Welcome to My Lebanese Dream: September 2005

Open your arms...

...and hold me for a few days or maybe a few weeks. It has been over a year now and I miss your rampaged mountains, your rundown homes, your dying trees. I miss the smell of your dirty asphalt and muddy water. I miss you like the heaven I have never seen. So be quiet, my love, my land, and hold me now, but hold me ever so lightly, or else I will never be able to leave.

I miss you.

Like the Morning

It was dark and cold. He was outside. Lost like on the day he was born. He looked around and saw the familiar flickering of a promise. His eyes started flickering too, as he saw the flame. It was beautiful, dancing, burning, singing even, like a woman, as if only for him. But the flame was feeble, and the wind was blowing at it, quickly taking its splendor away. He ran towards it, brought himself close to it and enveloped it with his trembling half-naked body, protecting it and himself from the unforgiving breeze. But the flame, now sheltered from the wind, grew stronger, came to him passionate and hungry, and mercilessly burnt his dry skin. Startled by the sudden heat, he stepped back. But the wind came back quickly. The beautiful yet feeble fire started to die again. He feared losing it, and panicking, held it again close to him, just like a child. But the flame, safe again from the wind, grew wild and strong and licked at his skin like a thirsty dragon. He stepped back screaming, shivering from the cold and the pain. How could he possibly be close enough to the flame, gather its warmth and save it from dying out, without charring his chest and blistering his hands. How could he get the warmth without succumbing to the greedy blaze.

He couldn't.

He curled up by a tree, saving whatever heat he had left to get through the night. While he trembled in the cold, he watched the flame slowly fade into the darkness. Quickly, at the mercy of the wind, it disappeared. His skin was burnt, but he missed the warmth, because that's all he could remember, right then, in the cold. He cried. His tears brought him peace. While he was crying, he slowly fell asleep.

A million hours later, the morning came, determined, from behind the hills.

He woke up. He was drained, burnt, frozen almost, but alive.

The cold was much easier to bear now in the sun. Lightly touching the burn marks on his chest, he promised himself not to ever fall into the arms of another fire again.

He stood up, shook away the sleep and the pain, and walked.

He didn't really know where he was going, but, just like the morning, just like every morning since the journey started, he was determined to go through yet another, sad, long, crazy, beautiful day.

Am I a treehugger?

Posted angrily earlier. Had to delete it.

Here's my question. I've spent almost all my life in the city, I run on gasoline, I don't eat organic, I am surrounded by technology and often feel dependent on it, I don't recycle except paper, and I have no interest in being an active environmentalist, or a green leftist, only because I think it is a futile quest in a system programmed to eventually self-destruct.

Yet I love nature, I love the way it makes me feel and how it rids me of my daily insignificant worries and pains, and how it brings me closer to my roots and to myself, I love the sight and touch of a tree, a flower, a rock, I love the song of a bird (or a cricket) in the morning and at night, and if I had both the courage and the strength to live alone in a cabin at the edge of a forest, far from civilization, maybe with something to draw with and write on, and just enough food to survive, I'd be the happiest man on earth.

So is it wrong if I call myself a treehugger? how about a treelover? If it is, then I take back what I said on my previous post. And if anyone assumed I was more than what I just described, well, I'm not.

Someone is reading this and chuckling with satisfaction...

Anyway, always happy to set things straight.

Good night.