Spiritual Republic of Zitser

Posted on March 6, 2003 in Courage & Activism Travels - Past

In 1992, I was enrolled as a citizen of the Spiritual Republic of Zitser.

They fed me pizza served in a style peculiar to the Balkans. The meat and the cheese came out on the crust. The sauce arrived in a pitcher: you poured it on the slice or dipped the slice in it. I couldn’t understand, at first, why people pressured me to add more sauce: one bite revealed that the pizza itself had none.

After dinner, they passed around a microphone and asked us to speak. I didn’t have much to say. I was tired of being a spokesperson for the Quakers and for the American peace movement. Perhaps it was in that moment that I began to seek ways to speak as myself, for myself. When I talked as a representative, I sounded forced, untrue to myself.

This morning, I find it easier to think of the pizza and the garden where I ate it than of the young men who defied the Serbian tanks a few weeks before. It’s easier, too, to remember the Lexington Green as I saw it two years ago, than to remember that a line of men formed there and that some fell for our freedom.

You can always find a spiritual republic inside of yourself. It’s a place to retreat when the shouts and villifications of an ongoing struggle begin to change who you are; when too long a sacrifice causes a wearying, technical moral beauty to replace nature; when an obsession erases the mountain rising behind you, causes you to forget the chamise and the buckwheat that make up the chaparral.

Zitser is out there. I think I shall take some walks in it.