A Surreal Return

We spent ten days in Israel. We saw the sights, we took pictures, we swam, we wrote, we read, we walked, we listened, we listened, we listened, we watched, then we talked. Three days in Jerusalem, three days in Bethlehem, three days in the Galilee region, and a day on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. When I say "we" I refer to the group I went with. The group included my dad, eight other people from my school, a family from Texas and a team from England. Twenty-Two people in all, experiencing the wild extremes of poverty and wealth in the "holy land."

I am still recovering from the trip. I am tired, I am angered, I am depressed, I am confused, I am saddened. How can I begin to relate the complexity of Israel's oppression, apartheid of the Palestinians? How can I express my own feeling of powerlessness? What really happened in the last ten days?

To me, everything and nothing. I accidentally formatted my camera's memory card. For those of you who don't know what formatting is, it means I erased all of my pictures from the entire trip. On the last day. No way to retrieve those. The picture above is my dad's.

Then, on the flight home, I left my journal in the nefarious pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. This journal has all of my thoughts from not only Israel, but my thoughts and feelings when I was in New Zealand. Devastating, really. I have a few gifts, a few poems, but I have lost a lot of evidence of the last ten days. I am attempting to find the journal, but it is unlikely that it will be returned.

Yet I have experienced so much, so much memory has been placed in my mind. How can I reconcile the wild experience I had in Israel and the West Bank while being forced back into the redundancy of life here with almost nothing physical to show for it!?