke in the pile, and found my tour group, the guide finishing another head count, one with my presence now complete. 

I was late once. And it was intentional. Because one of the central tenets that the last 3 years has taught me: you pick your spots.



Ophir raised the small logo-ed plaque on the stick and spoke into the small microphone headset. "Okay, so we're all back. Now we're going to walk through one of the oldest gates of the Old City...."