Friday, June 5, 2009

Dawning


Today is June 5, the day my parents were married 68 years ago, and the day before Allied troops landed at Normandy in 1944. It is also the beginning of our second full day back in Canada after five weeks in Turkey and Syria, though I do hear those names in my head always as Türkiye and Suriye, the way I say them when I am over there.

The sun came in our bedroom window this morning at about 5:30, illuminating the contours of our duvet and the wall hanging we bought in Cairo on the Street of the Tentmakers a few years ago. We were already awake, perhaps because of our jet lag readjustment, and it made me think about all our days of waking up over the last few weeks in Syria. There, in Aleppo and in Palmyra, we slept with our hotel windows open and heard almost every morning the wake up call from nearby mosques at about 3:40. We didn’t pray and we did usually go back to sleep, but we were for that short time consistently enthralled by the melodic beauty of the calls that came from close at hand and farther away, each one echoing the other. It made me think about the synchronicity of watches and how these tiny intervals between the starts of the calls gave a wonderful contrapuntal element to the sound.

The call to prayer, whatever the time of day and whatever the vocal ability and lyricism of the muezzin, is the most compelling evidence of the fact that I am in Türkiye or Suriye, two places where the call is particularly lovely, and it is one of the things I miss most when I am in Canada. When we attended an Iftar celebration at St. Mary’s University Gallery during Ramazan last fall, it was the small and quiet call by one of the Santamarian Muslims there that thickened my throat and brought tears to my eyes; for those who do not know it, it is impossible to explain the emotional resonance the call can carry.

It is time to start our day here, but there are so many things to do – finishing unpacking our bags, hanging out laundry, washing more things, sorting through mail, priming the bathroom walls, contacting Steve about installing our Damascene lamps, the list keeps going – that I feel like getting back under the duvet or hopping in the car and going to Coastal Coffee to hide away from it all.

We are not conscious of suffering from jet lag, but we are still in re-entry mode, both physical and cultural. This morning I am not in Turkey or Syria, there is sunshine and cool air coming in the window, boats and ships are quietly active in the calm harbour, and we have time to reflect a little as we begin to engage with this new day. So we’ll stay out of the bed, make our own coffee, and get started on this life, our Ferguson’s Cove life, with the sound of northern birds in the morning our wake up call today.

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