Among the Olive Trees

 We used to play among the olive trees, chasing each other in games of tag or mission impossible, dashing from tree to tree as if their thin knobbly trunks could hide us. We were careless then, impervious to the hardship of the outer world… there were walls built around our places of play, containing our laughter. We called these places home, the space between the olive trees, the safe bubble of our existence. 

I suppose we must’ve always known we looked like outsiders, though. The older we got, the more obvious it became. We had only to look at the different color of our skin and hair, which was uncovered, to realize we were the foreigners in this land. We had only to be stared at by hungry eyes on the streets we walked and be told not to make eye contact, not to laugh out loud, and not to show too much skin to realize we were not free beyond the walls of our safe zones, in this place we called home. When did we realize what this did to our relationships to our bodies? Distancing us from them, shame taking up residence in the gap?

And yet, despite this estrangement, we maintained our sense of home in the space between us, in our houses, and among the olive trees, and in the links we did make to locals. Did foreigners ever become locals? Would we ever be fully at home among them? Questions that haunt me now, though I didn’t ask them then or need the answers. Why would we have? There were enough of us that looked different. Though we also looked different from one another, we were not foreigners to one another. We were hybrids, we were nothing and everything, we were medleys of every song brought to us from near and far and from the land on which we stood. We were new compositions of culture. And together we were home. 

And then the space between us evaporated, dispersed… like hundreds of droplets of mixed paint, scattering across the canvas of the planet to become foreigners wherever they may land. We left the country that had hosted us and the leaving, the scattering pained us. Where were we to find our sense of home? How were we to explain our particular droplet of paint, what measures of which colors made us exactly this shade of who we were? 

I didn’t know. I searched and questioned, but did not find. I went to places I looked even more foreign, but felt kinship. I went to the place where I shouldn’t be foreign, but felt it even more. Perhaps the answer to my questions was never outside myself. I imagined I had built a boat in the desert. An odd thing to do. I imagined it was the rains, pouring down in heavy sheets and flooding the land, that lifted me up, confused and dripping, away from the home I’d known. I floated on the surface of the water, keeping my eyes peeled for any sign of land, any indication that I could settle. I imagined sending doves to scout out the horizon for as long as their wings could carry them. They came back with nothing. Their empty claws mirroring my unanswered question of belonging.

In reality, I was in what was supposedly my motherland, walking through the forest, questioning what I had done in coming here. What on earth had I hoped to get out of this? Loneliness gnawed at me. Something happened then that I can’t explain, as a host of leaves rustled in the wind and I reached the end of my endeavors to understand. A flutter inside me, a divine whisper. I am the dirt in which your roots may grow. The dove returned and it held an olive branch, telling me I needn’t float on the seemingly endless seas of my questioning much longer. Where I landed didn’t matter. My roots were made for divine earth. And this. This was everywhere. He is in the wind, rustling through the leaves above, in the heat of the desert sun. In the droplet of mixed paint that is me. 

Wherever I landed, it didn’t matter, I would plunge my branch into divine earth and, nurtured by her, there would grow an olive tree. A reminder and promise of home. One I have now tattooed onto my skin, near the earth where it can be grounded. 

Home will always be among the olive trees, always the hundreds of droplets of mixed paints. Always the space inside of me. Home will be your embrace. The space between us. A shared smile. A story. Roots dug down deep in divine earth, who is everywhere.