a soft breath of morning haze
serenades the dawn.
I visited Cairo and the pyramids at Giza in 2012. It seems a long time ago looking at the pictures below. A different time before I got sick, when I could cope with the minutia of life and forge ahead building a future.
The place of peace this Haiku emanated from is pretty difficult to find at the site of the ancient pyramids. Hawkers of trinkets dog your every step, while Bedouin trail you trying to sell camel rides through the baking desert heat.
It is all about money, and the endless quest to remove some of your money from your wallet. To be honest the only place that we could find any peace at the pyramid site was after paying £5 to enter one of the tombs near to the feet of the great pyramids 😂
But I finally relented and payed a friendly Bedouin to ride us out to the desert where I got the picture featured in the title image of this shot.
The weight of the great pyramids sit in the shifting desert sands as a reminder of the monumental power of human endeavor... unless you believe that aliens built them 😆👽 The history of ancient Egypt is a fascinating one, and I do believe that there is something to the many 'conspiracy theories' about the energy around the pyramids. They seem to shift time in an odd way.
As I sat in the desert near to the pyramids I drifted off into a state of soporific reflection, a state I often reach when writing but didn't recognize at the time as I was creatively all bunged up after a long five year spate of writer's block. I do remember at the time feeling like I wanted to write poetry, but the words wouldn't come and I didn't have a note pad.
Mainly though, it just felt like an immensely deep state of meditation. A state of mind that I have only reached occasionally after months of living in a certain way with daily yoga and meditation practice. This state of Satori happened in an instant and lasted pretty much the rest of the day.
My girlfriend at the time remarked that I had been sitting in the baking heat for nearly an hour, eyes unmoving apart from the occasional blink. She became somewhat worried as this uncharacteristic quietness stretched on throughout the day. As we visited the Sphinx where the many sellers and beggars became quite extreme - this was just one year after the revolution in 2011 - I was as calm as the desert after a sand storm.
I distinctly remember having a pinpoint focus, along with a certain amount of compassion for the people who were hassling me, and in one case trying to pick my pocket. I calmly put my hands up to indicate no to each bit of tat thrust under my nose, in the case of the 'would be pick pocket' removing their hand from my pocket and pushing it away.
All my focus was on photographing the sphinx from optimal angles, and despite hawkers demanding money to be able to stand in a certain place to take pictures, I just calmly muscled my way through 😂 My Ex girlfriend was quite freaked out by the whole experience at the sphinx as the sellers were so aggressive that a police officer with an AK47 stepped in to get them to back off.
All of this just washed over me, and I have no idea why I experienced this level of calm in what was a potentially dangerous situation. I like to think that I inhabited something of the spirit of the pyramids that day - solid, unchanging and stalwart. But maybe they inhabited me.
I have decided to challenge myself to post a daily Haiku on Hive. Each week will have a different theme based on picture prompts from either Pixabay.com or Unsplash.com.
This week's broad theme is Ancient Wisdom.
To read more about the aesthetics of true haiku, and the difference between haiku and senryu, please check out my post: Haiku Vs Senryu - The Aesthetics of Form
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