Placelessness

Placelessness.  He wrote it on his arm sometime during the night when I was asleep beside him. Jet fuel and metal carried us across the lines on the map carving into the land below. We let our words speak their truth and for a few hours put ourselves aside. He was a stranger lost beside me, and although it was foreign to him, he was trying to grasp my faith. I don't know where it's taken him. 


I was that little girl, the one always cast as the angel or Mary. I’d play the part but secretly I longed to climb up onto a camel and ride away with the wisemen. Wonderlust. Now that I’ve grown its taken me to the far corners of the world. Occasionally into places of power and influences, like the castles of the kings, but more often- and in moments far more sought after -into the homes of the poor and into communities torn by violence. 

I now understand how hard it is to travel: When you go, you don’t always come back. You and the places you leave change and sometimes you can’t reconnect. Placelessness. Be in this world but not of it. I’ve come to embrace the disconnect. I can’t be the same as who I was before… and neither could the wisemen. For me, nothing captures the truth of the Christmas story like  T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi.  

By Kathryn Deckert

Journey of the Magi By T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods. 

I should be glad of another death.