Saeeda’s Visit: Doing the “someday/maybes,” following the heartbreak, and falling in love

Don and I are listening to an audiobook of Natalie Goldberg reading her classic work Writing Down the Bones aloud, and commenting after each chapter on her current reflections on it 30 years after it’s publication. It’s a wonderful book about writing as a zen practice, and provides much food for thought about the role and process of writing in my life.   It’s also helping me understand why it has felt hard to keep going with blogging as I re-enter life as a “healthy person.” 

Goldberg talks about how writers must slow down and pay attention to everything, then relive things a second time as we write about them.  As I get busier with many “doings” in the world, I am simply not spending as much time in that space of reflective “being.” However, it’s possible that writing as a reflective practice is just as important to me in this mode – or perhaps even more so!

Much of what I’ve been busy with is a continuation of themes I have written about – exploring what I really want to do with this next phase of my life, with the awareness of how brief it could be. Doing now some of the things I’ve always thought I might do “someday.” There’s lots to say about this, but for now I will talk about how I always thought that maybe someday I’d be more of an activist on Israeli/Palestinian peace issues.

I wrote about this last fall – about how at the meditation retreat with Tara Brach, James Baraz spoke about taking action to care for others and the world as a part of living joyfully. He said, “follow your heartbreak,” and I thought about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. This was one of the reasons I ended up deciding to go to Israel in November with my aunt & uncle. As a result of this (and as a result of writing about it), three weeks after my return from the Middle East I went to a CORE Consultants’ Circle and was introduced by my dear colleague/mentor/friend Bert to an Arab American woman named Layla who had just returned to Madison after living in the West Bank for 14 years.

Layla and I began to get to know each other, and in addition to really liking her right away, I jumped at the opportunity to engage with someone with such direct knowledge of Palestine. Layla worked for NGOs in Palestine, is married to a Palestinian man, and has two young children who were born there.

At the end of April Layla sent an email to a few of us here looking for a place in the US for a Palestinian colleague of hers to stay for part of the summer to practice her English, on the way to a leadership development program in Canada. Without too much thought, and with only a brief email exchange with Don about it, I offered to host Saeeda Mousa, and my offer was accepted. Don had agreed readily over email to making the offer, but later warned me, “you do know this is going to be a lot of work, don’t you?” I hadn’t really thought about it that much – I was just offering a place to stay, Layla was going to coordinate helping Saeeda get English practice and get involved in the community.

Well! Saeeda has been living with us since June 5th, and will head to Canada this coming Thursday. It has been a remarkable experience on many levels – and in other ways quite ordinary. As Don predicted, it was initially a lot of work. Layla turned out to be a lot busier than she thought with changes in her life. Saeeda is an incredibly sweet, loving, smart, and creative woman with a lot of fascinating life experience (she’s 54). Her English was minimal, and my Arabic nonexistent, so we relied a lot on nonverbal communication and translation apps. English tutoring wasn’t so easy to find (though we did eventually arrange it, thanks to Rabbi Laurie connecting us with Parthy!).

Some difficulties have been due to cultural differences – I had been warned that Saeeda was “very traditionally Palestinian” in some ways, which includes not asking for anything. I wasn’t warned that Palestinians don’t use, or know how to use, maps! It’s taken until the last week or so for Saeeda to feel comfortable enough to go to the grocery store and bring home food! From the very beginning she insisted on doing lots to help around the house – dishes, etc – and she brought home some seedlings from a community event and helped me transplant them, along with many house plants that were badly in need of attention. Lately she has taken to straightening and beautifying small areas of our home that were also badly in need of attention.

We have also been having fun together – when my 16-year-old nephew Nathan was here for a week, we took her on her first boat ride of any kind (a kayak on Lake Wingra). My step-daughter Sarah and I took her for her first-ever swim (in the Goodman Jewish Community Campus pool). One of the many tragic things about the Israeli Occupation and constraints on the movement of Palestinians is that, though residents of the West Bank live about a 90 minute drive from the Mediterranean, they are largely not allowed to go there. Saeeda’s childlike anticipation, fear, and exuberance at these activities was both delightful and bittersweet to behold.

Deep love has blossomed here; Saeeda and I feel like family to each other, and I truly hope we will be friends forever. There are of course profound issues of power and potential conflict that we have barely scratched the surface of in these brief weeks with minimal language overlap. I realized a couple of weeks into it that I was in some ways thinking of her as a child, and needed to adjust that attitude pretty thoroughly to have the kind of relationship I want with her (transplanting the plants together was a big help in this regard, as she is a master gardener and I’m a bit plant-challenged).

Nathan and I also screwed up our courage one night (this was still only week 2 of her stay) and asked her what she thought the solution is to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Once she understood the question, she seemed surprised by it, and I wasn’t sure why. Was it because we wanted to know her opinion? Was it because we were suggesting it was solvable by asking her her ideas about a solution? As she answered the question, I came to realize that her surprise might have been because, to her, the solution is very simple and obvious: All the Jews who came to Palestine since 1948 should go back where they came from.

I was somewhat stunned by this response, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. That evening Nathan and I, joined for a bit by Don, haltingly discussed with her some of the reasons we don’t find this to be a realistic solution (principally anti-Semitism/the Holocaust, i.e. most of the Jews who moved to Palestine/Israel were not wanted where they came from). She listened and worked to understand – though it was hard to distinguish between attempting to understand the words, and attempting to understand the perspective. I do feel like I began to glimpse the world a bit more from her perspective.

Mostly, we have not attempted to discuss this again. Partly, I’ve been very busy with CORE and other things. But I wonder: Are we agreeing to disagree? I’m not sure. Are we waiting until Saeeda’s English is better? I think that’s probably a rationalization on my part. Are we avoiding conflict? Probably. Are we building a foundation of trust on which to engage in future loving struggle? I hope so.

Today I expect to share Saeeda’s company and artistic eye at the Art Fair here in Madison. We are already anticipating how much we will miss each other. And there is so much more I want to share with her – like our respective ideas about leadership development, meditation, and the somatic coaching methods I’ve been trained in. Much of it will have to wait until another time. And it is with deep gratitude to Bert, Layla, and Saeeda that I realize that, now when I think about following my heartbreak and going to visit the West Bank, I see myself going to visit beloved friends, rather than just as “peace tourist.” And I am stunned at how quickly and easily this transformation has happened in my life.