Land of Layers

Our bus ride from the airport at Tel Aviv and the coastal plains, into Jerusalem and the central part of the country took us through a rock-strewn valley, an historic road from Jerusalem to the sea - a scene of many battles, including 1947/48, from which military debris still remains.

As we ascend into the more hilly region, what strikes me, as the light fades, is the strata of the landscape - the layers of sedimentary rock, groaning under millennia of pressure of stress, being pushed together and thrust upwards. They have not stopped moving, or being moved.

And then today, walking through the old city of Jerusalem, a city of layers, different quarters wrapped around each other, walls that go down, right down, but not down far enough, into history, storing people's grief, pain and joy in the way they are rubbed smooth, in the scraps of paper jammed into niches. New walls terminate ancestral highways, forcing a reshaping of movements. The pressure of space, confined space.