God Bless the Grass

May the Circle be........broken!
May geometry be overcome
by roots, small tufts of grass,
naively brave small fingers
wiggling through.
Again, the thought came to me in different costumes today, peeking out from a quotation on A Word a Day, in a picture of a circle mandala that was not a perfect circle, roots and leaves penetrating geometry's idea of perfection. And a song
God bless the grass that grows thru the crack.
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back.
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do,
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the truth that fights toward the sun,
They roll the lies over it and think that it is done.
It moves through the ground and reaches for the air,
And after a while it is growing everywhere,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that grows through cement.
It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent.
But after a while it lifts up its head,
For the grass is living and the stone is dead,
And God bless the grass.

God bless the grass that's gentle and low,
Its roots they are deep and its will is to grow.
And God bless the truth, the friend of the poor,
And the wild grass growing at the poor man's door,
And God bless the grass.
.....................by Malvina Reynolds
The mandala reminded me of Da Vinci's man. And the reminding reminded me that everything reminds me of everything, because everything earthy is outcome of the same fractal geometry, or of the same lively grasses, constantly risking absurdity.

Counterpoint: Creativity and Poverty of Imagination

One of my inspiring experiences here in Israel was at the Canadian Embassy, a screening of Bonnie Klein's "Shameless: The Art of Disability". Both on screen and in the room, I encountered such shining examples of creative living. A dancer who became disabled, and didn't for a moment think she'd stop dancing. Like Bonnie's own "Slow Dance", this woman has crafted an exquisite dance form with the body she has now. The director of a deaf and blind theatre group talked of her standards. She expects only excellence - why should her theatre troop be held to any reduced standards than the very best? In counterpoint harmony to this notion of creativity, the line in the film that has spoken to me loudest, resonating clearly in the year since the Tel Aviv screening, was the response of Michael, Bonnie's husband, when he was asked why he didn't consider leaving her after she became disabled following a stroke. Michael's impulsive response, which they both laughed at, was "Poverty of Imagination". They laughed, but think about it. Poverty of imagination in the right places is what enables creative living. There are givens that we don't question, canoes that we don't rock, commitments that we don't have the imagination to even think of changing. Poverty of imagination grounds us and stabilizes our trunks so that we can reach our creative branches higher, higher.
I am waiting to find out about these pictures, sent in haste by my mother after a visit with Bonnie and Michael Klein. Magic to me, the number of people that our family has visited with, both in Israal and in Canada. The mandala is round.

Beyond Nationalism

I'm recalling how absolutely capitvated my mom was at the 1976 Olympics, amongst a sea of waving blue and white Israeli flags, when the Israel soccer team was playing. The Israeli flag is a tallis, the cheering, an outright show of nationalism.
I was curious this week, as 7000 young athletes began marching in at the opening of the Maccabiah games (and we have the parents and grandparents of an American swimmer staying with us right now, and last week a basketball player and his family stayed with us for a special pre-Maccabiah vacation, and the Bat Mitzvah of their daughter), yes, I was curious how I would feel as the Canadian team marched in. Would I feel Canadian? Israeli? Turned out that the 700 young Canadians in white Stampede cowboy hats and red shirts were all kids I'd recognize from Jewish summer camp, and that these Canadians danced a spirited hora to the music that accompanied them in, all of them excited and inspired with their trip to Israel. All of the athletes in the Maccabiah are Jewish. The games were initiated in the 30's to create a new Jewish self-image. The people of the basketball, the people of the swimming pool. The people of the strong, sturdy body. The physical people, not a brain with a transportation system, but a vital physical presence. We have a model for this in our heritage: the Maccabi's.
What is nationalism? Is it good? Is it bad? I'm beginning to think that asking this is like asking whether water is good or water is bad. If someone brings you a glass of water, water is good. (and believe me, I got totally dehydrated during the half-marathon yesterday. I entered as a public noncompetitor, and it was too much in the heat for me. I'm fine now, and smarter.) If someone brings you water, water is good. If someone drowns you, God forbid, water is bad. Water is bad? Water is good? Nah. It's what we do with the water. I was thinking about all this, when today's A Word A Day brought me this thought:
I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us. -Konrad Lorenz, ethologist, Nobel laureate (1903-1989)
We, the missing link, have some noble and beautiful ideas. In our brokenness, our half-doneness, our gawky transitional adolescent lanky missing-linkiness, we try to pour wondrous fare into halfbaked vessels. And the vessels break.
And we will grow. I know this. We will grow.

Koogle

Just found this. A Jewish search engine. I just loved the name, and took a peek. Speech therapist in Netanya listed. With my phone number! Somehow they found me, and listed me. That's Koogle for you.

Headlines in Israel

This is what should be in the headlines you read, in the newspapers from "chul". Chul is an abbreviation of Chutz L'Aretz, meaning outside the Eretz. There are two places in the world: haAretz (the land) and chutz la'aretz (outside of the land). Yes, here are the things your should be reading about in your papers.
*the waves along the shore. The way Murray and Eleanor walked the whole Galloping Goose in Victoria, we walk the entire coastline of Israel, wading in the shallow waves, sometimes surprised by sudden bigger waves. All of my clothes have saltlines. From Netanya you can see waves, fainter and fainter along the scalloped coastline, to the northern tip of the land, and to the south. This land is not so big.
*the figs ripening on the trees. You are never hungry, on a walk. Grapes and figs fall sweet into your mouth wherever you go.
*La Scala in the Park. 100,000 people of all ages gathered to picnic and listen to a huge choir and orchestra from La Scala within a bandstand decorated as if it were the real La Scala in Milan, complete with chandelier. You may not have known that Verdi's Requiem includes fireworks at the end. It was grand.
*Last Shabbat we slept at Kibbutz Beit Alfa, at Dani and Sima's. Singing the old Israeli songs under the stars at night, I understood that Israel is the Israel each one of us creates. You wish it were the Israel where people dance and sing the old songs under the stars? So pull out your guitar, and everyone is singing and it feels like the Israel you hoped to find. There's a song about that.
Omrim yeshna Eretz
They told me there was a land
with Maccabis and tzaddikim.
Where are the Maccabis? Where are the tzaddikim?
Aha! You be the Maccabi. You be the tzaddikim.
That's what this land is.
We then drove to Sally Bar's art show in the artist's village of Ein Hod.
*In a restaurant, a glass broke.
Everybody in the whole restaurant yelled, "Mazel Tov".
Moments like this, you know you're not in chul.
Moments like this, you are in Israel.
And that should make the headlines.

Grapes on the vine, translating sun into sweetness

Click right on the grapes in the picture. See Dani Bar's reverence for life,
for grapes that translate sun into sweetness,
for the fig he picked for me, high up in the fig tree.
Pablo Neruda writes this, about lemons. More luscious in its original Spanish, but here's as much of a translation as a translation can be.
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold
.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

 

Click on this picture to make it big. See the light bursting from the cracks in the pomegranate.
Ring the bells that still can ring!
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in every thing.
That's where the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen)
I've been writing little stories for the children I work with. I asked how to say, "safe and sound" in Hebrew. "Shalem v'bari". Shalem means "whole".
Interesting, how much emphasis there is on wholeness. The "How are you?" greeting is, "Ma Shlomcha?" How is your wholeness, your proximity to the ideal state we long for, where there are no holes in our soles (one of our holiday guests wrote in the guest book about the "soul full" time they had with us).
"Shalem" means "Whole"
and "Shalom" is......Shalom.
There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.
For it is from our broken places
that we can connect with one another.

Ironing and Intersubjectivity

Lots of ironing today, as we said farewell to one family, and will welcome a new bunch after Shabbat. Both families have members participating in the Maccabiah games. I love my ironing time. Words and thoughts smooth themselves with the billowy sheets and pillowcases. Suddenly, while ironing the white duvet cover for the master bedroom, with eyelet that matches the lacy white ice cream table on the balcony overlooking the sea, I had an aha! about intersubjectivity. If "I" am the subject, ("I" is the subject?) and everyone else is an object, an instrument to use, a source of income, an object of my anger, of my jealousy, or even an object of my love, then we are talking about subjectivity. Suddenly, if we have intersubjectivity, I am a subject and you are a subject. "We" is a loop. "We" is a strange loop, a magical loop, a mystical I-thou, both of us mattering, both of us thinking the thoughts, our caring for one another a natural process; no virtue of generosity or empathy need be invoked, because these are inherent to intersubjectivity. Must think about this more, but first, must fold beach towels.


Between guests, we're off to Kibbutz Beit Alfa for Shabbat. Dani and Sima will come with us to Sally Bar's Opening of a new show at the artists' village of Ein Hod, near Haifa.

Am I a Spiritual Being in a Physical Garment?

I'm interested in what's more "real", the idea or the thing.
Am I a physical body with a spirit, or a spiritual being in a physical garment? Meaningless and dualistic, to split the physical and the world of ideas, in this way. But fun. Tzvi Freeman writes, "There are not two forms of matter, the physical and the spiritual. Rather, to each thing there are two faces, the more tangible and the more abstract. Our senses and perception grasp that which is tangible and we call it 'physical'. Our mind's eye is able to grasp the more abstract, each according to his level."
Who said, "I woke up this morning from dreaming I was a butterfly. Or....am I a butterfly who is right now dreaming he is a man?"
My uncle Izzie talked about poem-writing as gilding the lily, and I responded to him,
A real poem, I think,
presents the lily to you,
right there on the page:
fragile petal,
a slight powdering of pollen,
dew.
Poempetals wait there
word on page
in closed books
or whispered on computer screens,
until you open the page
again.
Unlike the lily itself
which was too full of cells,
of water,
of living,
to last,
a real poem
waits
and is there for you
when you come to it again.

 

Related by Chance

Alex recalls my father commenting about some of us being related by genes, others related by memes or related by chance. You could say that all of us are related by chance. Or that none of us are. Either the laws of nature are working, or they're not. Help me with a quotation please. Was it Einstein I'm trying to quote? Did he say, "There are only two tenable assumptions. Either everything is chance, or nothing is". Can Emergence and Beshert theory tell us that if you had enough information you could predict everything that will happen?
"If we had been here first and then set the criteria for a very perfect (G‑d) or (creativity pattern) certainly one of our requirements would be that He be logical and understandable.

But He was here first. As for logic, that came later." Tzvi Freeman

Sweetness

Erez and Chani
Erez is the son of Dani and Shlomit Karmi of Yad Mordecai. They were married in the biblical gardens, amongst grapevines, pomegranates and fig trees, all growing as in the good old days.

Funcertainty

Funcertainty
is delight in knowing
that nothing will be
the way you planned it,
that wherever you're headed,
ceaseless creativity
will wait behind a thin tree,
giggling,
that the only certainty
is that we will be surprised.
Funcertainty
is the promise to ourselves,
that we too will laugh.

Acting As If

Israel changes a little bit whenever Alex Jadad is here. Like circleripples around a bright bobbing centre, we all take on a little of the energetic optimism that comes from believing in our own possibility, and in our own duty to visualize big, and then bigger, and then to follow through, enlisting the creative energies of the people in powerful places, so that visions can dance, reshape and realize. Why wouldn't the most influential people listen to me?
I once read, "If you wish you could a find a certain character quality in yourself, act as if you had that quality. Soon, you will find that in the doing, you actually do have the quality".
I wish I had sticktoitiveness.
So stick to a project you started. And poof. Right before your eyes, there is the quality!
I wish I had the sense of perspective, to see the daily complications of living in Israel, as background noise that just has to be dealt with. And to see the bigger shape of things bright and large and more important. Like Alex and Martha do.

To Lightness

Lightness and a Spirit of Adventure.
That's what we need. We're in a very expensive and lavish hotel for a few days: our own house, not rented out this week. And it's high season. So we are the guests nibbling chilled papaya in the lounge chairs under colourful sun umbrellas, looking out at the waves, eating feasts of edible art under the escheresque chandelier, and talking the life of the spirit, the essence of what Israel can be, in this shining, airy space. We've had gorgeous times with each of our guest families. And family by family, they fall in love with this place, and get in touch with their own spiritual selves. Several have decided to buy in Netanya. Lovely for us to prance alone through the house this week, and to prepare for our next guests and the Maccabiah games. To luxury, and to our willingness to be the providers and not the receivers....no, to blur another line, in the spirit of, "It is better to give and to receive". To realize that it is no less luxurious to waltz through this lovely place with a broom and a dustpan, glowing in the pleasure we see on our guests' faces, and in the knowledge that we are sending them more comfortably out to face the intricacies of this multivalent land, where each, no matter what their religion or their point of view, has a complicated bond with the land. Lightness and a spirit of adventure, a slice of papaya and an adjustable Swiss System bed with sheets in colours of papaya, mango and lemons, and matching bathrobes. And fresh towels. And then, go out in to the real world generously, objectively, willing to look and to learn.