Machsoum

I brought the Palestinian workers from the “machsoum” (army checkpost) in the morning at 6:15 as Tuesdays is the day I volunteer for that. They go back in the mid-afternoon but one of them, Issa, stayed behind to do a bit of side-work, gardening for my daughter, and I took him back at 6:15 in the evening, exactly 12 hours later. And that on a day that the temperature got up to 36°.

Actually community gardening was my job for a few year’s, when I was Issa’s age. In the summer I would start at dawn, take a long break from around 11:00 and then work again in the late afternoon. Issa said he also took a break today, so it’s not as if he was working for 12 hours.

On the car journey back, I listened to an episode of Anita Anand and William Dalrympl’s excellent “Empire” podcast. This one was about the Vikings. It opened with an unusual discovery, a bauble found at a Viking site in Derbyshire, UK that originated in India. Also present at the site were victims of human sacrifice, who were probably slaves. It turns out that the Vikings, besides their more well-known exploits, were involved with trade along the silk road and also traded in slaves throughout all the countries they visited.

The origin of the English word “slave” is “Slav”. The Vikings were using the system of European rivers to make it as far south as Byzantium and maybe further. When it was not possible to travel consistently by river, they would haul their boats, or maybe slaves would haul their boats, from river to river.

The Anglo Saxons too kept slaves, so the Vikings weren’t special in that.

One of the few surviving accounts of the customs of the Vikings comes from an Arab source – he witnessed their social life and ceremonies, and wrote about them.

Everyday, I learn something new.

Pronunciation

Dancing lights caused by moving camera, at airport

Reality

Mindfulness retreat

Returned from a mindfulness retreat at Kibbutz Inbar, near Mghar, in the Galilee. It was restful, and fairly intimate, with about 30 participants in all. I didn’t photograph the retreat itself, but went for a walk this morning and took some photos on a walk around the kibbutz and nearby.

more photos

Veganism

In the early 2000s, when I first visited Plum Village, the mindfulness practice community near Bordeaux, it was vegetarian. In some of the meals they would include eggs and dairy products, then, as a response to climate change, Thich Nhat Hanh and the community members decided that Plum Village would observe a vegan diet. That was how the retreat I just attended was also conducted. As someone at the end of the retreat calculated, that was 360 delicious meals prepared without the use of animal products.

I learn from Greta Thunberg’s new book (“The Climate Book” that “shifting towards a plant-based diet could save us up to 8 billion tonnes of CO2 every year. The land requirements of meat and dairy production are equivalent to an area the size of North and South America combined.”

Thich Nhat Hanh was a little ahead of the mainstream in his understanding and adaptation to the climate emergency, but actually, the book that first turned me on to vegetarianism, after leaving my parents’ home in the ’70s, was “Diet for a Small Planet”, which was written in 1971 by Frances Moore Lappé. That was really far ahead in its promotion of a vegetarian diet for the good of the planet.