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.
I have the house to myself as D has gone up to Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee for a personal meditation retreat with Hagit. I was invited but didn’t feel like being in the proximity of thousands of Israeli weekenders. Although Tabgha itself is a more private place; it’s mainly a Christian pilgrimage center.
I do enjoy these weekends home alone though, and if I want to get out, there are lovely walks in this season. We had three days of rain now, which should bring lots more flowers. The poppies were the big surprise this week, and I took lots of photos of them.
Around the house, I have plenty to do if I feel ambitious – trimming hedges, which shoot up quickly in the springtime, and planting some lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora), which in Hebrew is called “Luisa”. From Wikipedia, I see why: it is named after Maria Luisa of Parma, wife of King Carlos IV.
D also booked a plane ticket yesterday to the UK, to visit neighbours / friends who are spending a year there. I probably won’t be joining her for that trip either. I don’t want to fly frivolously anymore, going somewhere for the hell of it, just for a few days. Unfortunately, the Europeans still seem to be encouraging lots of domestic flights with tickets that are cheaper than equivalent land transportation. Such flights should be taxed to a level that make it less worthwhile to fly. Trains and buses could be subsidized with the income from taxing flights.
I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There’s more to do.
Afterwards we went out to a plant nursery to buy mainly flowering plants for pots + fertilizer for the lawn and the citrus trees. We noticed this year that the skin seems to be growing thicker and thicker on the oranges and gratefruits, and this apparently indicates a need for potassium, in particular. We got some organic fertilizer and resisted the advice to get a chemical to treat the crinkling of the leaves. Similarly for the bit of lawn, I didn’t get the fertilizer that has insecticide built in. I don’t want to be responsible for killing the critters or harming birds.
VPNs
According people who understand these matters better than me, VPNs are becoming almost a necessary feature for privacy on today’s web.
I have been experimenting with some of them lately. I started with Njalla. It worked well with MXLinux, I activated through a script in the terminal. The cost was, if I remember rightly €6 per month for one device, and it was not possible for me to choose a local server.
ProtonVPN has both a free and a premium plan. The premium version costs about the same as Njalla, but is for 8 devices. There are servers all around the world, so I was able to find a local one. Linux support is through a dedicated gui app. However I found the app to be buggy under MX Linux / KDE. After I got rid of it, I had a hard time getting back into the Internet. The app works fine in my aging Samsung phone however – it’s still working there, till I cancel the subscription.
Now I’m trying Mullvad VPN – I came upon it by chance since I have started to use Mullvad browser. This also has a Linux GUI app for Linux, which works well for me, so far (2 days). It costs about the same as the others, and is good for 5 devices, which would be enough for all our computers and phones. Like ProtonVPN, there are servers around the world, including local servers that we can use. The speed seems fine.
Mullvad browser
Mullvad browser is a new browser produced by Mullvad VPN company in cooperation with the organization behind Tor browser. After reading a review on it in The Verge, I am giving it a try. So far it seems quite usable; like a slightly downgraded version of Firefox. One noticeable “feature” is that the actual size of the browser window is smaller (evidently they are trying by this means to standardize the canvas size, which is one of the things that trackers use in order to establish a unique browser fingerprint). There are also no sync options, and the addition of addons is discouraged. I will probably use it in conjunction with my other browsers.
The country
I haven’t been listening too much to the depressing news. My assumption is that it is in the interest of our wise leaders to create a fracas or maybe start a little war in order to distract people from the other harmful stuff they have been up to. Nothing unites the (normally divisive and polarized) Israelis better than a healthy reminder that it is surrounded by enemies. Starting a minor war offers a win-win situation. You can easily start one by sending border police into the Al-Aqsa mosque to beat everybody up, raiding Syria night after night and then bombing Gaza again. Everyone will feel sorry for the Jews cowering in their shelters over the holiday. The people will unite against external threats that are, with a stretch of the imagination, just real enough to be believable. After weeks of warnings about the dangers of Ramadan, it seems that the holy month got off to too quiet a start.
Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I’m getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.
Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn’t enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).
Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn’t make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta’s book, through which I’m still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.
It’s almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.
That won’t help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I’m not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.
In the early 2000s when I began to use Linux, a lot of things seemed a bit experimental and iffy. I would install and reinstall distros and software. Nowadays I feel that it is generally more stable, and there are long periods when everything works just as it should.
But occasionally things still go wrong. After installing a new version of Darktable photo editing software in a flatpak, the application started to crash. The problem was with the database – I hate databases; they so often seem to be a source of problems. I’ve now gone back to an earlier version of Darktable and hope that it will be quiet.
In between, I learned a bit about another photo editing program, Lightzone, which seems to be simpler and doesn’t have a database – a plus, from my point of view. But still something wasn’t right – there’s always a learning curve.
I think a better solution to these matters could be not to require elaborate photo editing software at all – my new old Fujifilm X10 is capable of producing good results that do not need editing – other than cropping and rescaling – which I can do adequately and easily in XnView.
I have been having other software issues as well, with both the fediverse servers I use. Epicyon didn’t work for a couple of days, and now the site won’t open again. Hubzilla has suddenly stopped allowing me to add photos to albums that I create – probably a file authorization problem that has come since upgrading to a new version.
I think the solutions to these problems are probably not too difficult – but they will take time to identify, and I ask myself whether this is something I want to continue dealing with. My blogging software is so much more simple and trouble-free. “Simple and trouble-free” is irresistably attractive. Social media software is better for repeating or linking to posts and images that have already been published in my blog, while following others who have interesting posts. I’m not sure that I really need to run a server at all for that.
Figure 1: Seen on the internet
My current blogging software is a simple Lisp program created in and employing emacs. The photo gallery software is another small php program that doesn’t depend on a database. I didn’t create either of these programs, but the possibilities for something to go wrong are slight, and the system is fairly secure, since anyway the whole caboodle is uploaded from local files. Still something went wrong the other day, after a Chromium update. The blog began to use a wrong font. I solved the error by changing the font’s file-name from a *.woff to a *.woff2, if I remember rightly. That wasn’t too painful.
Back from the US to the turmoil of this Jewish-Israeli intifada, which is only getting worse. With this people and government it’s like the cliché about when an irresistable force meets an immovable object. So far neither are giving way though the government is showing more signs of stress than the people on the streets are showing signs of despair.
I’m jetlagged – should be asleep now. Besides the change in time zones, there have been two daylight saving time switches: first in the US and now here.
I went for a walk with my new old camera on Thursday to learn more about it. I’ve posted a few photos. Spring is about at its peak here now and the greenery is lush, with more rain predicted for the weekend.
I am in the US for the last ten days. I came over because my brother was in hospital. He drove himself there just in time, in the middle of a heart attack; collapsing on the hospital floor. They gave him CPR and snapped him back, and, in the following days performed catheterization and angioplasty. However, he suffered another three cardiac arrests afterwards at the hospital, where he also needed CPR. I arrived just before they installed a device called an Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which is considered necessary in order resolve a problem known as arrhthmia, where the heart is not able to maintain its normal rhythms.
After this last operation, he has been all right. He was released a few days later with mainly bruises to show following the various procedures they administered. They sent him home with about 16 medicines, some of which he is supposed to take temporarily for a few days afterwards. He must change lifestyle habits that contributed to his medical emergency. The question, as always, is whether he will succeed.
In the early few days of my stay I stayed at a motel, then at an Air B&B within walking distance of the hospital. Afterwards I came to stay with my brother at his one bedroom basement apartment. We’ve been having long conversations. I think that a person that came so close to death but survived must have a reason to go on living. To place this in a spiritual frame, if someone almost died but has returned, there must be further karma that they need to work out in this life. My suggestion to him is that he will try to discover what more he needs, or desires, to further accomplish.
His life-long interest has been photography, and he has given me an old camera, which I have been trying to study, with the help of YouTube and other sources. It’s a Fujifilm X10.
Anyway, he assures me that this is the kind of camera that I have been looking for. Despite being released several years ago, it still gets excellent reviews. People recommend it for the type of photos I like to take: nature, travel, streets, self-documentation. It’s small and tough enough to take anywhere, which is basically what I want – so I’m hopeful and eager to get out with it. The camera I’ve been using, a Panasonic Lumix DMC ZS45, developed a problem of dust within the lens or sensor, which leaves artifacts on the photos. Fixing it will be expensive, so there is a question of whether it’s worthwhile. But I never really liked the results that that camera gave me. I like mainly its size and tiltable screen. Anyway, I’m glad I’m not buying another new camera, fresh from some factory in China.
