Sometimes I aspire to the kind of life lived by Sri Aurobindo, in his later years, or Ramana Maharshi, in his earlier years, i.e. mostly in seclusion and never venturing out into the world. Perhaps I’d just go on long solitary walks, read, or spend time in meditation. I’m invariably cheerful in my own company.
In the morning I took advantage of the cool weather to do some basic yardwork – weed-whopping, hedge trimming, lawn mowing and path blowing, all with various parts of the Stihl Combi, a kind of Swiss army knife for gardening.
Afterwards, D had volunteered to attend a hearing at the supreme court involving the village, so I agreed to join her. It was an interesting experience, but ultimately the whole affair made me feel unhappy, and I wish I’d stayed at home.
Meanwhile the capital was busy with the stupid nationalistic March of Flags – from the bit that I saw of it, it looked like groups of indoctrinated school kids, bussed in from various settlements.
In the afternoon I took a nap. D went to visit neighbours and I made myself a meal of rice, tofu and tomato sauce, seasoned with moringa powder, shoyu and Tabasco, washed down with Israeli Gold Star beer.
I read a bit more of Mondiano’s Cafe de la Jeunesse Perdue – I love the atmosphere of his novels.
I didn’t listen to any music today! Maybe that’s why I feel sub-optimal.
On my afternoon walk today I wore for the first time a pair of multifocal glasses that I just had made and picked up today. As anyone who has such lenses will be able to attest, the initial experience is a bit disconcerting, so walking out with them for the first time across uneven ground gave me a slightly drunk and giddy feeling. In addition, I was trying out some of my camera’s special colour effects and filters, so it was a special kind of walk.
Further along, I came across a lovely stand of wild fennel, with its wonderful golden yellow colour.
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.
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.
On the way back home from my late afternoon walk I met a fellow community member, B, who had just returned from Addis Ababa. I invited him in to tell us the story. He, his wife and daughter had been invited to Ethiopia for the wedding of G, who, years ago, they had taken into their household when he was a young refugee newly arrived from Eritrea. He had been at the time recovering from a gunshot wound sustained while crossing into Israel from the Egyptian border. Refugees were, at the time, at the mercy of dangerous people-smugglers – I’m not sure if he had been shot at by Egyptian soldiers, the Israeli army or the smugglers.
He fully recovered and later they managed to obtain for him asylum in Canada, where he started a business in Calgary. Recently, while there, he met another Eritrean woman in Ethiopia through video-conferencing, and they arranged to be married in Addis. Family members from both sides were present and finally B and his wife got to meet the mother of G (the former refugee). He said that it was a moving reunion for everyone, and a happy turn of events. G’s family background turned out to be quite different from what B and his wife had imagined. He said they were warm, friendly, caring and intelligent, and they felt quite at home among them.
Our guest showed us a film about fungi, a subject that is increasingly at the intersection between spirituality and environmentalism, as science learns about the way that fungi live and people become increasingly interested in the curative or psycho-active properties of some them.
The film (whose name I’ve forgotten) is interesting, though not great. It jumps, like many popular American documentaries, from one thing to another, without due analysis, leading one to suspect its credibility (perhaps unfairly). The narrators and interviewees are leading lights in the subject, fungi enthusiasts. Our guest said that he had been partly inspired by the film to try “magic mushrooms” himself: with favorable results.
I agree that the fungi kingdom or queendom, in particularly their mycelia, can be a material metaphor for what Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing. The way that mycelia facilitate the links and communication in the biosphere, such as between forest trees, is indicative of the cosmic interconnections between all “things”. And if it’s true, as the film claims, that the psycho-active properties of some fungi are uniquely suited for interaction with our neural synapses (I think that’s what they said), then this is a further indication.
On the other hand, this is just one of the manifestations of the way that the universe is wired. One finds similar connections at the molecular level, for example. In terms of the unity of consciousness, this remains only a metaphor for the transcendent reality in the material plane.
In our conversation, I told him that in meditation (as in life) I am not seeking new “experiences”. The truth (satya) of the unity of consciousness remains the truth whether or not we “experience” it.
His response was that I might be doing meditation wrong. With regard to ingesting magic mushrooms, he said that this has helped many people to have transcendent experiences.
From a vedantic perspective, however, these would still be merely experiences. Experience points to an experiencer. As long as we think in terms of experience, there is the illusion of separation. This is the very fallacy in which we are caught; a wrong-vision that is basic to our nature. I don’t think that adding new experiences, of the kind induced by drugs, can help us to be free of it. Ramana Maharshi would say that such freedom can only come through self-inquiry into the nature of the I that hankers after experience.
While I’ve never had any luck with self-inquiry, or resounding success with any other spiritual pursuit, I have at least understood the roads not to take – the directions not to bother with. This in itself is a net gain, because it leads me back to the only place that any transformation can really happen.
Tuesday was my last day at work, so I’m now officially retired. I sat with Ira again, explaining a few more of the responsibilities and departed the office in the early afternoon.
This was also Israel’s Memorial Day, which precedes its Independence Day which, because the Jewish Holidays extend from evening to evening, began at sundown. We currently have a foreign guest, so we took him to Tel Aviv to see the part celebration / part demonstration happening there, and were joined by H., first for a meal in an Italian restaurant.
It’s the first time in memory that I’ve visited any kind of celebration for the Independence Day, and H said it was the first time for her too. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Lots of children spraying foam at each other from cans that they later discarded in the streets, among other garbage left there – I guess there will be a massive clean up operation on Thursday morning.
This year the event was combined with the protest events that have been taking place for the last 3 or 4 months. Walking around Tel Aviv and joining the crowds, there were lots of opportunities to take photos, and I’ve already uploaded some of these.
In the afternoon I picked up from the local junction a Glaswegian photographer and sangha member doing a project over here (she sent the photo below from the bus stop at Latroun to make sure she was at the right one)
She joined us for lunch, while our grandchildren’s TV programs blared out from different screens. Then D took her to Hares (West Bank village) – a bunch of Israelis, most of them Buddhist practitioners, went there to join Palestinians for the evening iftar meal. They do this every year. It was kind of the last moment in Ramadan, since the moon has been sighted and Eid al-Fitr will begin tomorrow. I decided not to go this time – I generally feel uncomfortable on such occasions, for some reason that I don’t fully understand myself. I also didn’t go for the iftar celebrations here in our village. This was one:
Instead I went for a long late afternoon walk in the woods and fields.
On my walk I continued listening to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”, which I find really interesting. A completely different look at some of the same history and pre-history covered by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens.
(wild mustard flowers growing by side of the dirt road going down the hill)
I covered a lot of ground, both in the book and on my feet, and arrived home after dark at around 8:30, eating the leftovers from lunch time instead of the rich iftar fare: bit of salad, broccoli florets, half a pita, ball of labaneh with za’atar, and beetroot soup.
