The Top Carrot

As little as I understand the translation of this places ridiculous name, the Tel Gezer has a charm unmatched by anything I've found in Israel until now. The average day is often so contained on campus that it almost feels as if we have not left the states and instead are camped in some backwater corner of California that seems oddly influenced by European-esque culture and an indecipherable style of writing. It almost makes me wonder if the nineteen hour flight actually happened or if I never left the sun struck city of Phoenix. And yet, The trail we have taken in Tel Gezer puts these, fanciful wonderings to rest. We have seen the Sabra cactus, the olive, the grape vine. We ascend a hill, bleached by the piercing sun to match its surroundings in sepia tones of gold and yellow and brown with the occasional tint of green as if an artist had passed over the film of the country and colored only the rare places where grass actually manages to grow before he too succumbed to the blazing heat of the terrain he painstakingly colored and set down his solitary colored brush. I know his struggle as I sit in the partial shade of a small wall at the high place of Gezer, a sacrificial alter to the God of defense from long before even the ancient Jews enter the land. The sun, persistent in its affront to my sanity, finds crevices and nooks in the wall to sneak through and paint my paper-white skin. My aching arms, sore from the exertion of activity and stress, are battered by it. I reach to the ground to collect some of the dozens of pottery shards that have littered the pathways for more than three thousand years. Our possession thereof has been described as a legal grey area.

I'm writing under pressure. they are pushing me out the door even as I type these last words but I know that if I don't make it down now, I never will. Breakfast time before a long day of hiking in caves and finally journeying to Jerusalem. Israel has begun to take its own shape. It has begun to come alive.