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.

SomatoPsychic

Whoooooooosh!! It's coming at me from all directions, the pyschosomatic-somatopsychic connection,
the complexity of effect becoming cause,
the notion that ailments we thought were psychosomatic or behavioural are actually physical,
that emotional sources lead to biochemical changes, which are molecular, and even, you might say, physical.
A biochemical imbalance is a physical thing. It may look on the outside like Attention Deficit, and you find out it's a wierd balance of norepinephrine or dopamine.
You're down a quart on your a neurotransmitters or your windshield washer fluid. Would you like the oil checked? Let's top up your antifreeze. Yes, in our cars we treat a missing fluid by unscrewing the tank where that fluid goes, and adding just the right amount. Complicated, but not complex.
So, by strange chance, synchronicities piled upon coincidences, I happened to meet Dr. Esther Silver, an old friend from Montreal, now a specialist in Attention Deficit Disorder in Jerusalem. She points me in this direction of diagnosing a physiological biochemical problem, and treating it behaviorally. And in my "daily dose" from my hero Tzvi Freeman, I receive
"Exchange of Matter
....it is impossible to separate between physical needs and spiritual needs. The spiritual transforms into physicality and the physical rises to become spiritual in a perpetual chemistry of exchange. heal the soul and the body is renewed. Heal the body and the soul is empowered."
Oooo. Walls are crumbling. Does this mean the scientists and the faithful will start to hear each other?

Ceaselessly Creating

I've changed my term for what forms and energizes this world, from yesterday's "Ceaseless Creativity" to today's "Ceaselessly Creating". This is in keeping with Cooper's interpretation of the creator portrayed in Kabbalah. He helps us understand the energetic process by telling us, "God is a verb". The process of godding, as it were, a continual breathing of the world.
We still have the initials CC. Ceaselessly Creating.
Or Ceaselessly, creatively, creating, changing, charging, recharging, because there is no good creating, there is only good recreating. Aha. In the creation story, each day's creating was whole in itself.
And CC saw that it was good. And it was evening and it was morning, one day. There is a wholeness to the world at any point in time. It stands precarious, ready to change, by revolution or by evolution or by emergence or by CC or by CCC
I get asked here what my therapeutic approach is. I think I'll call it the Ki Tov approach. "Ki Tov" means that it was good, "And he saw ki tov", he saw that it was good. This implies that the world as it was each day, was whole and fine, just the way it was. I see each individual I work with as whole and good and fine and sturdy. And able to change.