Nicole Hanley

In Egypt, I found it difficult to capture its beauty in a still frame. Floating down the Nile, crossing streets in Cairo, tracing the banks of canals- a pace and a life foreign to my own, yet deeply coherent. The call to prayer five times a day, stopping a community in unison- some in devotion others in quiet witness- created a shared pause that was stirring and felt almost unimaginable in a world I know.

What stayed with me more than what I saw was what I felt. Walking out of a tomb into a sun so blinding against the undistracting pale desert- evoking the light people describe in near death experience. The lush, almost unreal vegetation along the banks of the Nile- as if simulated not grown. The seemingly strange cadence of street traffic defying my notions of order yet functioning with its own internal logic. The scale of the temples that make you feel profoundly small and simultaneously awed by the sophistication of a civilization thousands of years before your time.

I only glimpsed a fraction- fleeting, against the tremendousness of it all- but can already sense how much more there is to feel- again and again. I will return, on my own, to absorb it further.