I was over at Paul's blog. He was a fellow traveller on the Palestine journey and he was talking in a post about struggling to be back and it set something off.
I think all the people who went on the trip seem to be struggling being back in one way or another. I know I'm certainly finding aspects of being back a bit bumpy on re-entry.
It's re-finding those familiar things that I allowed myself to not think about. (I know I was only away for a week but you live several days in one in Palestine) On Monday at work I had to really stop and think what my login password for my computer was. Someone asked what my extension number was- I had to find the post it note with it written on. My sleep patterns are slightly out of whack. And it sounds like we’re all waking around 6am. I also know that the UK is experiencing a cold snap but I'm keenly feeling the cold. Layers of t shirts under hoodies with heating turned up.
I have a bit of a recurring dream. It's not a whole dream, it's just a scene that seems to leak into other dreams. I'll be bimbling through one dream, open and door and step into this scene and then wake. I've stopped looking at the clock as I now know it'll always be 6am. (Maybe that's the time I kept waking due to the call to prayer)
One morning I went with some others to see the conditions at a checkpoint. Long queues, people praying, eating, sleeping.. everything going on by this huge wall topped with razor wire. My eyes kept searching the tiny windows of the watchtowers to see if Israeli soldiers were watching. I couldn't tell. Then there was word through the crowd and around 3000 people all ran to try to get to the front of the queue. All politeness and semblance of a queue disappeared. I've not done the injustice of the situation justice. I can't conjure the scene easily. I'd have to wake you early, take you by the hand and show you myself and know that even then you wouldn't fully believe your eyes knowing that this happens day in day out and the world knows about it and the world isn't really doing that much about it.
So now I sleep and I dream of checkpoints and walls, sometimes I’m me watching, sometimes I’m running to get through and other times, weirdly, I’m the wall or the watchtower with little Israeli's looking out through my eyes and aiming guns out of my nose.
I think part of the issue with being back is that we’re carrying the weight of the stories from the living stones and we’re learning how to walk with the weight of their stories in our pockets. Part of me hopes I never learn to just live with it, that I don’t turn it into stories to “dine out” on and end up hearing people say “Oh, Ben… do tell those stories of that quirky little place you visited with those sweet people from Greenbelt”.
