What would remain?

what would remain?

Imagine being a modern person, even a well-educated person, and the world-as we-know-it ends .It doesn't really matter how, but this person, Cory, is now the remnant of the advanced civilization we know as ours, finds himself or herself in a remote village deep within the mountains of asia which has somehow managed to escape the wholesale disintegration of the outside world.

Maybe Cory doesn't even realize what has happened to friends, family and culture. Not yet, anyway.

Time passes.

Through some process, Cory discovers that a disaster has occurred and that some major failure has occurred and that what she /he knows may be all the entire world knows of civilization.

Hope gives way to resignation and Cory decides to make a life in the village and to pass on to the villagers what he/she knows and feels to be important, that which needs to be saved.

Years pass.

Cory is long dead.

A thousand years later, what might be the message that endured through the centuries and how might have it changed?

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Restaurants

After driving to Seattle for a crafts fair in the university district and after checking into my hotel, and before finding any of my friends, I decide to get serving to eat. I notice that across the street is a restaurant and I figure, why not? I approach the front door of what can only be called a concrete cube.
I probably wouldn't be attracted to a place like that now, but now was then. I opened the door and pushed aside heavy red drapes and stepped into an anteroom coated with gilded mirrors.
Incongruity rooted me to the spot. Outside, the highway churned with truck traffic and people headed home to a warm, comprehensible dinner.
I was not so sanguine.
But before I could reconsider , I was escorted to a table.
To my delight the table snuggled up near a piano where a pianeuse, a black woman in a gorgeous gown, played and sang.
I watched and clapped and appreciated.
I said so, and she thanked me.
Then she asked what a nice boy like me was doing in a place like this.
This?
I admit that my crap detector is set on "Low", usually, but I now looked around and saw lots of mirrors and suits, gilding and women of the broad sort.
She played wonderfully.
I told her that I was a woodworker and that I was going to be selling at the craft show on the morrow.
Here she was, in brocade and singing jazzy songs on a grand piano in what I was now suspecting to be a hangout of some sort, and she tells me that she is a woodworker too!
She loves it and we talk tools and wood species, between songs, for the rest of the night.

I went back a few years later and there was no building there.



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Nothing is forever

Except Forever.


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Surprise

Surprises.

First time in Paris, being a committed Democrat and having just read "Tale of Two Cities", I go in search of the Bastille, refusing to ask directions because, after all, how difficult might it be to find such a famous monument?
Tres difficile, as it turns out.
Not until a few hours of puzzled searching later do I discover that those fellow Democrats tore it down.
Not unlike back when I visited Barcelona, and Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and found no church there, just the facade!
There remain subtle reasons to travel, and some that just smack me alongside the head.


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Spain

Spain

Hitchhiking.
Picked up by two Iranians.
They offer to share their lunch.
We stop by a small stream.
They climb onto the roof of their old Peugeot, cut up raw onion and french bread and we eat. Afterwards, they slice the peel of oranges longitudinally, making it very easy to peel and eat the fruit.
I haven't seen that done before.

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Piazza Navona

Sitting in the Piazza Navona, eating outside and watching all the artists convincing the tourists that they were the next Giotto, the cammeriere puts the glass of wine on the table and it wobbles as he doe so. He reaches into his apron a pulls out a matchbook, leans down and squeezes it under one of the legs and and asks me if that works. He taps the corner of the table. "E pur si muove", I say.
He laughs uproariously.
"Chi la detto?"
I hate to say it, though I should have expected it, I am not thinking that he would recognize the phrase , and when he asks me who said it, I freeze for a moment. But fortunately, like a starry messenger out of the night sky, it flashes: "Galileo".
He laughs again and says, with a clap on the back,
"quando hai finito, ti compro un cafe".
A thoroughly delightful meal, out of very little.



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Eternal Truth

Winter morning;
The rain falls from the sky
As it always has.


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"Liking" and "ising"

I am liking what's ising.


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Is like

Nothing "is".
"Like" best describes it.


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Myth

Myths as a metaphorical way to present reality:

The most content with the least detritus.


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Mr. Y

Is mystery a good thing or a bad thing?
Would we rather a world full of mystery, or none at all?

Mystery is like an inexhaustible battery, powering all questions.

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If...

If,
After reading a poem,
One asks "what did that mean?"
Then the poem failed.


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Winter with Einstein

Winter morning;
Nothing moves.
It's everything else that moves.


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Poem 9

Poem 8

Poem 7

Poem 6

Poem 5

Poem 4

Poem 3

Poem 2

Poems

My cat

When I turn on my gas fireplace, my cat comes to sit in front of it to share in the warmth. She has no idea where the gas comes from, all the pipes and pumps, the global political machinations, the physics of gas dynamics, the ignitor that makes such a comforting click and rush of the flames. But she doesn't care.
And when I extinguish the flames, she leaves.
Without regret.


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Beethoven.

Got am email from Paul asking if I want tickets to the Ninth symphony.
Thinking about Beethoven.
Remembering that I have seen it.
And also Fidelio.
At the Teatro La Fenice in Venice.
Ein engle descending the stairs.
That years later, I had dinner at
the Ristorante La Fenice with Rosella and Emma.
They were pretending to smoke cigarettes,
using bread sticks.
They were certain that the carabinieri would arrest them because they were underage.
We spotted an old woman, a police spy no doubt,
leaning out a window above us.
Dinner turned into a thriller.
Worthy of Beethoven.
A young Beethoven perhaps.



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Mr. Y

The name of God
It's only right not to utter the name of GOD.
Once we, in our language, conceived of the Ineffable as God then we could no longer prevent anyone from turning the word into whatever seemed desirable and instead of acceding to omnipotence we render the word impotent.
We freeze the possibility of infinitude into petty wish fulfillment.
We created GOD by naming it.
By refusing to name the Ineffable, we keep Wonder alive.
To name something is to control it.
To refuse to name something is an act of honor.
Maybe every word is like that. In that it takes on an existence of it's own above and beyond it's referent.
A hamburger is first the thing itself and only later the word "hamburger" but once it is no longer the original thing, then it becomes your hamburger instead of my hamburger then it acquires your meaning and not all the nuances that the thing means to me. In fact, it achieves lowest common denominator status, a crude map with many blank areas with the empty spaces to be filled in by the user, to be filled maybe wildly.
But it does attain a life of it's own.
Poetry tries to keep language honest and humble.
A musical note is here and gone.
An act is here and gone.
A word is nearly immortal.

Vivid moment 2

Standing in line at the grocery store, there is an old man fumbling for change who Looks at me and apologizes. His unkempt beard and crippled fingers and strong smell notwithstanding , I put my arm around his shoulder and say, " I'm in no hurry". Sehow he mentions that he's a pagan and I concur. Withot remembering everything, I recall that science also figured into the conversation and so I reccommended the book that i'm reading, The End of Mr. Y. He said that he reads three books a week and said not only would he try to find it, he wanted my

Vivid moment 1

Vivid moment 1

Talking  to Tommy. 

Tommy, can you hear me?
Can you feel me near you?

We are both seekers.
Are there others?

Off to the Hindu Kush. 

When I get back,
Let's do life. 
Wednesday okay?

Right now

Right now is god.
God is right now.
Autumn morning.

Vivid moments

Today is as vivid as I want it to be, as is God.

Walking

Stepping outside, into the cold acridity of an autumn morning, i might as well be biting into a little madeleine for the onrush of walks past: the zattere with San Giorgio across the bacino, the Sawtooth Mt range on the road from Boise to Stanley, the 8 K of the red clay road from Koun Fao to Koun Abrouzzo in the ivory coast.  

The sun appears...

Of the river flecked...

Do old rocks...

Nepalese embassy.

While in Washington for the Stewart-Colbert rally, I decide to try to get visas for my trip to India and other countries that I might be able to reach.
I enter the Nepalese embassy, a small, neglected brick house and find noone around. I yell "hello!" and still nothing.
Prayers?
Meals?
No music or sound
I wander into the back of the house and find a guy at a desk who speaks very little English.
As we are stumbling along, someone who can ask "can I help you?" comes up behind me.
I explain that I want a visa but I realize that I have no photos and might I just take an application? He says "no problem, no problem. Just put your name here".
"What about the photos?"
"I'll just make a photocopy of your passport photo".
I'm thinking that the photo in my passport already looks nothing like me; what kind of likeness will this be?
I never do get to see it, but he does put a stamp in the book.
"$25, please".
I give it to him in cash, and he thanks me with a big smile.
Nice guy, and I feel like I leaving a real Nepalese experience behind me.


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What twenty years?

Eating outside
I see a man I know.
But don't really.

He looks at me
and assumes I do
But I don't, really.

I point at him..
he looks at me
And says "Mike, Industrial Finishes. "

Twenty years disappear
In an instant.
But, not really. U

We catch up.
We might see each other again
In twenty years.

He's now an 8 handicap.
He hasn't been wasting his time.
Not really.


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Now I'm 64

I love crossing borders.
I just bought my ticket to the Indian subcontinent.


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I don't know

I don't know who I am
Nor where I'm bound,
But hey, it's only October.


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Somewhere

White mountaintops,
through winter clouds,
sailing somewhere.

Appreciate

Appreciate this time.
This day.
This hour.
This minute.
How fast might it change, this minute, this hour, this day, this entire Time?

My grandson was born one week ago and now he is back in the hospital with a severe infection and, when I go out into the world and I see and talk to complete strangers, I can smile and say" thank you" or whatever is appropriate.
Why is that?
How and why do people smile?


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Wedding redux

Wedding poem
Dedication

To the entire villages it took
To raise these two spectacular people

I googled weddings
between Peties and Jacobs
and nothing did I find.
But of course,
How to put
The sweetest smiles
and boundless generosities
Into a search engine.

Differences of traditions
Produce unity and oneness.
Truth becomes the language
For greater understanding.

The winter sun and moon
Are about Time
and you and me.

In the springtime trumpets
Of bright daffodils,
I hear our song

Summer evening;
Opening my arms opens my heart
To you.

Leaves on autumn's earth,
A time to gather together again
Who we are and why.


I'm not going to have any trouble remembering this wedding.



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JUST THIS ONCE

Prices

My guidebook keeps saying that if I can afford it, there There are many good hotels that are worth it. The price: $800-$1000 a night!
Not the typical backpacker's source of information.


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Brains

Humans:
brains big enough
To imagine
The possibility of god
But
No bigger.


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ADRIFT

OOPS

I feel like a parakeet
Trying to break up
A cat fight.


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SENSE OF LIFE

The way people make sense of life:

- Religion gives people hope, and friends who agree with them, and a sense of belonging on a personal level, and of belonging to something bigger than themselves, i.e., as much access to a “higher power” as they want or might feel that they need.
-
- Sports give people a way to talk about a topic that rarely brushes up against their personal life, and it provides a framework for warmth and laughter with little risk of self-exposure, and also friends, and a sense of belonging.
-
- Business tends to be a consuming passion because it feels so important. What could be more urgent than providing for one’s material needs? Especially if it enables one to be a part of a group that, in a society that values wealth, seems so respected and convinced of its right to power. Business, as a worldview, seems almost enough, until it isn’t.
-
- Art is a source of compatriots, if not-quite friends, and much self-satisfaction. Art, if in fact one searches for Truth and not just a way to make a living, which then resembles more the Business model, can provide not just a sense of belonging to the here and now, but also belonging in an historical sense, to Traditions. The protean artistic vision can also adapt to changing circumstances.
-
- Military life affords a person with a framework with which to judge the positives and negatives of life as it unfolds, who is a good person and who isn’t, which is a good course of action and which isn’t, in short, a template for valuing worth. The Military certainly provides friends and a feeling of belonging to a larger idea.
-
- Outlaw living certainly binds people together, in a sort of Brotherhood of the Damned, but a brotherhood nonetheless. Sometimes, people have little else. With very few other options for belonging, in a society that esteems “worth”, anti-worth presents itself as an attraction.
-
- Intellectualism bears some resemblance to Art as a Reality filter, but where Art feels almost a compulsion to produce “objects d’art”, intellectuals know that one can, ultimately, “think one’s way through”. Intellectualism is conversation, and, by definition, needs “conversants”, someone to converse with. Intellectuals can feel pretty proud of themselves living, as they imagine, on mountaintops in small communities.
-
- Science affords the scientist much fellowship throughout many disciplines in a great dialectical chain that appears unbreakable to its adherents. Once a scientist, always a scientist; its more a system of thinking, even if one is not “scientist” in the strict sense. Truth is just so damned unassailable. Between one adept and another, there is always something to discuss.
-
- What do people have who share none of these templates? The question seems similar to the one asked of Taoists: how is a proponent of Taoism different from a very young child? Can one imagine a person with, seemingly, no conceptualizing tools? Almost like asking one to think of nothing.
-
- Sleep unites Reality and Superreality.

LATE SUMMER

A summer evening,
But, one red leaf at a time,
Fall creeps in.


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STUPID

“That was a stupid move”

“Hmmm.”

Playing chess with Pound promised a few God moments,
but few good ones.

It hadn’t been my idea.

Miss Rudge had suggested it to Mary Jane; that Ezra liked to play chess, did I know how, was I interested?

“Hmmm.”

Thinking back, I wish that I had gone out and bought a book, telling me how to play chess with Ezra Pound, a book surely to be found in any corner bookstore.

I have a feeling that Miss Rudge would have appreciated it. Evenings in winter, in Venice, could drag on.

I only called him Pound when he wasn’t there. Sitting across from him in the dim light of their living room, a very small room, mind you, sifting through his craggy, bushy face, finding his eyes on me, cowardice came easily. It was always Mister Pound over the chess table. While I tried to find a move that he hadn’t already seen me try ten minutes ago, he would perch with his hands in his lap, one hand picking at the other, like an eagle pecking at the liver of Prometheus.

“Hmmmm.”

Surprising really, the places that I’ve ended up in.

LIGHT

FRIENDS

?

Reading "The Venetian Empire",
I find that Venice helped to destroy the Parthenon.
Who can I call who would care?


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SWEET

Sweet the way she touched his shoulder
as he passed her
with his lawnmower.

WHAT'S A SOUL?

When A. P. Sinnett writes, "We start with a soul in physical life ...", curiosity asks:
Who are "we"?
When is "start"?
What is "soul"?
And is "physical life" as real as we imagine it to be?

He goes on to say that "we follow it through the experiences of life...
which make up the person in question. We perceive that personality proceeding next to enjoy a spiritual existence ... and then we find it returning to a new earth life to gather in fresh experiences. "

SPRING MORNING

MYSTERY

Religion wants to take the mystery out of God.
Science wants to take God out of the mystery.


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WHEN IN DOUBT

When in doubt,
go out
and look at the night sky.

TODAY

Today
is yesterday
before tomorrow.

I AM

OTHER WORLD

Outside, on a summer night,
Reading about Venice,
I live in another world


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STILL

It's still summer,
And yet..
And yet...


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SYNCHRONICITY

Deb and I
On the same page
But different books


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I have only so many days.
Every day spent feeling sorry for myself
is wasted.


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POOR DOGS

DAFFODIL

AN OLD MAN

DUMB

Walking along, I see a guy, probably tough, hit the girl he is with. I yell at him to stop. He smirks and call me a faggot. I yell that I will call the police and make a point of noticing his license plate number, which I promptly forget. But I think he noticed because he shut up.
I walked a few hundred yards further and a guy, passing me on the street, offers me a high five, which I return.
He could not have seen what transpired.
There are circles within circles.


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GREAT MINDS

COOL MORNING

Cool morning.
When the heat comes later,
Will I remember?


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RED DRAGONFLIES

Do the red dragonflies
Also see themselves reflected
In the blue water ?


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FOOTPRINTS

On a hot summer afternoon
I follow my wife's disappearing footprints
To the pool.


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WHY NOT?

Work hard
Live large
Dream big




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SMILE)

Chasing her kitten,
The young girl's quick smile
Is faster.


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ANARCHY

Anarchy, at its appearance at the end of the nineteenth century, bears a striking resemblance to the terrorists of the end of the twentieth.
There are more than a few parallels between that time and now:
The Speaker of the House, Thomas Reed, and his fight against the "silent quorum".
In 1895, when E. L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, said that the U. S. "finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager ro use it.....and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe. "
Replace Democrat with Republican and you might as well replace 1895 with 2010.



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CRICKET

Cricket on the windshield;
Doing better than I would,
Under the circumstances.


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WHAT IS DREAMING?

What is dreaming?
Most people might say that who we are, really, is the person who is awake and that when we sleep, we are simply a shadow of our wakened self, merely resting and preparing for consciousness. There is little doubt that, awake, and only awake, we reach our highest potential while sleep remains a hazy, necessary inconvenience.
Flip it around, though, and consider, for a moment the possibility that sleep and the dream state presents us with our best opportunity to realize most fully the enormous capabilities of our minds and imaginations. We can be whomever we want, go wherever we want, experience the universe unconstrained.
The question: "why do we need sleep?" then might become: "why do we need bodies?"
To provide a sanctuary for our dreaming self.
This explains why we sleep and have always slept, in spite of the obvious dangers; we sleep because only then are we truely alive.
The waking state exists to feed and protect the temple of the superconscious.



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PARTICLES AT REST

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TASTY

DREAMS

No one knows why we sleep, or what dreams do for us.
Why sleep?
Sleeping plays such an enormous part in the lives of so many organisms that it must be profoundly important to existence itself.
The benefits of unconsciousness, even in the wild, must outweigh the obvious risks of being discovered by a nocturnal predator.
Nature does not declare a Christmas Truce.
What, then, are these benefits?
What could be worth, day after day, taking such risks?

Sleep deprevation is considered torture.



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CHEAPSKATE NATION

What do people do when they lose their jobs?
If they weren't already, they start shopping at Walmart.
Preferring low prices over goods made in America,
they perpetuate the transference of jobs overseas.

DEMAND AMERICAN-MADE, PEOPLE!!!

Be proud of paying the prices that will keep
Americans working.
We need to mutually buy each other's products.

Want cheap beer? Make it yourself!

Want cheap bread? Make it yourself?

You're an American! MAKE IT HAPPEN!

BOOBS

I feel that the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis can explain our fascination with décolletage and I propose this idea to my wife.
She says that I am overthinking this, "who doesn't like boobs?"
Mmmmm.


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WIND

The summer wind off the ocean
Pushes me around.
I don't really have an answer.


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WISDOM

Summer morning;
The particular wisdom
Of large rocks.


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TONIGHT

IMMIGRATION

Immigration is America’s comparative advantage.

In the philosophy of Free Trade, America’s ability to
attract adventuresome, hard-working people from
all parts of the world could and should be such a
remarkable resource that we, as a country, need to
re-embrace this vision that once defined us so many
years ago.

Those “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”
are different from the huddled masses who choose to
stay where they are, in their own country.

This country created itself through the regenerative
power of immigration; that immigrants, having severed
ties with their old country and old ways of doing things,
might work for, and become inspired by, a new vision,
that of the Future, for themselves, certainly, but more so
for their children.

Unlike the Tea Partiers, who are confounded by fear, and
ignorance of what can be accomplished by creative people
who believe in an idea of an America founded on
opportunity, immigrants aren’t afraid of too much
national debt. They arrive here with an unbounded optimism
in their ability to survive and prosper. They don’t care how
far down on the ladder of success they start. They only
ask for the right to grasp at the first rung.

People who are afraid of other people who choose to work
harder are right to be afraid.

Hard work is patriotic.

Tea Partiers consider themselves privileged, but economic
security is available ony to those who continue to work for it.


Work Hard.

HOW BIG IS GOD?

WEDDING POEM

My daughter, Petrel, married Jacob and these poems are for them.

Summer evening.
Opening my arms opens my heart
To you.

Colorful leaves on autumn earth.
A time to gather together again
Who we are and why.

The winter sun and moon
Are about Time
And you and me.

In the Spring,
The trumpets of the bright daffodils
Play our song.

CARL SAGAN

I just learned that if I were to cut a piece of pie in half and then cut
that half in half, after 90 cuts I would be down to 1 atom.
And then, if i counted all the atoms in the universe, I would have the number 10 to the 80th power.
Something to think about over the morning cuppa.


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SPIRALS

Days. Seasons. Years.
Spirals.
Circles elongated by Time.

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THE FALL

Realizing, on a hot Summer afternoon,
that short term memory
goeth before the Fall.


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THOUGHTS

Summer rain.
Thoughts
Allow my happiness
To wander.



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THE OPEN ROAD

ARE WE THE METEOR?

Are we the meteor?


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EVOLUTION

From an evolutionary standpoint, except insofar as we are eggs and sperm, we do not exist.
Who we are as persons, what we have managed to achieve by growing up and working hard,
why we think we are who we are, none of this matters to evolution.
It's all about procreation.
Once we, as men, have passed our sperm on to the eggs of women, we cease to matter
in the great evolutionary scheme.
Whether we live beyond that moment is irrelevant.
Anything that we make of ourselves after that point is completely outside the purview of evolution,
the invisible, though no less iron-like, hand of evolution.
We can be especially proud of that.
We might as well invent a new kind of person, one that Nature would never have created on its own.
The Universe is immense.
Our dreams must measure up to that immensity.

TEARS

I decide to make my wife one of her favorite dishes for dinner.

It's an emotional thing, in the kitchen, cutting and chopping, sauteing and stirring, and I fail to hear her approach behind me.

She touches me gently on the shoulder and I turn to her, tears in my eyes.

"French onion soup, wow!"

I'll be damned if she doesn't have tears in her eyes, too!


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OOPS

I was mistaken.
My cat is singularly unqualified to kill anything
This summer evening.



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MY CAT

My cat does not seem particularly interested
In killing anything
This summer evening.

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TOTALITARIANISM

The trouble with totalitarianism, like a sinking stock market, is when to get out.


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THE GREASED PIG

We all get to wrestle the greased pig.
There are really no good tips on wrestling a greased pig.
But music helps.


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FEELING BLESSED

First day of summer,
Feeling blessed
For no particular reason.

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WHAT IS A THOUGHT?

What is a thought, anyway?
A thought is an interpretation of the passage of time, of an experience.
A question has always been: can there be thinking without words?
Is a visual image a thought?
Is a piece of music a thought?
Which is more important, the work, or what we can say about the work? Put that way, nearly everyone would say that, of course, the work is paramount, but, for some reason there always remains an substantial undercurrent of incompleteness to a painting or a jazz riff because we can't talk about it without talking ABOUT it.
Words, the naming of things, seem to be on a different level of interpretation, maybe less profound but certainly more accessible, maybe, for that reason, more "valuable".
There are always poems, words, that try to be less accessible and, therefore, more profound, but does this happen at the expense of relevancy?


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I WILL BURY MY FEARS

OPPURE, SI MUOVE

A long time ago, and far, far away, in Rome, to be exact, I sat in Piazza Navona, at a table that wobbled. When the waiter reached down to steady the table with a piece of cardboard, it still moved. He looked at me. "Oppure, si muove", I said.
He laughed and asked me if I knew who said that.
"Galilleo", I said back.
He clapped me on the back and offered to buy me a coffee after dinner.
Here we are, the earth still moving around the sun and that table still moving in Rome.
500 years later, and the truth resonates to this day.


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WHEN I BREATHE IN

Every breath of air that I inhale contains atoms of oxygen and nitrogen and who knows whatever else, all atoms, that predate my own today's existence by billions of years. When I drink water, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms were ancient before I was born. And when I exhale or perspire, the atoms that leave my body and return to the world in common do so remaining unchanged by being me for a short time.
I am composed of parts more ancient than I can ever imagine. And they have met in me, coming from all parts of the universe to coalesce in this body for a short time. Every instant, the person that is me is a dynamic conglomeration of mass and energy, changing constantly. When I am born, I accumulate a certain amount of particles to allow my spirit to call a body "home". When I die, my body's particles, having been only borrowed, return to the cosmos.
My spirit puts some serious thought into the next step.


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LOOKING AT THE HERON

TRUTH?

What is Truth?
It makes you wonder.
Summer lightning.


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HERE AND NOW

"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past" (Ulysses p. 153)

What if, instead of a life in a day, June 16, 1906, the work were to be a series of heres and nows that eventually becomes a life.
Rather than writing Ulysses later, after the life has been lived and examined, the point would be to allow Odysseus to live in the moment, goaded by the past and hungry for the future.
The present is never just here, nor just now, but a continuum of shadows and uncertainties extending into the past, achieving some degree of clarity in the present and then, stretching into the future, more shadows.
Why we choose to do something and the repercussions of that choice make every act less of an isolated point on a graph and more of line, a series of points, a string in fact.
Thus every single action that we take becomes the sum of where we have been and where we hope to go, a thread whose either end remains forever invisible.

The middle of the string is right now, with brightness and clarity extending into the past and/or future depending on the individual's awareness. Everyone's life is a fabric that unfolds decision after decision, idea after idea, action after action, which all up to what an individual does day by day. lf those thoughts and actions are the warp on the loom and the days, minutes, hours are the weft, then a weaving tends to be bright and distinct in the center and fading at either edge into shadow and farther from awareness. For an extremely aware person the image is wider. For God, the fabric is bright and endless from side to side, and endless top to bottom.


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THIRTEEN BILLION YEARS AGO

Thirteen billion years ago
a long time ago
Words-Falling-Apart ago

Complete silence
The speed and brilliance
of Creation
surprises

Why, once,
did the pin
of Insatiable Curiosity
prick the point
of Incandescent Possibility?

Every single atom,
every particle,
that makes up Me,
has traveled for thirteen billion years
throughout this Universe
since the beginning of Time
to coalesce right here
right now
in Me.
Temporarily.

Odyssey
Proteus
Prometheus
Akasha

The Odd Sea of Eternity

What are thirteen billion years
to a dream?


I am
here begun,
to change
many times
before I’m done

TOURIST OR TRAVELER?

If your idea is to "take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but footprints" then almost any experience out of the ordinary is likely a bad one.


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THE ART OF POETRY




Truth may be beautiful, beauty may be truthful but there is no necessary connection.

Craftsmanship aspires to beauty. Art aspires to truth. For myself, when Truth and Beauty collide, truth should be the last criterion standing.

Beauty is beguiling, like Money and Power. Truth couldn’t care less. I respect Beauty, Money and Power, but they need always to be measured against Truthfulness.

Art takes me to another place than where I live daily. When I go back and look at something that I have written in the past, I say, “I don’t know that person”, as if I wrote it in a different mind.

Haiku enables me, searching for the mountaintop, to stick my head up through the clouds and get a peek at the peak.

ST ANDREWS

I went to Scotland a few years ago, at about this time of the year.

I wanted to play the Old Course

I approached the starter and he sent me out.

I finished my first round.

I approached the starter and he sent me out again

I spent the second day the same way, playing twice.

I approached the starter on the third day and he sent me out.

I finished my fifth round in three days.

I approached my now good friend, the starter, and he sent me out.

I finished my sixth round

I approached him again and asked him if he gave out discounts.

"The fourth round the same day is free," he said.

Scottish thrift.

Scottish humor.

A CURIOUS DAFFODIL

WE ALL WONDER WHY...

What is it,really, that makes our life worth living? At some point,We all wonder why we exist.

One person who has managed to get a start on the question is Pavla Zakova-Laney and her non-profit organization, Educare Africa, where she is working with the people of Cameroon, in Africa, on educating the children there. you can find her at:

http://educareafrica.blogspot.com/

She has problems finding other people to whom she can entrust the future of the organization.

Will there be a legacy?

Are the children the legacy?

Will that be enough answer for her?

Are good deeds good forever?

AND ALL AND EVERYTHING

and all and everything

and why not pass by

and i

i sigh

and seek to remember

assured enough to love it

and yet,

not yet sure

of something else

Mmmm

ONE

All of the universe, every atom, every stone, every animal and plant, every human being ever is, every second of every minute of every day moving towards, while within, ONE.

As if we, the entire universe, were on a boat on a so-very-large river, flowing with the current, everything flowing with the current, everyone and everything in the boat, in the water and moving slowly and inexorably down the river, always toward ONE.

But, because the river is so wide and the shore invisible, there is no sense of motion.

Rowing with or against the current, the river always decides.

BEYOND THE UNIVERSE

LISTENING TO GARRISSON KEILLOR

In the car, I listen to Garrison Keillor, on the radio, saying how today is the birthday of Larry McMurtry, the author of "Lonesome Dove"

Later, I overhear a friend mention "Lonesome Dove" as his favorite movie and I assume that he heard the same broadcast. When I ask him, he is completely surprised and didn't have any idea that it is McMurtry's birthday.

An ever-so-small tip of one of the mountains of coincidence poking through the cloud cover of Reality.

They are astounded by the knowledge that I can call upon, seemingly at will.

I am more astounded by how quickly disparate skeins of wooly facts knit themselves together.

WALKING BRINGS ME TO MY SENSES

ISRAEL IS A BOWL OF WATER

Israel might be a bowl filled with water.

The religions which have come there are big, bright, colorful marbles.

They arrive with much splashing, and after they enter society they remain distinct.

They do not disappear, staying as visible and discrete entities.

While the water stays clear.

If India were a bowl, likewise filled with water, things could be described differently,.

The religions that entered India are colorful. yes, but colorful salts and colorful sugars.

They become part of the water, changing the water without remaining discrete entities.

The water takes on a hue, and both sweet and salty, a mixture.

The religions of Israel don't want to mix; the religions of India can't help it.

EXUBERANT IRRATIONALITY

As much as I would like to have made the trip to Israel and moved on, the latest news shows how pivotal the region is to anyone in the western hemisphere.

The aid ship, destined for Gaza, was attacked by Israeli commandos and many people were killed or wounded. The Israelis, as much as there is to admire in what they have accomplished since WW2, seem determined to hold the rest of the world at arm's length.
I hate to say it, but it reminds me of the behavior of a cornered animal, with fewer and fewer trees to climb.
There are certainly many people in Israel who still couldn't care less about world opinion, though I worry how much of a island any state can truly be in this age.
Having just been there, I know that this sentiment is not universal. But like the teabaggers here in the U.S., the loud, farting tail tends to wag the reasonable dog.


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LIGHT FROM JESUS' TOMB

RETHINKING MOTHER AND BABY

If we accept that the baby's will to be born is as much a part of the birthing process as the mother's willingness to have a child is, then abortion becomes more of a compact between two spirits and less of a unilateral decision on the mother's part.

Underestimating the presence of the baby's spirit in the birthing decision leads to a fundamental misplacement of the responsibility for that decision, making the mother the final arbiter.

A part of me says that the world is bigger and more complex than that.

An abortion, the curtailing of the pregnancy, can just as much be the spirit of the baby deciding that the time isn't right.

To my mind, that spirit does not choose to enter the corporeal form until the advantages of being born outweigh the disadvantages, as grave as they might be.

Life, as a series of hard knocks, may still be worth learning.

Granted, not everyone will agree with me on this or a lot of things, but my purpose is to probe the boundaries of possibilities and maybe stretch them, rather than watch one more sports event that I don't want to watch anyway.

I think that it's instructive to keep in mind, in the second book of Genesis, that.

"The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.".

That life comes after breath.

ROSELLA AS APPLE

I told Rosella that she is the apple of my eye, but that when we go away, I don't want her to become the apple on the tree.

When I look out any window now and I see rain and large green maples, instead of scrub and rock , I know that I am in Oregon and not the middle east, but my mind, and even my body because of the time lag, insist that it's not that easy to separate them from right now.

Life unfolds concurrently, and maybe not always consecutively.

Many people wonder about my trip, and I do, too.
Not so many 64 year old men travel this way.
"Did you ever feel threatened?" they always want to know.

They never quite believe me when I say "No".

There is a lurking suspicion that I managed to come back from the Holy Land looking like an old testament prophet and speaking in tongues, when all that means is not shaving, and saying words like, " trusting people, liking Arabs and Jews, traveling alone, wife staying home, not being afraid, all religions essentially being the same".

Incomprehensible.



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LIVING TOGETHER

A neighbor from our street, as I was getting coffee in Starbucks, came up to me and, before I knew what else to do, gave me a hug. Now understand, our family has a checkered history with her family, distantly, tight-smiledly polite, neighbor-ish.
I can put up with it, but Deb, when I told her about the hug, responded, "evil one".

I need some Israeli expertise to help me build a wall between our houses.

Distrust clambers about in the stones of the old city like a furtive rat.
Or the old neighborhood, for that matter.
The ability to live together, for all the ill will, somehow they can do it in Jerusalem and we can do it on Moss Street.

I am downtown, not a pretty place, but accessible to anyone; thin and fat people, wheelchairs and backpacks, hoodies and pierced ears, very young and loud, old and incoherent.
I know many people who never, and will never, come here. Better to think this world does not exist.
But downtown , because no one wants it , can be home to everyone.
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Location:W 10th Ave,Eugene,United States

HOW LARGE IS DEATH?

Death is a larger, less intense, more pregnant experience with potential than life which is more circumscribed, more blindingly devoid of choices but more difficult to see past.
As being awake is more circumscribed than the dream state.
I think everyone of us would admit that we don't know everything but that we, as people, are learning something new every second and that there is no real limit to our imagination. The only proscriptions are those that we place on ourselves.
If I say, "where is my mom right now?", is there any sense to the word now to somebody who has died?


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BACK TO THE MOTEL

Getting up early to walk to the DAC and finding no one on the streets, not a single donkey, not hearing a single call to prayers, not even anyone sitting on the curb selling grape leaves.
It is raining. I never saw that in Israel.

Ruminations are the chewing on lifes's narratives.

I went back to the motel where I left the little naked boy that I found running down the middle of the street at 4:00 A. M. so many weeks ago. A young Indian woman was only too willing to tell me how stupid she thought the parents were.
"Hello! They were out partying! What were they thinking? You want a baby, take care of the baby. I can't stand to see the way some of the people in this neighborhood treat their dogs, but a human?!! ".
From somewhere, she said, a grandmother showed up, very quickly, to get the child. So she assumed that they lived nearby.
I thanked her and she thanked me.

Reading David Brooks today in The Times, he posits the life of someone who "did all the right things, not doing the things he wanted to do, but the things he felt he had to do to live, and how, now, he feels cheated by the fecklessness of his society. ".
I say who gave this invented person any right at all to be born into a world where he would be surrounded by people who would always make decisions that would always be in his best interests?!
I just came back from Israel and Jordan where getting screwed from the time you wake up in the morning until the sun goes down on a world that does, in no way, have your best interests in mind.
Just to dodge the constant drizzle of bird droppings all day long counts as success.
Who in the hell does Brooks think he is and how can he presume to invent a man who has a right to be angry, and whose response then is to join with other people who hold themselves entirely blameless and who say that they choose to want no part of the "down" of the "ups and downs" of existence.
I find Brooks , his straw man, and the whole notion of self- righteous selfishness repellent.

Richard found me at the DAC and we talked long and hard about Israel and Jordan. He had been there not so many months ago. We had no trouble agreeing that Israel resembles the old apartheid South Africa all too much. Sadly, for a country that has accomplished as much as it has, to wound itself with the dagger of hatred, It's difficult to watch. Richard is even more bitter than I am, maybe because he's Jewish and takes it that much more personally.

Jerusalem belongs to the Jews until someone takes it from them.
They can hurry the process , or not.

20,000 miles ago and three weeks, I sat right here on this couch and wondered what I might find so far away, and now I sit here and wonder what I did find.

My brother called to say that the doctors have increased my mother's dosage of morphine and that he thinks that she is soon to go, but she seems to think otherwise. She is a tough old bird and I love her for it.
She has said so many time that she doesn't even want to be alive, to the extent that she has tried to commit suicide twice, that to be this determined to live only says that, ultimately, she is afraid to die. Afraid of what she will find when she walks through that door, though if you aren't sure of the existence of god, there's no point in worrying about hell.


This is about three hours later.
Mom died.
Bob just called me and, even though we knew that it couldn't have ended any other way, still it seems lonlier all of a sudden
It's really easy to look up at the big, white, fluffy clouds and the warm sun and imagine her spirit as free and part of all this light.
I called my sister Barbara, who was there when she finally let go, not easily, but at last. She had a desire to stick around and wasn't going to leave until she was assured that the time was right. Barbara told her that she was safe and then took this little moisture applicator, used to wet her lips with, and dipped it in some Pinot grifio and wiped her lips with it and she said "ok" ten minutes later.
What a dear sweet person.

Trying to put the last few weeks in perspective, I can only believe that my trip to Jerusalem and Petra is all of a piece with my mom' s passing on from this world and my managing to be a part of it.
Life is as strange as death.
I am a coin, a circle with two sides, life and death. Flip me and I live, flip me again and I still live. Flip me enough times and, at some point, I die. But again, continue flipping and I get another opportunity to live. And on and on, until, finally, This coin that is me becomes a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is infinite.




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EVERYDAY HAS A NARRATIVE

The restroom in the airport was really cramped, with me having a backpack on. I was trying to get out while a soldier was trying to squeeze by me, with a friend. The first soldier gave it up while I asked the soldier if his friend had to pee or,,, wasn't sure of how to put it, , and he said no, but he does have to blow his nose.

Everyday seems to have a narrative, when it starts and where it takes me.

That's what's so difficult about losing the last few day's writings. I lost the narrative and the days that went with it.

An idea seems so ephemeral, a slight mist over a morning landscape, all too easily dissipated by the breezes of time passing.

To write,

and then to be from the i-earth untimely ripp'd. Arrgh.

My mom died yesterday at 3:30 pm, after Barbara moistened her lips with Pinot grigio instead of water. She said, in effect, "I'm done" ten minutes later.

On some level or other, she felt safe to let go.

She lived in a nervous skin with nerve endigs on the outside. No longer. She at rest now.
I hope she passed on her will to live to the family line.
It hardly is a coincidence that this trip of mine to such a religiously centered place as Jerusalem, where death and the past are the warp, and life and the present are the weft of the fabric of the city ended with the death of my mother. It didn't start out that way; in fact, when I left she wasn't even sick.
As I visited her on her death bed, I told her that I loved her and appreciated that she waited for me, so that I could say goodbye.
She opened and then closed her eyes. I like to think that she heard me.


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MY MOTHER DIED TODAY

My mother is, was, a most wonderful and sweet human being, but it's even more mysterious than that, but I'm out of words.


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BACK IN OREGON

Back in Oregon.
I've been away long enough to be intrigued by the water simply falling our of the sky, unbidden.
To have come from the middle east, the land of miracles, we take this one for granted.

In every God I met
In Jerusalem,
I came to believe.
And not.

I came to believe
In every God
In Jerusalem.


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HUMANS LOVE TO PROCREATE

The world is experiencing a population boom. When a population expands, it is usually because conditions are conducive for growth. If humanity is growing than human life is finding itself in a propitious environment and is responding accordingly.
Humans want to be born.
Something good is happening.
For this time, the universe is encouraging humans to procreate.
Is it a sign of wishful thinking to imagine that the profiferation of births and the overall increase in population might be due to more, optimistic souls wanting to enter the physical plane? That they are being enticed by a generally ameliorating climate for spiritual improvement?
The plane of the physical offers opportunities for the working beyond karmic stasis.
Souls choose to be born, or not to be born, depending whether there are possibilities for movement towards ultimate unification with the Eternal Godhead.
Baby steps.
We all sometimes fall back, but we know, deep down, what we have to do.
And how we have to do it.
We have to get ourselves born.

But, on terms that favor our advancement spiritually.
And then we must make the most of every opportunity to grow.
We will, of course, have all the opportunities that we need to reincarnate but the joys of progress are so palpable that once one catches hold of the process, a certain impatience asserts itself, an impatience that, irritatingly, may make progress more difficult.

My mom is no longer fighting for her life but easing into death.
A woman from Oregon said that she was not so afraid of dying , but that she would be sorry to no longer be alive.

My brother (younger by a year) has decided to to have a face lift, lose weight, and have hair transplants.


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THE RELIGIONS OF SPORT

Working on this idea of a comparison between sports and religions.
-Primitive religions are like baseball teams , each team Is like a different city state with their own local religions : the Yankees, redsox, dodgers, all with their own pantheon of local gods: Derek jeter, Mariano Rivera, Nolan Ryan , and each fan wears the symbol, the jersey, of his or her personal favorite god and when city state fights another, their gods battle each other. Religions wax and wane as the fortunes of their gods do. Within each religion, every fan has a personal connection to one or another of the major gods within the world of baseball.
At some point, the religion of football comes out of the east, a different sport, more brutal, more primitive, more vigorous and proceeds to overcome the religion of baseball, sweeping all before it. Yet , while it manages to supercede baseball as a religion, on a deeper level it is still a religion based on local religions: Cowboys,Bears, Giants, Patriots, under the big umbrella Idea of Primitive Religion, with the same affinity for local gods: Peyton Manning, Bret Favre, Michael Strahan, et. al. as the religion of baseball.
Different but the same underneath.
Fans could have tie-ins with several different gods with no feeling of self conflict, and the gods didn't care.

The Jews did it differently. They organized themselves as a People. They did not have a personal relationship with god outside the context of themselves as a group. Yahweh, Sport itself, was their god and they were the chosen fanbase. They did not (or weren't supposed to) have individual idols before them. Sometimes they got seduced by the sports idols of primitivsm, ultimately they would come back to themselves as the People of Sport, the one god.
-Christians took the the primitive idea of participatory belief and the Judaic idea of the one true fan and combined it into the religion of the triathlon, where the fan is also the celebrant and each fan must establish his/her own personal relationship with the divine. It's instructive the the entire process starts with baptism. Everyone runs at their own speed. The fan and the adherent become one.
-Islam is golf. The People of the Book
The individual submits to the rule of Law. Worship takes place in the blinding light of Fairness. There is mo compromise. To cheat is to be condemned for all eternity. Bobby Jones is the Prophet and St. Andrews is Mecca.

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LEAVING FRANKFURT

Now I am in the plane from FrankfurT, on the way to Washington D. C. And then on to Jacksonville. To see My mother who is very sick, but anymore than that I don't know.
We'll see.
She has recovered before.
In any event, this trip to the Middle East is over and another trip is beginning.
I am now in Airline World, which is a subset of the real world.

Everyone keeps to themselves.

One seeks simply to emerge intact.



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I LET GO

Looking back I feel it was no so much that I got lucky , but that I trusted people, that I let go.


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PETRA TO TEL AVIV

Checked out of the hotel. Ouch! I think that when I booked the room I must have mistaken dinars for dollars. Way more expensive than I expected.
Waiting for the cab driver. He doesn't know what I look like and I don't know him. One more little bit of uncertainty.

That actually went remarkably well, but then Ahmad's father, the cab driver looks a little like me, to wit, short grayish-white hair and scraggly beard. Except that he doesn't have any teeth and I do, inshallah. He doesn't speak much English so it will be a quiet trip, at least in that sense.
Petra to Tel Aviv in one day, with a border crossing thrown in, plus transferring in Jerusalem. All with public transportation.
Unless he kills a few people on the way, two pedestrians , unbeknownst to them, having already escaped with their lives, we might make the Allenby (Kimg Husseini) bridge by noon. I can see why they say "inshallah " so much in this country.
I wish that this driver would stop waving his arms around and stay on our side of the road.
I can't tell if it's because of the heat that my palms are wet, or from abject fear.
In the middle of Jordanian nowhere , the engine stops for no reason.
I'm not sure I can adequately describe how desolate the landscape is. And the more often the car drifts to a stop and jerks to a start, the more desolate the landscape becomes.
Imagine Death Valley, and then imagine hitchhiking.
I suggest bad gasoline.
He offers " pompa? Like this" and holds up cylinder of some sort. Bad sign.
The engine continues to cut in and out, even at 140 kph.
Sweating profusely. Must be the heat.
We drift down from 140 to 2, and just before we come to a complete stop, the old beast kicks in again.
Back to 140.
At least , at 140 the motor has a longer time to rally before we reach 0.
Not sure if panic is yet in order, but sweaty palms sure are.
Still might just be the heat

Somewhat comforting to see that even down here, by the shore of the Dead Sea, the guy has cell service.

That people can live both I'm this country and also in Oregon amazes me.

We just coasted almost to a stop again. I dread coming to a complete stop. Which we just did.
I was wrong. There's no cell service.

I was wondering when it would be time to panic.

Now.

I remember that I left my passport in Petra.

Actually, this realization did not come to me at this point. First, I had to ditch this cab.
An old, old Toyota van, like we had years ago, a taxi even lower on the scale of taxis than the one paralyzed with me in it, stops to help us. This doesn't look like it's going anywhere waiting for the cab #1. I decide to bail. I pay the first guy something and agree to pay taxi #2 the remainder.
No one, remember, speaks English at all well.
I climb into this old bus, leaving taxi #1 fuming by the side of the road. I feel like this has probably happened to him before, witness the spare pump.
We them proceed to drive up into the hills delivering bags of pitta bread and a pile of plastic chairs.
I'm feeling very patient, stoic even.
This tax #2 then drops me on the side of the road, where taxi driver #3 tells me to get in. Deciding that I don't have much choice I get in.
For 20 dinars, i.e., twenty fingers and then pointing north down the road, we arrange that he will take me to the Allenby Bridge (King Hussein Bridge, depending on who you're talking to).

So, we are putting up the road when taxi #1 passes us. I still feel better where I am.
I'm even starting to think that I may be gettin pretty good at surviving the viscissitudes of off-piste travel.

That's when I remember the passport.

I stare out the front window, sitting among four Arabs who speak very, very little english. Fortunately, for me, they know a little bit more than they were admitting to.
Shy, maybe.
Using mostly nouns, I managed to get the idea of stupidity and no passport across.
Nothing much happened for a while. Between two fine fellows in the middle seat, I lean up between the other guys in the front seat, dodging all the fringe and medals ang icons hanging from the ceiling.
We drove on while I could only think of how we were moving in precisely the opposite direction from my passport. I could, at this early moment in the crisis, only imagine that I would need to return to Petra , many hours now behind us.
I could, feeling awfully alone, imagine only that I had to get myself out of this by myself. I couldn't see how it might be possible to get back to Petra and then return north again to reach the Allenby Bridge before it closed for the night.
In the meantime , the little bus putted along. I had said about all I could say to the guys around me, though they did seem to be talking among themselves. About me, maybe, but who knows.
At some point they pulled off to the side of the road. They got out and I did too. A big guy comes over and asks me in English what is the problem. I try to explain that I need a fast car to take me back to Petra and return. He says he can do it.

He has a brother who lives in New Jersey. Small world.
This will cost a lot. I know this and he knows this.
But have they found the passport? I feel like I want to know this before committing to this plan.
I ask to use his phone. We eventually get through and, yes, the passport's there and I explain my plan and the time problem and my new best friend in the world says they will send it up immediately by courier and meet me at Allenby Bridge in plenty of time and I am elated and I tell the man. He's not elated.
Vast sums just vanished from his plans. I say that I will pay him to take me to the bridge, but he's not happy.
I offer him more than the now short trip is worth, but I am not feeling sorry.
I realize that this has worked out so much better than I might ever have hoped, and I appreciate what he has done for me and I tell him so, many times.
He's not impressed but I get into his nephew' s car and head out for the bridge.
Omar, his nephew, leaves me at the entrance to the Jordanian border control and I give him a tip because I realize that uncle is going to take everything for himself. Nephew's a good guy and we shake hands warmly.

I wait in the Jordanian exit lounge a long time

Finally. The courier arrives with my passport. I board the bus to cross the bridge into Israel.

I meet these three german guys who just completed the Germany to Jordan car rally. 6000 K. The idea is to drive a car that is at least 20 years old, spend very little on food, bring something from every country you pass through, like a bottle of water, stay somewhere for less ythan 15 euros a night , and, at the end, donate the car to charity. Took'em 20 days.

I now have to get a mini- bus to jerusalem, cross the city somehow, get another bus to Tel Aviv, then a cab to my hotel, that is still only a distant dream but no longer a nightmare.

It's hard to describe what happens next, because it seems so improbable. I am asking if there is a taxi direct to Tel Aviv from the Allenby Bridge when this very pretty woman with the cutest daughter, an Arab woman in full head scarf, very stylish, walks up to me and says," come with me, we are going to Tel Aviv also. We can share a cab in Jerusalem."
I say yes without knowing what else to say. Her English is great, no mistaking her forceful offer.
My stereotyped image of arab women is that they don't talk to men outside their family.
Well, that opinion changed in about five seconds, though I am still not sure how this will work. We're not talking about a pick-up here, but rather a woman in charge.
Nothing is said as I and she and her daughter board the bus. As we prepare to leave and the driver asks where I am going, she, sitting in up front, turns around looks at me and says that we are together.
I must have looked puzzled because she smiles and says "trust me".
I has been a long day and my puzzler is sore.
"Well, okay, why not?", I think.

We reach Jerusalem. I grab her bag. She changes money. We get a taxi. She gives directions. I pay for us. She finds the bus. I grab her bag. We board the bus. She pays for us.

And off we go.

To extend the surreality, the Arab taxi driver speaks Italian to me all the way across Jerusalem.

Maybe the righter word is "magical".

So, we are sitting together on the trip to Tel Aviv and she tells me that we were in run-down east Jerusalem. I tell her that I know where we were because my first hotel was near there, the Alcazar. She not only knows it but her grandparents live nearby.
This kind of thing doesn't usually happen to me. Deb finds all kinds of connections with people, but me, not so much.
We talk about how difficult it is for her as a young woman, even with a baby, to travel without a man.
I feel useful.
Her husband comes from the occupied territories and can't come into Israel. They now live in Qatar. But she has to come back every 6 mos. to maintain some kind of residency relationship with Israel. She is a civil engineer, as is her husband.
For as much as bureaucracy and politics seem to impinge on her daily, she loves her life and laughs very easily. It's hard to understand why Israel doesn't want this family to be citizens.

She says not to worry about my mom, that Allah will care for her.

When we reach Tel Aviv main bus station, we run to catch her bus, with me dragging her substantial bag. We get them there at the last moment. They hop on and we wave, like real friends.
I head off to a cab to the hotel, out near the airport.

That's how i find myself sitting in the hotel eating Chinese takeout.

One of the most miraculous days in the history of travel!

Escaped from a nutty cab driver.

Found by a group of wonderful Jordanian hangers-about.
Rescued by Arab woman and her beautiful child.
Discussed Rome with an Arab cab driver speaking Italian.
It goes on and on.


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