We left the Dead Sea yesterday. You can see my sister going down the steps from the hotel where we stayed for 2 days. Below her is the road with a stop for the bus that will take us to Jerusalem. Beyond the road is the Dead Sea, its water evaporating in the merciless sun, and Jordan on the other side. The great World Heritage Site of Petra, the red desert city, is in Jordan an hour to the south.

The three siblings have been here countless times, and often somebody says: Let’s go up north this time, to the Galilee, Safed, or to the green hills with gorgeous B&Bs. We always end up in the desert, at the Dead Sea. The desert is like a blank slate. A little like the white screen that mocks me when I wish to write, as if to say: Why bother?

All around us is the turmoil of the Middle East: the impotence in the face of Trump’s agreement with Iran, anger at the local government, disillusionment, fear, and exhaustion. As usual, there are always the few who wonder what this is really about, what this point in time is asking of them. But they’re few.

Across is Jordan, a reminder of the Arab states surrounding this country on three sides, and even as the two countries cooperate in extracting salt from the Dead Sea, with Jordanian hotels on the other side echoing the hotels on the Israeli side, even as the potential for more partnerships across borders becomes more and more obvious, anger, distrust, and hatred persist.

And between them? The Dead Sea. You can’t drown because of the salt, it will hold you up no matter what you do. You don’t have to swim (my sister is now learning the Total Immersion method of swimming), you don’t need float rings or inflatable tubes or even bathing suits. However you go in, the water will hold you, be you a Sunni or Shiite Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, male or female. Just don’t drink the water.

My brother, Mordechai, who spent hours describing to me his meetings in the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Morrocco, walked back with me from tourist shops when I suggested we go into the water. The hotels all contain the salt water pools so only a relative few venture into the Sea itself. With clothes and all, we went in. I felt my clothes billow, warm water licking the bottom half of my body.

“If you have bruises and cuts anywhere, you feel it,” Mordechai said. The oily salt water slowly licks the body and unerringly finds its scratches and splinters, the bumps and bruises, including those you didn’t know you had. If you closed your eyes to them before, if you didn’t want to know, the water will tell you.

But this time nothing hurt me. The skin was whole, unscathed. If there was hurt, it was inside, in the mind, in the heart. And the water soothes those as well.

I have found so much peace in this desert over 55 years of visits to Israel and to the Sinai (in Egypt). The Dead Sea is the result of the 3-million-year-old Syrian-East African Rift that cuts through continents. The peace I find there has nothing to do with any activities of mine. I don’t think I meditated once while I was there. It has nothing to do with Mordechai’s activities cross-countries and religions. The peace in the Dead Sea, like death, is unconditional and absolute. It doesn’t need me, it doesn’t need any Zen master or HH the Dalai Lama, it doesn’t need anyone.

I go there with all the usual questions, exacerbated by my personal karma and being in that part of the world: How can I best use my time on this earth? How can I best live this life? And the Sea and desert tell me: Just live. Don’t add things. Don’t add more tools, more skillful means, more teachings, more study, more practice. Peace is absolute and unconditional. Much of the time you don’t experience life like that but feel it here. Your vows notwithstanding, you don’t need to save yourself or anyone else, for that matter.

Go in in your clothes, stand or float, peace will hold you up. Fly back home in the early hours of Monday, go back to your work, your friends, your students, your teachers, your lonely life in the woods and an aging body, something holds you up. Not my peace, but Your peace, as St. Francis prayed to God: “Make me an instrument of Your peace.” Two brief days in the Dead Sea before we leave, but that primordial water flows in my veins regardless of where I am..