This month we are working with the team
Goodness Gracious. Brian, our squad leader, said they were a very
pleasant team and that since we are a pleasant team too, we’d get
along very well. I don’t know what that says about the other teams,
but I am excited to be with them.
I write in my new moleskin. It is a
thin journal which now has the word “Romania” written on the
brown cover in stencil letters. My sister bought a pack of three of
these for me when I was in New Jersey about a month ago (was it
really that recent?), and I filled up every page of the first one
when I was in Ireland. Now I am in country number two writing on
journal number two. Its pages feel fresh and crisp. Soon the pages
will be worn, dog eared, and filled with my black and blue scrawl. A
month from now, it will be full, brimming with what will feel like a
lifetime of experiences, of lessons, but now it is blank, filled only
with endless possibilities.
A blonde flight attendant pulls her
suitcase through the fluorescent lit parking lot. She’s pretty. I
smile and make eye contact. She eyes me, not warily, but not
friendly. I wonder what Romanians will be like.
It’s warm here, much warmer than
Ireland. There is no rain. The sky is not covered with the low grey
which was all but constant on that tiny green isle. The full,
parchment colored moon peaks out from behind the dark clouds. The
clouds are black and eerie. The moon seems small, smaller here than
in California. It is as if this country has a darkness to it, a
hauntedness, maybe emanating from its mythologized region,
Transylvania.
I am ready for a bit of spookiness
though, and for the darkness. We’ve spent a month couped up in
Dublin, in a big, old building surrounded by a the thin streets of
city guarded by rain and traffic lights. It feels more open here,
and I am itching to walk through warm woods at night underneath that
parchment colored moon, veiled as it is just now by black clouds. I
might be escorted by dark men who talk in strange tongues. We will
run through cornfields and Transylvanian midnight streams and howl at
that moon.
I want Romania’s wildness, if it has
any, the wildness Dublin couldn’t provide, couldn’t provide even in
its clubs and pubs. I want something primitive and real and
connected to the earth and its cries and groans. Who knows though,
Romania might not be better. It might be a land of friendly farmers
without any holy devils to teach American’s how to be wild.
“I left here a boy and return a
bull… with two horns.” I read that on the plane out of Palace
Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. I hope
this will be true for me. Jesus was a bull. A thousand men tried to
ride him. A thousand men tried to lasso him and fence him in, tried
to teach him to play nice, to follow the rules, to live peacefully.
They tried to make a cow out of him.
“I came not to
bring peace,” he said to them, “but a sword.” Not peace, but
two horns, which will break your cute little china shops into
porcelain rubble, which will smash flowery, tiny tea cups by the
thousands, which will decimate gold leafed saucers by the hundred
thousand…
…and out of that
rubble I will create something new, something perfect and holy.
Superglue has nothing on me. I will fuse porcelain and my blood and
flesh and make a temple, a holy place, a place of peace.
His anger is a
grace. Like the Page France song,
Swing like a
wrecking ballLike the heart of GodWhat a mystery!You’re a wrecking ballWith a heart of goldWe will wait for it to swing
How is it that life
comes so often from death, light so often from darkness, peace so
often from the rubble of what was really an illusion of peace?
