A journey to Egypt…

We made a journey to Egypt in March to the Sinai Desert. It was a wonderful encounter with an ancient landscape. We camped in a canyon that was once a sea bed, now eroded by rain and wind over millions of years. Deep colours of red and yellow sand stone meet layers of black basalt from once volcanoes. At night watching the star constellations slowly move across the sky…we were without anything of our habitual patterns…a place that allows the stillness to enter…

We then travelled along the Red Sea and the Suez canal onto Cairo, to encounter the ancient and modern city and the wonder of the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

Nothing can quite prepare you to meet these ancient structures….the mind cannot quantify or comprehend how they were made … yet the heart has a feeling of an intuitive understanding, that cannot be expressed in words. I wonder how to capture this feeling…and translate it even as a fragment in another place…..

The journey took us onto The Monastery at St Katherine and to climb the red granite of Mount Sinai, a place where you tread in the footsteps of ancient pilgrims. Tea shops on the path up, offer mountain mint tea and a moment to catch ones breath and look out to the vast mountainous landscape. The Monastery has been presided over by Orthodox Greek monks for centuries, it has a warm smell of frankeincense and the presence of past devotees are etched into every surface.