The other side of the looking glass

Set Translation Preferences

Profile Pattern

Mishu

Joined Aug 2, 2024

This week has been heavy.

We are under time pressure and need to get stuff done. Our meeting on Tuesday was terse, I neglected my own training to give space for feelings and we plunged into the meeting's agenda, with the Chair getting impatient with newer members cos it felt like we were going around in circles. The meeting ended, tense. A couple of people left, thankful that it was only 9:30pm. A young chap from Gaza, casually mentioned how awful his previous day had been cos a well meaning German lady had taken him him to a musical event that turned out to be focused only on Israel. Faced with patronising words like "Oh but you have to see the other side" he couldn't take it and had a bit of a row. I already had my coat on and my bag over my shoulders but decided to stay and ask him how he really was doing. He suddenly spoke to us of his pain (we knew already how many members of his family he has lost). Knowing he had been taunted by the police I cautioned him about walking about in the dark alone with the kuffiyeh and launching spontaneous one man protests in places where the big and powerful gather and he looked at me, "What can happen to me in Munich, when my family is in Gaza..." A rhetorical non-question. Then he confessed he was undergoing therapy and medication. Eventually the entire very diverse international group of misfits was crying about how they felt and sharing about trauma etc. It did everyone good. But I only got home way after midnight. So much for trying to speed up the meeting and get home early.

Yesterday, dazed from lack of sleep, trying to process family news of an uncle's passing amidst all the gory images and news from elsewhere, as if on cue, messages popped up - Peace Meditation this evening. I knew a couple of people in the group, knew it was run by people from the Land and that it was a safe space so I went in and suddenly found myself in a roomful of women I didn't know speaking Hebrew. The only person I did know was off video and in a parallel meeting or something. I felt like a fraud but I turned on my camera. I knew they would be surprised to see me. And with the introductions it turned out one woman was the mother of a hostage. In that hour, all the political positionings, anger, all were set aside to address pain and grief. One side of the wall is dystopian pain and the other side is true horror. A distorted, exaggerated mirror relection. One death, one hostage, one story amplified in their thousands on the other side that become statistic. I had stopped looking at the numbers around the Christmas/New Year period when it went above 10k. On one side of the wall/looking glass they can focus, they have names you mouth in your prayers. On the other, they barely can keep up with knowing what hit them, literally, and who got hit. I had told the group I was there to seek anchoring/stability, to connect out of my bubble.

Hours later, the person who led the meditation wrote to the WhatsApp group informing what we did and especially for whom the prayers went. We could mention the name of the hostage but Gaza was a collective word. She then wrote privately to me and thanked me for being there, "It matters that people from far away care. Thank u." A few hours ago she had been a total stranger sitting in Israel, her phone number was just a number to me. Now she had a name and an entry in my phone. I wrote to the mother of the hostage who in turn wrote,"I just want my son back, he was a civilian, a good person. He never did any harm." I hear those same lines from the other side of the looking glass, from the other side of the wall.

Construcción de la paz
Juntos más fuertes
Global
Like this story?
Join World Pulse now to read more inspiring stories and connect with women speaking out across the globe!
Leave a supportive comment to encourage this author
Tell your own story
Explore more stories on topics you care about