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All the best,
Orit
All the best,
Orit
 Yesterday I was talking with a friend. (and thank god for the amazing ones I have). I said I felt like I was in chronic-cocoon phase, constantly awaiting my great transformation. I think a lot of artists who are trying to "Make it" but in the mean time are "just surviving" (which, folks, is already making it!) - feel that way. Probably a lot of non artists too. We laughed about this. If you just stand still, turn around and look back, you can see that you've been transforming the entire time. "Orit you just put out a new record. You've got another one in the bag. You LEARNED HOW TO DRIVE, for crying out loud! You applied for three grants. You've been writing. You learned how to do animation!" Oh. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I did do all those things. Heh heh.... Oops. I tend to stare at the not-done-yet pile. Putting music "out there" is the same, in a way. I don't have the kind of situation which makes new releases go BOOM and sell a million pre-orders at once, or get commercial airplay round the clock (industry secret: you need a whole lotta money to make that happen). And frankly, these days, hardly anyone is paying the artists for their work. But songs that are out in the digital and physical world have their way of trickling along, touching hearts and souls, messages come in from time to time, from people I don't even know, from countries around the world, "thank you for your music, it helped me." Let's call it a winter-darkness everything slow-mo, waiting-for-spring-is-hard syndrome. But if you're taking stock and wondering what it's all for - here's a first-person-account reminder that your impact might not elicit an immediate gratitude parade. But you should still be putting the best and most authentic parts of yourselves out there. Cause the stuff travels its own mysterious course. I was lucky enough to be given this pep talk, and it's been swirling around in my head, so I thought I'd pay it forward. And thanks to those of you out there who take the time to let me know whatever I'm up to creatively is making its little difference. Lights in the darkness - we're gonna get brighter and brighter. Speaking of which, I have a beautiful new album of Chanukah music to share with the world. A holiday all about the magic and power of a little bit of light! Have a listen, and if you like, please consider purchasing! It's up on bandcamp. Just click on my discography tab! Thank you!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve ridden past prairies. The official count, on the via rail train, is fifty, but that doesn’t count the various car trips I’ve been on, and something always happens to me, looking out at the wheat and canola fields, that is the closest thing I’ve ever felt to dreaming and being awake at the same time. A part of me leaves my body and soars over the rolling, blowing stalks as if we are embracing, the fields and I, as if my body embodies the movement and the expanse. I don’t remember ever not feeling this, seeing them through the moving window.
To get to spend time this week right in the heart of it, standing and gazing at it, walking through it, the sounds of it crunching below my feet, touching it, smelling it (antihistamines included, of course) – in the gloriously warm autumn sunshine, the sound of geese overhead, I swear it has unlocked levels of my soul, and given me peace I haven’t felt in ages. I don’t want to leave. At all. I think I like it better than, even, the ocean. This great expanse, and what it does to the sky and the clouds, what it tells you about the nuance of colours and shades, and what it does to elevate the spirit. But my fortune is even great than that, this time, because not only have I been treated with hospitality and cheerfulness, and hosted for two performances, but the man who has been showing me around these parts, is both a professor of agricultural economics and a third-generation farmer himself. And that, my friends, is an exquisite and important combination, because he has zoom-out understanding, and zoom-in understanding, and their interplay is the crux of it all. My friends, farming is everything. It is about feeding the world, it is about climate, it is about development, experimentation, ingenuity, inventiveness, communication, attention to details, attention to trends and patterns, it is about nature and humanity and how they interact. And to have him rub some wheat between his palms to separate it and show me the grains, hand them to me, and have me see them, hold them, smell them, taste them – while he talked about so many aspects – has been nothing short of profound. What more, there are the personal stories of the farmers. Their arrival as homesteaders, their migration, their backgrounds, their stories of survival. Yes, there is the story of colonialization here too, how they were part of that bigger picture, and what that has meant here on the ground. There are their stories of families, their tragedies, the stories of mental health and medical history, the story of the stubborn and the sick, the stories of births and deaths, departures and returns. And these all intersect. The land and the people are woven together. If I were a historian, an anthropologist, a meteorologist, a biologist, a psychologist, a zoologist, an economist, a painter, a poet, a songstress…. Everything I would ever need is right here. These fields. I don’t want to leave you, Saskatchewan. But I must continue on…. Thankfully you liked me a little too, so we can meet again, soon. xo  This is my face. This is my face after playing the first live show in a year. A woman read about me in the newspaper and reached out to host a small and safe gathering once restrictions lifted. Ten ladies. I can't even describe what I feel, but I can tell you that I arrived to find them sitting in formation, and it took exactly half a second to get into Orit-mode: not the one sitting in an apartment fretting about the ills of the world. The other Orit. The Orit I thought was gone. I can't come close to putting it into words. Redemptive comes to mind. There was so much love, a kind of love I faintly remembered, the love between performer and audience, a sacred kind of love that holds everyone in the same magical zone for the duration of the show. Applause (remember that sound?), laughter, smiles, nods of thoughtfulness, joy. Joy. JOY. Energy. Strength. CDs sold. Cash. Remember cash? The offer of more concerts by some of the attendees, wanting to host their own. This is how it all started, and this is how it's all starting again. Maybe. Hopefully. I can't describe how I feel, but I'm gonna hold on to it for a while.
 Stranded by a global pandemic in a city I wasn’t familiar with, after eleven years of total nomadism, I was lucky enough to find a quaint little apartment I could afford for a while. I rode the waves of hope and despair, for my own future and for the future of our world. Hope had been easier when I was on the road, encountering people’s smiles. Despair, too, was easier, in the company of others and with the balance of the magical experiences that riding trains and performing brings. On one particular night, feeling particularly anguished by the state of the world, the extreme polarisation, the rising of willful ignorance and hate, it seemed too much to bear. I suddenly remembered a song I had written a few years back but had never recorded. “You’ve expressed this already,” I thought to myself, and began to remember there were others. I sat down and made a list of them. Eleven. Just seeing the titles brought some relief, as if gathering the loose melodic and textual threads of this pain was already therapeutic. A failing, noisy laptop, a cheap microphone, and free, basic recording software, it struck me that the barrenness, solitude, and relative impoverishment of my circumstances made the perfect background and story for these songs. No ornamentation could be appropriate. No sheen. No sparkle. Just the bare-naked truth of it. And when the next wave of despair came, I remembered the list. I knew I had to record all the songs then and there, in one session, and headed into an all-nighter. I made a record both of the songs, and of the time and place I was in: a solitary night in an apartment in downtown Winnipeg, full of despair, in isolation during a pandemic, knowing that singing and recording were acts of hope and survival. Lorem Ipsum are the two words you see in graphic design, the textual place-holder so that you can choose the font before you insert your own words. Textual place-holder was exactly what these songs were: varied written articulations for the same basic feelings. With some extra digging, I discovered that Lorem Ipsum comes from the Latin Dolorem Ipsum, which means, Pain Itself. What was a design place-holder as I was figuring out the artwork for the album, became its official title. It has been my practice for as long as I can remember, to use song-writing as the space for pain and its release, and in sharing songs I have learned how necessary art is as a space-holder for what anguishes us. A shared space. In this sharing, there is the antidote to pain itself. Yours in song and gratitude, Orit You can Pre-order a physical copy here on the website, or pre-order a digital download on Bandcamp. Thanks, as always.  The phone call came at around six in the morning.
“Orit?” “Yes.” “I have some hard news.” I gulped for air. There’d been so much already, but this was a direct, official phone call. “Yes?” “Your home room-student Yonatan’s mother and little sister have been shot by a terrorist. The sister has died, the mother probably will too. We will gather everyone for an assembly. You will need to talk with the students and be there for them.” I don’t remember if I said anything. I don’t remember my way to work, but it involved two different buses that I knew might explode on the way. Others had. I had a special way of sitting that was a kind of bracing for it. I made it without incident, walked past the security gates and into the school. I remember gathering outside, the entire tenth grade which had about six different classes of forty students each, they were outside the assembly hall, I remember it was hot outside. They were hugging each other and crying. A few were vomiting. I only remember what I saw, not what I was thinking or feeling. Yonatan was there. At least that’s how I remember it. I remember seeing his face. I remember him saying what happened and that he looked uncomfortable for all the attention around him. His dad had been out for groceries when it happened, or he would have been dead too. What do you say to your favourite 15 year old - a smirky, sarcastic-but-sweet English-class favourite who always had thoughtful answers and had just the right dose of class clown – What do you say to him now? I can’t even remotely remember. I know we gathered in the assembly hall and I know the principal spoke and I know it had something to do with being there for Yonatan and trying to stay strong. I remember that we didn’t stay the rest of the day because the funeral was going to happen right away, by then the mother had been pronounced dead, and they were organising rides and a bus for us to go. I know I didn’t want to go and that I knew I had to. I rode with one of the other English teachers. I can’t remember if we spoke in the car or not. I remember being at the funeral. I remember not knowing what to do. I remember that I stayed off to the side because it seemed like close friends and family should be the ones gathered around the two grave pits. Not me. I remember the sound of Yonatan crying rising to my ears above all the other noise and that it was a kind of crying I had never heard before and that would stay with me forever. I remember that some people off to the side were holding banners with political slogans that were about revenge, not peace, no, not revenge but that the only way to end this was with power. Zero tolerance. And that I wished they wouldn’t because this boy had just lost his mother and kid sister and his father and another sibling and Yonatan were falling apart and hugging each other and wailing and this wasn’t the right time to wave a banner. There was a lot that came before that, and still more that came after it. But I could no longer sit in my apartment, and the entire world around me grew darker and darker. No place felt safe, as the explosions had been happening in café, buses, and now even supermarkets and with this, the latest, even the apartment didn’t feel safe. At night I could hear the sounds of the nearby village getting bombed. I woke up to the sound of a nearby explosion – a car bomb? A bus? If there was more than one siren it meant that something big happened. My students were handing in their English tests with “Death to the Arabs” written at the top and I was trying desperately to come up with ways to convince them that this wasn’t the right response. But over the weekend a group of their pals had been blown to smithereens while hanging out downtown. I tried. I really tried. We were all so lost. They were allowed to have cell phones and have them on in case there was an emergency. Every hour the news came on and we waited to hear if there’d been another explosion, or if they identified more dead. I could no longer guide them. Everything I said felt empty. Only one sweet girl in one of my classes stayed Left wing. She loved the protest songs I brought in with my guitar to use them as English lessons. And when Israeli Independence Day came round that year and flags were out in the streets, I could no longer stand the sight of them. And when the wall started to get built, I left. I had the option. I had a Canadian passport. I saw where it was going and I left. With an insane amount of guilt toward the people who didn’t have that option. I landed in Montreal among a peer group that was decidedly Pro-Palestinian, and were decidedly my type of people. I bought books from the anarchist book fair, informed myself of a narrative I only half-knew before, and completely unraveled. I knew I had a lot of learning to do, but I also could tell that some of the literature was too one-sided, had full-on falsehoods in it at times, and was not peaceful in its rhetoric in the least. I searched high and low for any analysis that took both narratives into account. I had nightmares almost every night and was still disproportionally anxious on public transit and in crowds. I got a job teaching Hebrew and Judaic studies at a secular Zionist school. I wondered how the hell I was going to teach some love for the country I still loved but do it in a way that was part of a peace curriculum? A critical-thinking curriculum. Every ounce of my intellect went to try to figure this out. We had at least two bomb-threats to the school while I was there, having to evacuate room-fulls of elementary school students. What the fuck was I supposed to explain to a bunch of eight-year-olds in Montreal about why someone wanted to bomb them. I am not asking for pity. There are bombs falling as I type and I am safe and sound in Winnipeg. The Palestinian plight has been profoundly worse than the Israeli one for a very long time. It is a human rights crisis and has been for a long time. There are elements within its population that are not helping, that’s for damn sure. But the bombs that are dropping are Israeli bombs. That’s for damn sure too. I have been wanting to say something concise and definitive about peace but I keep tripping up and getting tangled. To be a humanist while you are in direct danger is really fucking hard, but it’s the only way forward out of this mess. To try to hold love for the beautiful and heroic aspects of one of the most dysfunctional stories in history – to try to reconcile the irreconcilable within your own blood and bones – to stand up and say our narrative isn’t a false one, but it is an incomplete one… when to accommodate the other narrative has proven, so far, dangerous and deadly - but to negate it is even more dangerous and deadly - what is peace? It is not peace if it is only one side that gets some quiet for a while. It is hard to breathe like this. But it is harder to breathe now in Gaza. And has been this whole time. And plenty of Israelis and Jews know that. And plenty of Israelis and Jews have been condemning the actions of the Israeli government and military for a long time now. Just not enough to make enough of a difference. It feels insanely self-indulgent to be telling you any of this, as if my story is important to know while things are burning. But it’s literally the only thing I can offer with any authenticity and I feel as powerless as I always do to stop the bigger forces at hand. So I will tell it start to finish, in its disjointed and fragmented ways. This is what I’m working on now, the story of my political identity-creation, and it’s undoing. I don’t know how the story will end yet. I type here in Winnipeg, as the bombs continue to fly. Everything feels wrong.  I just got a lovely email from the woman I used to email back and forth with when booking my train gigs. She was wondering how I was doing. I had wondered how she's doing too, hoping she hadn't lost her job, since the program is obviously suspended indefinitely. I cried and smiled when I read her message. That train gig, as most of you know, was a huge part of my road life. Photos of me singing on it are constantly floating up from the "facebook memory" bank, as are messages from people I've met at those shows. The radiators in this apartment cling and clang like crazy, and it was bugging me at first, until one night I told myself to just pretend it's train-noise. I grinned and lay my head down and pretended that the bedroom here is a little train cabin, and suddenly the noise was fine. Welcome, even. I still get stirred every time I hear the freight train whistle blow. But this time here, this Winnipeg chapter, it's just one long train ride. I don't know what station I'll get off in, or how long the journey will be, but I'm as awake and alive and engaged in it as I can be, and I have been insisting, without too much difficulty, that this - this is just another stretch of road for me. Clickety clack.  A new friend of mine, here in Winnipeg asked me, “what do you do for Hannukah” – It was a text message on my phone and I knew there was no way I could answer it by text, because it’s not a short answer. It never is with me. I mean, the basics? I could find some local store where I could get a menorah (technically, it’s called a Hannukiah), and some candles for it, I could light them, I could fry up some latkes, eat a doughnut, - that pretty much covers the traditions unless you have a dreidel and someone to spin it with, but that’s more of a kid thing (though I’m sure it’d make a good drinking game if you were into that). I own a Hannukiah but it is in Berlin, where I lit the candles last year. I was supposed to be there now, on tour. My friend, whose home it got left at, sent me a photo of it, and that made me smile. I like light. I like candles. I like fried food. So…why don’t I do it? Or why DO I do it sometimes? Why am I always so conflicted about it? To be clear, if I was hanging out with other Jewish people, then of course, I’d be celebrating it, but that’s true for any holiday being celebrated by any people I’d be hanging out with. So the question is more, if I’m alone, or not around other Jewish people, do I bother? When I lived in Montreal, I had friends over. I made latkes for everyone. I lit the candles. I never knew if to sing the blessings or not. I wanted to celebrate with friends, but it felt performative. Educational. It made me uneasy. But not doing it felt unhospitable. I mean, I have this culture with delicious traditions and beautiful music to share with people. This year of course, that’s not even an option. Travelling around solo for a decade in communities that are predominantly not celebrating the holidays of my upbringing has meant I often just skip right over them. If there isn’t anyone to celebrate with, what’s the point? I’ll confess there’s a modicum of loneliness that comes with skipping over holidays. Missing my family. And one of the things that’s always missing is kids. They bring out the glow of every holiday. I miss being a school-teacher for that, seeing the kiddos’ excitement. But Hannukah in particular gets me going on one particular tenet. An important tenet. We are supposed to, according to tradition, put the candles near a window, so that the outside world can see the lights. Sounds beautiful, right? Sharing light with the world? Except – it’s also saying, “Jews live here.” – and in the various places I’ve lived, I’ve never known if it’s a good idea. The views on this are as diverse as the people celebrating the holiday. For some it’s a way of displaying pride in the survival against all odds. “I’ll put this in the window because there were times this would have gotten us deported and killed.” I have thought this, and done this. Celebrating the holiday in Germany meant the world to me. Celebrating the relative safety of my times. Being grateful for that. But obviously, there has been a definite darkening of “my times” and my safety gauge about these matters is not what it was six or seven years ago. For some it’s just a cultural pride in general – displaying diversity, displaying existence in a mosaic of other cultures, through the window for all to see. That’s fair enough, but I’m not proud of my culture per se. I enjoy many aspects of it, but pride is not the right word for me. It’s just another culture among many other beautiful cultures. It’s got beautiful traditions and a complicated history filled with trauma. In fact, the majority of the Jewish holidays commemorate some historical event where someone in charge wanted to violently get rid of Jews, but somehow we survived and still exist today. Amen. Personally, I find it an exhausting motif, even though it is historically accurate, it just doesn’t feel like much of a survival given the ongoing hatred everywhere. It’s been steadily increasing in terrifying ways, through the rise of conspiracy theories that employ old antisemitic tropes. It’s devastating to see that, and see how fast it’s growing globally. Nazis marching around North America - synagogue shootings, Jewish businesses desecrated... How safe am I or my loved ones, really, to display our Jewishness, these days? Maybe all times are dark and we shine our little light as hard as we can all year round, and that’s what I do metaphorically, so maybe I celebrate Hanukkah every day of every year because I am here, surviving. I’m surviving as a person, I’m surviving as a Jew. So far so good. Terrifying experience, but here I am. Could be better, could be worse. Maybe I think there’s no point in putting the candles by the window if people don’t know the meaning, the story that’s being celebrated (a tiny rebellion that had no chance of winning against oppression but somehow was successful – and according to the religious, that’s thanks to God’s miracles)… I don’t know. Maybe the fact that nobody knows anyway means all they would “see” is just some ornate candelabra. Maybe I should stop thinking so much and just do it because it is just an addition of light in the world. I have no great conclusion here. But I do know this: Diversity should be celebrated, cultures should thrive in the beauty of their traditions, and lights should be illuminated, especially in times of darkness. And I know this too, late last night, I made myself a few latkes. Out of one potato. Party of one. I couldn’t help it. My soul still wants to celebrate and commemorate, even when my mind is in a constant state of question. And latkes are a lot of work, so – maybe it’s just nice to enjoy the deliciousness of it, which I really have no drive to cook up the rest of the year. Yes, they came out perfect. I make a mean latke! So from my soul to yours, Happy Hannukah. We have work to do, individually and collectively, to make this world brighter. Let’s do it.   I have been at the Airbnb for eight days.
I have it until the end of October. It's lovely, and there's a balcony, so I can take in the coming of autumn and all of its splendour in comfort. And I can work on my book and paint. I've made one seriously delicious giant pot of soup so far, some smoothies, some toast, and many cups of coffee and tea. Apparently Neil Young lived in this building in his 20s, but they probably tell you that about every building in Winnipeg. And though I've taken a break from the news, from doom-scrolling, somehow the challenges of human diversity still seep in, in the form of overhearing neighbours. So far, one was howling about heartbreak all through the night, moaning and singing about it extremely loudly and out of tune. And I overheard the couple below, day-drinking, pontificating loudly, and I grimaced when I overheard their racism. And yesterday the alleged meth-heads on the first floor pulled the fire alarm as a joke, so the tenants all gathered outside until we were allowed to come back in, but no harm done. The new caretaker who introduced himself is into astral travel and crystal healing and likes to tell you about it in the stairwell. And a lovely young woman just moved in next door and is studying narrative therapy (a subject I am fond of, for obvious reasons) and she is a delight of conversation. We sat on the balcony and chatted for four hours after the fire alarm. It was a welcome break from the not-sure-I-want-to-engage-with-folks, and the nothing-but-me-ness of my interior walls. Yesterday, before the fire-alarm, I did something I haven't done since I was twenty-four years old. I looked at an empty apartment. There was a vacancy in this same building. I remembered the joy I felt in Montreal, the last time I had done that, the joy in the prospect of filling it with my own things, extensions and expressions of myself, books, more instruments, decorations. But this time, I did not feel joy. None. Just grief and trepidation. Even if I kept it to a bare minimum, I realised I would need, if not a bed, then a blanket, if not a couch, then a cushion, and a pillow, a plate, cutlery, a broom and cleaning rags, an internet provider, and each thing I thought about felt like a shackle fastening around me, and I panicked. I don't think I can do this. I am not wired to live that way after a decade of road, and as much as I tried to embrace it in my mind as a new beginning, to think about it as the sensible, reasonable thing to do, to even call myself childish and ridiculous, every cell in my body screamed, "no." There may be no touring any time soon, but that doesn't mean I have to give up my road-life. And if it means airbnb hopping for a while, even in the same city, to give me that variety and newness of environment and encounter that my soul has gotten so used to, if I am foolishly trying to trick myself into feeling like I am still nomadic, then I will be that fool. Everything may be different, cut off, scary and surreal, but I can still follow the truth of my heart. And, dammit, I will. I bought a mug, a ceramic one, at a small, sunny farmer’s market I wandered my way into. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of beautiful mugs to choose from where I was staying. It was that I’d stayed in places where none of the mugs suited me, and I had long-thought about finding one to have as my own and travel with. But of course travelling with a ceramic mug in my suitcase as I clunked it along over long, cobblestone streets and up flights of stairs seemed ridiculous, so I never did get one. But now I was going to be here for a while. For the first time in eleven years, I was going to be somewhere for a while. It was the perfect Orit mug. Large, robust, but light in weight, earthy and pleasant on the lips, round and shapely for my hand to wrap around and bring closer to me. The woman I bought it from and I chatted before I selected it from among the others, which were all similar in style, but varied in hue and height, roundness and thickness of body and handle. I asked about her practice as a ceramicist. And I told her a little of my musical life before everything got stopped. I told her I hadn’t had a mug of my own in eleven years. She recommended I perform at the market, and we exchanged contact information. I sent her a link to my music, and a photo of myself drinking from the mug, the next day. She replied with great warmth. And from that day on, I didn’t have to make a choice between all the mugs in the cabinet. I knew which one was mine. It had a ceremonial solemnity to it. As if I was silently chanting, “this is my mug,” each morning that I reached for it and filled it with thick, strong coffee, carried it with me from room to room as I flitted between creative tasks, sipped from it as I floated between reflective tasks. It was my mug. I had a mug. In time, though, and not too long, at that, I began noticing that I wanted variety again, and on certain mornings, I would choose a mug not my own, but not without something I can only describe as moral hesitation. It felt disloyal on some vague and admittedly slightly crazy level. I mean, it is an inanimate object I was worried I was betraying. But I also knew that I knew what I wanted each day, and that the morning ‘choosing of the mug’ was part of my nomadic life ritual that used to connect me to myself: My hand hovering over the choices was like a divining rod, as if I was trying to feel some sacred energy, let pure intuition guide my choice, while my mind offered cerebral justifications. There were considerations of feel, touch, mood, colour, style, and sometimes message, if there happened to be writing on it, or a particular image. Sometimes the mugs evoked memories of other mugs from previous life chapters. It was rarely an immediate choice, or if it was, it was a slow enjoyment of the intentionality of the choice, and the lingering over them was like a meditation on my inner state. Now that I had my own mug but still chose another on some days, there was a whole new layer of unfamiliar meaning. Like I was choosing between two philosophies. Still, there was something in the self-given permission to choose authentically each day, something in the self-forgiveness and the wondering if forgiveness was an appropriate concept here, an acceptance maybe, of my fickleness, or maybe a consideration of celebration of my love for more than one mug. There was also humour in the ridiculousness of seeing myself put this much thought into the meaning of choosing a drinking vessel. All I can say is that that mug meant something. It meant a bunch of things. It meant choice, ownership, ritual, aesthetic, loyalty, identity. And the new mug – it meant all those things, but added a new meaning I hadn’t known for so long: I am staying. There is consistency. There is stability. A couple of days ago, the kid who lives where I’ve been staying knocked it over with her elbow while I was standing beside her. We were cooking supper together, an activity we’ve taken to doing together, which seems to delight us both. She loves using her creativity by suggesting ingredients. I love seeing her excited creativity, and I love showing her the tips and techniques I’ve learned from my mother and grandmother, and a few really-good-cook boyfriends that I’ve had over the years. I love feeling like I have acquired wisdom, and a love of teaching. I love that I’m helping, and not just receiving help. To be fair, the counter was rather cluttered, and the mug was too close to the edge of it. When it happened, in my own perception, there wasn’t an iota of drama to it. There were a million other things happening as it was, pots bubbling on the stove, things to stir, taps to turn on and off, the fan whirring, and it didn’t make a particularly loud noise, though it made enough of one to look down, and there it was. My mug. Broken. And wet coffee grinds splattered out in a star-pattern all around it, next to the blue-sneakered feet of a very sweet kid. I’ve always said that there are two types of people in this world. The type that gets mad at you when you break something of theirs, (or at least visibly express their annoyance, disappointment, and disapproval), and there are the types that will go out of their way to make sure you don’t feel bad about it, because they know you already do. I’ve always said I would never want to have kids with the first type, because kids spill and break things and knowingly making them feel bad for it is terrible. I remember being a kid and breaking a glass. It felt terrible. Even when my mother told me it’s no big deal, I still felt terrible. So when I saw my broken mug on the floor, my immediate concern and attention was to put my hand on the kid’s arm gently and say, “no big deal,” in a calm, nonchalant and sincere-sounding way, and just get to the mopping of it up. Not to overplay the “don’t feel bad,” no need for a big educational speech about material things and transitory reality and non-attachment, and certainly not to say, “that was my mug.” I didn’t know if she knew and I preferred she didn’t. Those quick calculations of empathy aside, the truth of the matter is that other than recognising that that was the mug that fell and broke – I felt nothing. It didn’t matter to me at all that it broke. I had it for a bit, and now I don’t. And if it symbolised stability, consistency, I am staying, the fact that it now symbolised "ya never know," was fine by me. It's always been that way. I have long preferred what comes with the not knowing. The current global situation has made me consider quitting the road, and if that mug was supposed to be some icon of domesticity, the fact that it broke is more of a reassurance than anything, that I still have plenty of road ahead. Besides, it was far more interesting, visually, with all its new unpredicted edges. I’m moving in nine days. I’ve been here for four months, longer than I’ve stayed anywhere in eleven years of touring full-time. I’m going to be in the new place for a month and a half, and after that, I’m not sure. I could have brought the mug with me to the new place. I would have. And if I really want to have my own mug in the new place, then I can go and buy a new one. Or maybe I should wait and see what kind of mugs are at the new place. Maybe they’re all the same in shape and size and colour. Wouldn’t that be crazy? Maybe there’ll be all sorts of variety, and I’ll have my top three favourites. Or maybe instead of buying a mug to bring with me wherever the road will next take me, maybe if my stays are going to be more substantial in length, maybe I should buy a new one each time I arrive somewhere, and leave it behind when I leave, as a gift, and get another new one for the next place. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Nobody knows anything anymore. But I don’t mind that it’s broken. Look. It’s still beautiful.  |
AuthorOrit Shimoni, AKA Little Birdie, is a traveling writer, teacher and musician. Archives
October 2024
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