Feed my Eyes, Feed my Soul

New York is my home. Walking down 1st Avenue feels much like walking down the corridor of a large home, padding over to my sister's room in my fuzzy slippers. This place is requires of me only my truest self; it lives within me as much as I in it. Last night we were musing over beers in a dark East Village tavern about our home. Though it is home, that does not mean there is not room in my heart for other cities, other adventures. There is no where else in this country I would move, and I say this as someone who has seen nearly all of it. The world, on the other hand, holds far too many beautiful mysteries to be left unexplored. This lead me back to the exotic places that still linger in the landscape of my mind.

I have seen the beauty of Paris, walking along the Seine. I have seen the wonders of the Rockie Mountains on a crisp spring morning. I have watched the sun dip into the Pacific Ocean, setting the Santa Monica hills ablaze. I have swam in the azure waters of the Caribbean. I have found myself mesmerized by the grandeur of my beloved New York. Beauty feeds a deep place inside of me; I feast on it and succumb to it. When I think of beauty though, the kind that takes your breath away, there is one place that eclipses all others: my desert.

The unexpected bursts of beauty amidst desolation can bring a tear to my eye to this day. I can feel it inside of me: the unceasing desert wind, the purple and red of the sunset, the green jewels of life around the Tigress river that shock your senses as you come atop a sandy hill, even the sea of nothingness that surrounded me as we moved through southern Iraq. The orange and white trucks bustling down the road, the people dressed in flowing robes, the bazaars selling bootleg Micheal Jackson Cd's, all of it both terrifying and enticing in its complete otherness. My heart beats faster at the memory, filling me with both anxiety and longing. Funny though, looking at pictures of that place, it never looks the way I remember. I wonder now if the beauty we are drawn to is somehow reflective of something inside ourselves.

Iraq is a land of contradictions, juxtapositions: beautiful and barren, dangerous and peaceful, fight and flight. I sometimes think my own beauty comes from the same kind of contradiction. I am not the most physically stunning specimen, but there is something about me, like an oasis in a desert that makes me shine in a way that is not as simple as a beautiful face or body. What that thing is, I don't know.

I know that a desert wind blows through me, making me volatile and passionate and ever changing. Out of the currents of past pain grows a spectacular garden of serenity. The deserts of things yet unattained drive me forward. The constant dangers of the world makes me brave and grateful. The desert winds in my soul whisper to me. They tell me to live, live passionately, cherish people, push on despite the seemingly endless expanse of emptiness that sometimes surrounds me. I live in that rugged, beautiful, scary, exciting place, not as a soldier, not as a tourist, but as wild creature.

The wildness of that place speaks to the wild thing inside of me. That is why her beauty reigns supreme, that is why I must never stop seeking life in far away lands. There are pieces of me waiting to be discovered in faraway lands. I found my home in New York, but home is not the end of the journey. Home is the place that gives you the strength and confidence to venture back out, knowing that there will always be a place to which you can fully return.