Opinion: Survival in the Middle East

By Debby Titlebaum Neuman

Last week when I was alone meditating in the hills there was a siren.  I wish I were writing about the mythical creature, but no, I am writing about missile sirens. They sometimes wail in the morning, other times midday and often in the middle of the night.

More and more we meet bleary eyed in the hallway because we don’t have a bomb shelter.  If I lived alone I would stay in bed, but I don’t want to set a bad example for my children.  They aren’t so little anymore and understand what the siren means.  When they were small we would gather and sing because I told them it was a signal to start singing.

It seems like every day brings a new calamity.  We have missiles being thrown at us, a few days ago there were massive wildfires started by terror arsonists, young boys and girls’ smiling faces are front page as the latest killed, last week a man was eaten by a shark.  And yet when I awake in the morning the sun birds are still tweeting back and forth.  The male calls, the female answers; nothing can stop the song of love.  

I always step outside first thing in the morning, to remind myself that this world is beautiful.  I gaze at the alstromeria I potted in two different colors and admire how amazing they look next to the deep purple of a flower whose name I do not know.  I stare at our hammocks swinging vacant in the chill of a new day and feel gratitude for whoever that man or woman was that first created the hammock.

I pet my cat and feed my dog, I listen to my goats bleating and my chickens clucking. The doves love to coo in the morning.  Sometimes on the horizon I can see the trail of the missiles and just the same the clouds create magnificent formations.  

There was once a siren that caught me in the car, it wasn’t a regular siren, and yet I would have kept driving but my daughter was with me and told me to stop.  So I found myself on the side of a country road at night, lying in a ditch and looking at the most beautiful sight–the sky was full of burning balls of fire, they were cascading all around and I was almost caught in the reverie until my daughter (thank Gd for our kids) told me to put my head down because shrapnel wouldn’t hit me that way.

Why is it that these damn terrorists have to ruin what could have been a phenomenal sky view; honestly it looked like what I always imagined a meteor shower would be.  

It is hard not to see beauty when it lurks all around us, but death does that too I suppose.  It is a training, a subtle shifting perhaps, a shutting up the news and opening up the ears to the sound of the frogs mating at night, to the soft breathing of a child on the couch , to the wind that blows the smell of jasmine into my bedroom.

I could be scared, I suppose.  I could cower and cry.  Sometimes I do; but mostly I know this reality offers me a chance to shine brighter, to feel life pulsing from deep within my marrow. I move consciously, breath deeply and take my morning walks with an erect spine, head held high, knowing that this is the exact place I am meant to live and so like the wild oats swaying, golden in the sunlight, I do.