Sunset

I am poised here in the middle of my month long vacation. I have never had a vacation in Egypt before. Studying and working have been my life here, so breathing in the extremely polluted air of Cairo has never tasted so sweet as now, when I have no obligations but enjoying her and showing off her charms to people I love.

Instead of feeling restless or out of place like I half-expected taking such a long break from my obligations and routine, I feel a sort of deep contentment and sense of belonging. It seems like I'm existing in a long exhalation, a sunset moment of my life.


This month, but more importantly, this world, seem to be a sunset, the boundary between light and dark, wakefulness and sleep, the sun and the stars, productiveness and rest, this world and the next, reality and dreams. In that moment when the sun goes down, when you look for that green flash that is the fleetingness of our life, maybe seen, maybe not, here and then gone, withered like the green grass, things just seem to make sense, the world seems to just shimmer in the beauty of its transience, a transient beauty which somehow points to eternity. But you can't take up residence, or stay or belong in the instant of the sunset, as much as it seems to promise a beautiful eternity.

We pull up into the "new desert" in our converted jeep/van just in time for the sunset. It is complete silence out here, except for what noise we can make and maybe hear from the other campsites. The instinct of our new friend, like most Cairenes, is to blast music. That idea is abandoned. We look around us, the pink-red-orange sky is in the background, white, ridiculous looking rock formations that have survived the intense erosion of the desert wind. Most of them look like mushrooms or fake clouds or snow. This is really weird, let me tell you. The Christmas in the desert picture to the right pictures us pretending we were in snow (kind of convincing right). But anyway, suffice to say, watching the sunset while peeing behind white mushroomy rock formations and gathering other people's discarded firewood and chasing desert lizzards was a pretty weird vacation, but once again it amazed me with the variety and beauty but also transient nature of this world. My friend asked, "I wonder if in thousands of years the rock that we are now walking on will be new mushroom things?"

And even the pyramids. Yes they've been here thousands of years, but they're run down and empty and they couldn't keep anyone alive for eternity. Khufu's barge was left under the pyramids, ready to assemble for the passage to the afterlife. A mere fifty years ago or so, archeaologists finally assembled it to show to tourists, it never made it to the afterlife.

We climb the minaret of Ibn Tulun mosque at sunset and we see the whole brightly colored city of Cairo fading fast in front of us in contrast to the bright orange sunset clouds. Flocks of pigeons and doves are circling among the hundreds of other minarets and highrise apartment buildings with children dangling power cords off the roofs and schools and restaurants that make up life here. Here on top of this city, in the middle of this city, in this moment of sunset, I feel a continuity and a contentment. Somehow an acceptance of the fleeting nature of life, and the inability to repeat a single instant, and the utter unpredictability of the colors of this sunset that is life, but still trusting that you will be taken care of even more so than those pigeons, gives you a deep feeling of rootedness.

I ride a train to Alexandria watching the sunset over the rich Nile fields, going to the Christmas concert of one of my former students. I'm having an approximately ten hour conversation with one of my good friends who's visiting here. The concepts of hope and faith and the uncomfortable, unsafeness of the gospel are resurfacing just when I need to hear them.

I've said goodbye to so many people in the last year or so and yet these people seem to resurface. Visiting me in Cairo during this month are my family, one friend from home, one friend from college, and three friends from studying abroad. How could I know this?

My whole life, as a sunset, seems to be reflecting and refracting colors of eternity, but it is all existing in one moment, and in a green flash, like the grass, it will be gone. I can hope in only something more permanent than this sunset world.

"All men are like the grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
the grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of the Lord stands forever."

1 Peter 1:24-5