Feline cities with refugee reflexes

*** Will add pictures of recent trip to Petra and Wadi Rum soon*** This blog explains why I don't blog as much in Jordan:

It is true that Amman is a city of refugees. Every soul has been swept by all encompassing change, and altered their existence. All beings in this place are searching for a home… Some, the Bedu and Gypsies, were driven from their wandering by the fierce economics of the “modern” state. Others are Palestinians or Iraqi’s broken by violence and fear. Some are Westerners, going to the East to find meaning. All, call Amman home, all call Amman their refuge and sanctuary. Truth, in this place, is a matter of memory and a contrasting matter of survival. Everyone is pulled by false Eastern traditions and impossible Western futures. And so memory balances with sanctuary. The future balances with survival.
In this city of limbo, only the cats truly survive. For the month that I have been here, I have yet to spy even one dog or rat. Like the refugee-citizens, the felines are clever and abandoned. Dirty but not savage, and completely alone, they are fighting to survive amiss the unforgiving cement of the city.
Here, all are scared by visions of a darkened past and a cloudy future. Its strange, because by the mere fact of being here, I feel myself swept into this multilayered system of being. I am stuck in a strange limbo sanctuary where the sweeping pattern of my existence lays broken in a knot. Its all unchanging and in conflict. I’m double-minded, unwilling to look for solutions and dwelling hapless on the problems.
This isn’t to say that I’m unhappy. I am stuck. I am stuck on unchanging happiness and unchanging problems. I’m stuck on a cloudy future and a false history. I’m stuck in a limestone city with so much to offer but few open doors. I’m stuck searching for a future under relentless blue skies that stay the same azure.
This weekend I went to the Wadi Rum – an ancient landscape, the Bedu call the face of the moon. It was beautiful, it was stunning, but completely empty, overwhelming unchanging. That’s where I am. A place of monotonous joy and colorless pain. Everything is the same and everything is beautiful.