The vast, lonely Gobi desert surrounds the mother camel. She has no music to express the pain she feels, pain which goes on and on, seemingly without end. Into her exhaustion arrives her white baby camel, sadly bleating for his mother’s warm body and satiating milk. She pushes her child away, and loses herself in the arid wasteland. The white camel pursues her and she snarls at him, threatened and afraid. My five-year old daughter Eowyn watched The Story of the Weeping Camel with me, and said: “She wanted to love the baby, but she didn’t know how to love the baby.” Like the mother camel, I had no music to express my deep pain throughout my childhood and adolescence. When other people and God sought to extend love to me, I hid in the expanse of my loneliness and unsung sorrow. “Hooooooos” sang Ogdoo to the mother camel, her voice enchanting and mysterious. The desert winds caught the strings of the violin, and played a single note, haunting and resonant. The mother sang the note with t...
