Ripples In The Sea
When I went on vacation last week, it was the very first time i considered how important it is to write about your experiences in the moment, when i visited Petra and was contemplating the magnitude and scale of the work the people in the past have put in to crate a monument that is just as much home to them as mine is with its many cats. How they spent however many generations honing their crafts.
How when we went traveling through the Wadi Rum desert and looked at the corrosion in the sandstone mountains, seeing faces in the rocks, and the wind-showers in the evening, how we stood in the same wind that shaped the terrain around us (we think ourselves not altered by this constant wind, a force unseen but only felt).
When I started wading into the red sea water and stopped dead in my track, the water not yet to my shins, i wanted to cry at how beautiful the reflections were, the living, breathing sea around me, the tiny schools of fish waving with the current stopped at one green carpeted rock. I looked at the water and wondered how the waves were moving, and as i moved in i was observing in awe the ripples around me forming and merging with the greater waves. I was thinking about the math that would explain it to me, how the crashing waves seemed to crash against a solid surface but it was the same water.
And when we visited Al Karak Fortress, reading its history on the way there, how army after army attacked this place, and when people rose up against their would-be oppressors they were killed, so reminiscent of today, history keeps repeating and we think we were unique in our pain- and on many levels we are. But it's just another reminder that good people need to be as tireless as evil folk, as insistent on reminding people, because no matter what you do, the actions of everyone alive have a way of rippling outwards.