Jebel Musa

It's been 3 days now since I've returned from climbing Mount Sinai. I haven't been able to find the words to describe the trip,or at least the effect it's had on me. I can tell you that we left our hotel in Dahab at 11PM in a minibus with other tourists and drove for 2 hours to St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Jebel Musa (Moses Mountain). We then joined the many other pilgrims and climbed 1000 meters over 7 KM for about 3 hours. The moon was full and so we hiked without lamps. The granite mountains were all white against night sky. It really was beautiful. The last part of the climb consisted of 750 steps and I have to say it was tough. There was a group of Nigerian pilgrims going up and we would play leapfrog as we each took our turns resting on the boulders along the trail. Sometimes, they would sing hymns as they walked. But mostly, we walked up in silence. Bailey and I tried to keep away from the groups in order to really take in the power of the hills. At the top, which is just an outcrop of rock with 2 small churches, we searched for a place to lay down in our sleeping bags. Found a spot and zipped ourselves up to get away from the cold. From inside the bag, we could hear the Nigerians singing. We could hear the Jewish Rabbi chanting. We could hear the Muslims praying. And we could hear the Bedouin man selling "Black rock" over and over. It was a symphony. But a strangely eery sypmphony, sung with so much soul. After a while, I peeked out and saw that the light was coming, so we jumped up and found a panoramic spot to watch the sun come up. The full moon was setting just as the sun came up. It was last friday, the vernal equinox, and good Friday, and the full moon... all at once. We stayed at the top as long as possible until our guide, Sobe, came and found us. Took the 3000 step path down. Knees were in pain, but I felt strange inside mostly.
I have since been searching the internet for other people's accounts of their trip and I found one description which describes the experience much better than I can. Bruce Feiler says, "I realized that my trip had begun to affect me some place deep in my body. It wasn't my head, or my heart. It wasn't even my feet, though there occasionally. It was someplace so new to me that I couldn't locate it at first, or give it a name. It was a feeling of gravity. A feeling that I wanted to take off all my clothes and lie face down on the soil. I recalled my grandmother's funeral and the gulping ache I felt when they tossed a handful of soil on her coffin: "From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust." Not until that car ride, staring at that soil, did I fully understand what that phrase meant. Adam had been made from dust; his name is derived from the word adama, earth. "For dust you are," God says to Adam, "and to dust you shall return." Here was the source of that soil, I realized, and at that moment I had to resist the temptation to leap out and touch it."
I am still feeling this energy work on me. It's powerful. Full of peace, so much that I find myself having to take deep breaths. I'm just letting it be inside me and hope that it will help me become a better person, less judgemental, more accepting. For now though, I can feel gravity more. I feel more rooted to the earth, more like a part of it all than the speck of floating dust I was before.