اشترِك في نشرتنا الإخبارية
The March towards Beirut
18-09-2020 | 16:58
Source: Annahar
Friday, September 11, 2020 - On my way to Beirut
I left home around 8 a.m. to go to Haigazian University in Hamra and meet my online teaching load that starts at 10.
On my way to the office for the virtual learning-and-teaching, there was traffic, moving towards Beirut. There was a special aura and form of energy to that entire car- rolling motion that seemed like a militarized one. The move forward was in conformity with the motion around and the rhythm was in accordance with the drumming heartbeats.
The pace of the cars was slow, their voices silent, their honks muted. The cars appeared to be magnetized Beirut-wards, maintaining rhythm of their forward motion, from the pounding left side of their drivers’ systems. It seemed the heartbeats around in that pool of togetherness were the diastole's and systoles of a bigger unseen heart that enfolds all.
The movement of the cars was like the marching of the soldiers: a slow funeral march, developing slowly to a prayer-procession, leading to the soldiers’ march that marks the resumption of a normal rhythm.
There was no anger in that forward militarized synchronized motion, no provocation, no defiance; there was just that marching towards Beirut, silently, steadily, aim-fully, with the ceremonial pace of funerals. The beating hearts around me, a first step to life, all on the left, were the regulating drums to an ongoing funeral march consequential to a political system that has been concocting havoc and devastation.
More than a hundred martyrs and victims died in the seaport explosion, thousands are left injured and homeless, and the motion continues to the capital that is still beating, feebly but dignifiedly.
August 4, 2020 – September 11, 2020 – a continuum of suffering and injustice.
With the recent huge fire in the seaport, the tight economic yoke, and the proliferating Coronavirus cases, the Lebanese slog forward, slowly, silently towards Beirut, the heart of their nation. Their throbbing worries and humming thoughts are the rhythmic drums to their forward motion, that always begins where the heart is…
Their onward motion grows to a procession of collective prayer, one communal force in an attempt to annihilate the evil that is ominously present. All the heart-pounds on those crammed roads are the beating drums of an upcoming rhythm of life, slow but certain, sad but promising, lost but will be found. And the vapor of prayers thickens and condenses until it sedates the hurt and maintains the push.
Finally, this forward motion of car-troops heading towards Beirut evolves to mark the time to resume a normal march. The seaport fire-smoke thickens the air, carbon dioxide fills the lungs, destruction covers the eyes, pain encompasses the heart, brokenness hinders the will, but the motion is steadfast and forward; the motion is an incarnation of life, unstoppable, on the path of redefining the self, thus redefining the country.
One step that begins with the left foot, the side of the beating heart, in synchrony with the one heart, that contains the many heartbeats, is the marching forward in an aching country.
The march to Beirut was synchronized on that Friday with a beating silent will, an echo of unity for the love of the country and the oneness of the destiny.
