Ask the Priestess

It is night, and quiet. I am at home, typing while reminiscing. Tonight, is New Year's Eve, and tomorrow - nay, in a little under 3 hours (local time), a new year will commence. Instead of 2016, we will be dating all our documents as 2017. I sit, type and remember what I have done in such nights in the past years. Last year, I was a friend's house in the south of England. Half of the party was in the hot tub, while others like myself chose rather to curl up in the living room. I felt blessed and observant, as ever surprised at the choices we all have yet often don't realise. The Hot Tub New Year's had come up suddenly, and I had decided to join these people whose hearts I knew but their lives a bit less so. The First Day of the Year saw us walking to the sea in gusty wind and smattering rain, joyous and full of life. Other years, I have spent the celebration with other friends at other parties, other homes, other countries. Once, I was in Vienna for the fabulous Sil...

This 12th October, 2016 is a fabulous parallel to the conflicts I find within my identity. On the one hand, today is  Yom Kippur - Day of Atonement. Observant Jews, and many secular ones as well, have been fasting since yesterday afternoon. It is 26 hours of no food, drink (even water), smoking, driving, fun... It is the time to reconsider the last year, become aware of one's mistakes and wherever we may have injured others; a time of honest soul-searching whilst hoping that God will consider us worthy of being in the book of life for another year. Here, in Israel, the country is at a standstill - there are no cars on the roads, no radio or television broadcasts, no open businesses, no music, no groups of people sharing a fag. Not only are many people fasting, but the whole nation is remembering also the beginning of the Yom Kippur War , a conflict that was both psychologically and politically decisive for the country and the world at large. In Spain, where I was born and ra...

Time has seemingly just passed. It did not give advance notice, late apologies, or even a half-hearted hand wave. So, a year and a half has slipped by, and I wonder why I let it happen; why I did not make a record of me, of it, of all those people and events around me. I can feel my fingertips clumsily caress the keyboard, having to retype again and again, trying to unravel the confusion of long silence. Thoughts are not things, right now, but rather elusive shadows which I struggle to individualise. Maybe, if I were an ornithologist I would be more successful at it, with the added expertise of identifying one single song among the cacophony of a jungle canopy. Be that as it may, shortcomings or apprehension aside, I sit at my computer and chose to climb back to the peak of my mountain, ready to yodel away. Silence, like time, is a curious estate to be in. Some people merely feel awkward when facing silence; some others feel lost in the border-less expanse of nothing opened up by s...