InteGRATion into GRATeFULLness
Singing&Sounding keeps me Sound

Wie sehr ich mich muehte

Wie sehr ich mich muehte In Hingabe gluehte Das Herz mir verbruehte Auch jetzt noch oft wuete Voll Schmerz im Gemuete                                     Ich lebte doch nicht. Schau her, ich erbruete Als Frucht deiner Guete Erst jetzt meine Bluete Voll Liebe sie huete                                  Jetzt leb ich im Licht.

As much as I toiled and glowed with devotion and scorched my heart even now often rage with my soul in pain                 And yet I lived not. Look, here, I'm hatching only now my bloom as a fruit of your kindness, please guard it with love                      Now I live in the light .

The three of us on the veranda at Ramat-Hadar, with my 3 children in the background

Anke met Yanina, when she visited me in 1979. This was in Yanina's and my village, Ramat-Hadar, a year before I left my husband and left the village. While I've been wandering ever since, Anke still lives in Berlin and Yanina still lives in Ramat-Hadar

In my archive I found this accidental composition,
as if it prophesied,
that the two of us would become old and still be friends.
It shows Anke on the day we became friends,
and two old women in the graveyard of Bethel.
[I'm reediting this page on the day on which I'm editing a page of graves!]

It was in March and April 1959,
when I used the university holidays,
to work for two months in Bethel, the town of epilepsy-stricken people,
in one of the closed homes, called Kanaan.

The old women in the cemetery were inmates of Kanaan, where I worked,
while Anke was responsible for the female students' home, where I slept.
For Bethel is not only a town for the sick, but also a faculty of Theology, where Anke studied,
[as I did later on in that year, in the winter of 1959-60,
when antisemitism would hit me for the first time.]

During the first weeks of watching Anke in the hostel,
I was so awed by her beauty,
that I never dared to speak to her.
Still, when during the Easter days nobody was present but me and Anke and I had a free day,
I hesitantly asked her, if she wanted to join me for a walk before sunrise on Easter Sunday.
So we walked
in the Teutoburger Wald,
the two of us,
beautiful Anke and ugly (in my eyes) Christa.
When we came back to the hostel,
Anke slipped out of her woven skirt and gave it to me as a gift.
For years to come she reminded me of the girl in the Brother Grimm's tales, who gives away her last cloth,
but then, standing in the forest alone at night, in nothing but her thin undershirt,
stars fall from the skies like "Thaler" (dollars).
"Sternthaler" I used to call Anke.

That was the day of the covenant of our friendship,
March 29, 1959 - 48 years ago

Anke visits me at my mother's at Boeblingen, Germany, perhaps 1962

The only picture of the two of us together was taken in Acco, April 1960, when a students' group, in which Anke participated, traveled through Israel. Though I studied at the Jerusalem University for a year, I joined the group.

vmj Anke between 1959 and 2007

2007_07_06
Dedicated to Anke and Ansgar, her son, who took his own life

Anke and her three children, Ragnhild, Arvid and Ansgar Februar 1979

2007_06_25-"Ansgar ist gestorben. Diesmal ist es ihm gelungen, diese Lebensform zu beenden...eine Flut aus Licht und Frieden... ich sehe Ansgar in dieser Lichtfuelle, geborgen in dem Einen. Er hat Erloesung gefunden aus seiner Zerrissenheit und Ver- zweiflung. Und mir ist, als habe er die ganze Familie (die Generatio- nen zuvor) mit erloest. Sein Tod hat uns befreit von einem dunklen Bann...Ansgars grosses Leiden ... dass er seine kreative musikali- sche Begabung nicht so ausge- stalten und in die Welt bringen konnte...Seine Ergotherapeutin, die seine CDs kannte, hat zu ihm gesagt, er sei eine Reinkarnation von Mozart. Ich wuensche ihm, dass er nach einer Erholunsraumzeit im All-Einen eine geeignete Inkarnation findet, in der er nicht mehr Opfer sein muss, in der er vielmehr seine wahre Bestimmung voll ausleben und gestalten kann." AMEN

to former song to next song

Mika and her friends: "I want to know all the children of the world" Here she prevents Keshet (rainbow) to run towards the road with its cars. Mika and the World: Here she follows the TV reality series: A star is born The last event was too late for her to stay up. When - first thing in the morning - she asked me: "Who became the Star? " and I told her: "Diana!" she said: "I'm glad! I wanted her to win! But Ohad (one of the 3 finalists) --- he didn't feel hurt, did he?" Previous Composition 2010_09_21-22 Heaven-on-Earth "...Manifestation is meant to be a playground where being and playing are fun" [Godchannel]

In the morning of that Dancing-on-Chairs performance, Sept. 21, 2010, I brought her to kindergarden

Mika told her mother honestly: "Yesterday I and Keshet had to sit apart, since we had bothered [hitzaqnu] the other children" Grandma: "How exactly did you bother them?" Efrat: "Why do you ask her that, she will not answer." Rachel: "If you don't threaten her, she will answer, she loves analysis and clarity." Mika: "I was playing with Keshet in the house outside, and when other kids came (she mentioned about 5 names), we drove them away." "What house outside?" "I'll draw it for you!" and she ran to the drawing chest in my room. "If I'll be allowed to bring you to kindergarden tomorrow, you must show me that house!" I said. I was allowed and she showed me and demonstrated how they drove the kids away.

Inside the kindergarden I saw this pretty scene (with Mika to the right and Juli to the left)
A father of one of the boys, Gil'ad, read a story to the children who had already arrived.

What a contrast: Back in my family's flat, I had an appointment. A woman, Yael Agam, is doing research work on original Germans in Israel, some of them "Gerim" like me, who embraced Judaism, and some of them just citizens of Israel. Yael recorded, what I told. "You almost dont' need any questions!" she said with appreciation. But I had warned her, that once the clouds would start pouring, she had to take responsibility for stopping them and guiding me to what she most wanted to hear. The "clouds" felt some relief......

Still on September 21, 2010
[Though the following scenes occurred in the morning, I'm inserting them here,
since I wanted to free the previous page for the sequence of Mika's fun-making].

"I would like to photograph your eye!" I said, inspired by the picture of an eye on one of the days of the Gratitude Wave.
Both photos show Mika's right eye! But how different are the images!

Then she took the camera and searched for objects:
the door of the chest with lock, flowers and her knee.
And my cup with a straw next to our celotape device.

Mika's foot, photographed by herself and Mika's hand painted by herself The scene also reminds of one of my own creation: fragments of a novel The VICTORY of the DEFEATED, about Aisha, the Egyptian, and Azmiya, the Palestinian, written in Sept.Oct. 1974. I stopped writing when I felt the strength - in Nov. 1974 - to move from writing to acting.

Recently I started to re-read those old folio-pages, while sitting in the train from Beersheva to Lod, [from where Immanuel uses to fetch me, before he goes on flight on the day of my arrival]. The fragments could serve at least for the script for a movie! I therefore began cutting the huge pages in half, so as to photograph and insert them in "Cain&Hevel" I began this technical work , while Mika was immersed in re-creating her hand. Usually I don't do any work "of my own", when I am with Mika, but focus on savoring her Heaven-on-Earth, her zest-full-ness and her full-fill-ment, but in hindsight i find, that there might be a sign in the synchronicity of our two creations.

Later that day Mika returned to her hand once more, added a flower, added background and added seven stickers....

Yes, and then came a moment, where I saw her taking my scissors and stucking them into my blanket. I warned her and she let go. But I was shocked. The understanding came, when she said: "What are we going to do now?" This was the very first time in all those years, that I heard this sentence! So often - in former years - I saw Mika's mother worried: "She'll be bored!" and I always said: "Mika will never be bored." That's also the message of my song for her second birthday: "... in each moment she knows, what she wants, with zest and smartness she accomplishes and DOES." I said to her: "Now you can learn, what other people still don't know: when someone is bored, he tends to become destructive!" And I begged her to play the scissor scene once more "for the record". Then I suggested: "Whenever you don't know what to do, go - blindly - to places with your objects [hefetz in the Bible means mostly "desire"!] and then - blindly - grope for something. This something will give you an idea!"

On Yom Kippur, Sept. 18, 2010, I had been alone in my home at Arad, fasting not only from drinking and eating, but from any learning, doing, experiencing on the exterior level. I tried to tell a bit about that Yom-Kippur, with little success. Much later, on Sept. 27, 2010, Efrat told me, how - on Yom Kippur - Mika had amazed them with a story about a painter, who was totally unknown to her as to me Maurycy Gottlieb a very touching story, especially in the way Mika told it. The painting hangs in her kindergarden, and she must have heard the story there. "... he loved a woman, called Laura, but he was very poor, and the parents of Laura didn't want her to marry him. So he became very sick and died..." On this picture the artist, who let himself die at the age of 23, appears three times, as a child, as a Bar Mitzva boy and ?