• Occupancy

  
  

Carl”s Vibram Five Fingers, Boat-tailed Grackle in Grapevine, Texas

First, we all occupy our bodies. Over a lifetime, that embodiment can be uneasy as our bodies grow and change on a timetable of their own. Nor have we yet decided on the place of consciousness, awareness, thinking. But the electric connection of synapse can surpass ordinary time, and the effect of forgetting, entering the cloud of unknowing, can prevision the realm of the dead.

In Israel, occupancy declares foremost in the stones, the highways, the crenellations of new settlements, in the watersheds, the rocky wrinkling of the earth’s crust defined as country, place, holy. Occupancy manifests acoustically as well, in the noise of jet planes overhead, in traffic, in unmufflered carts penetrating the winding streets to supply market stalls and construction sites in the Old City, in the sound of water flowing in planned courses and fountains. Sometimes, silent seeping in springs make green brushstrokes on rocky outcrops as at Wadi Kelt near Jericho. There the ancient Byzantine Orthodox Saint George’s monastery clings to the canyon wall as if stuck on by superglue. Within the holiest Christian Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, among the eastern denominations who depend on unamplified human voices, their powerful organ declares the occupancy from their portion of the Roman Catholic Church.

Above all in Israel, bristling with guard towers, barbed wire, searchlights the outsize, winding, forbidding separation wall asserts occupancy. Often bracketed by demolished concrete piles, the former homes of people whose occupancy is denied, the fractal boundary of cement, steel, barbed wire, observation posts, imprisons implacably. The wall imprisons both occupiers and occupied.

Thinking about occupancy, where people can settle with legitimacy, stability, and hope presence can develop to residency and citizenship. Describing pathways for embattled peoples to make new lives together, Desmond Tutu has written a book, No Future Without Forgiveness. Further, changes in the cold regions of the world, the dry deserts and wellsprings like the Himalayan plateau where five great rivers of the world begin their journeys through the most populous countries of the planet, now call us to new sensitivity, new courage to forgive, share, cooperate. Might we cultivate new habits of occupancy to promote just, intentional, citizenship in the world?

Demolished home, Bethany, February 2008. Greenland laundry, May 2005 (MCM).