Spirituality

Nebuchadnezzar, Peacocks & Stonings

Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) means between two rivers. In this case, the Euphrates and the Tigris. This ancient land was where agriculture (hey, maybe we should grow something and then eat it! Or sell it!) and writing (hey, if I write it down now, I can look it up later!) were actually INVENTED. First it [...]

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Jesus Without the Band

Sometimes I think Jesus gets a bad rap. He reminds me of those musicians who began playing because they loved the sound of music but then everyone started calling them a “God” . . .and they were eventually led astray by either their agents or the rest of the guys in the band  . . [...]

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You have the power.

When I was ın my slumber party phase, my friends and I played those games. You know the ones. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, quiet as a churchmouse. We choked each other to deplete the amount of oxygen traveling to our brain and passed out for seconds at a time. But most [...]

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Good Times. . .even for the Girls

As a woman in Syria, one does get the stigma of being a second class citizen. Finding an Internet cafe bathroom with only a urinal, the unlikelihood of seeing a woman behind a counter or steering wheel and the cupboarded corner of a massive mosque reserved for female prayer are just a few examples I encountered. [...]

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Something to Believe In

Black-hooded women, not a speck of face-skin to be seen, scurried toward home, in groups of three along the littered streets. On the main avenue, smoke rose from a schwarma stand, hovering above the gingham, picnic-table-patterned heads of moustached, Muslim men. While CNN had always painted those Arab-symbolizing scarves flowing freely in the sun, tonight [...]

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Jesus Just Might Have Had Coffee Here

In Antakya, Turkey, our last planned stop before Syria, we stayed with Sakine–a friend of Fevy, our host in Antalya–and her sisters: Feygin, Jaylin (we called her JLo) and Sakine, not yet married, all lived with their mother in a large flat, where they lit a fire to take a shower and drove each other [...]

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Italia

I won’t go on about the food in Italy. How even if you ate at the last, spaghettio-serving, waiter-was-missing-teeth, hole-in-the-ruins restaurant because it was the night after Rome’s football team had won the World Cup and there were no tables at even the underground bakeries, that even there, even then, the food would still be [...]

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Turkish Bath

A spa in a barrio. . . where did I think it would be? Black birkas stuffed with women, trapped in sunlight splotches, asleep on the davenports wooden stalls that creaked when I crossed the floor What was I supposed to do? A scarf-tied, brown-toothed baba would become my red-pantied bather getting down to skin, [...]

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