hodayot [thanksgivings] for today

9:04
My Body, my Partner, my God
I give thanks to our nose with its 300 receptors,
for identifying 300 smells and aromas
and also for providing an alternative path for breathing.
I believed, there were 2 eyes, 2 ears, 2 hands, 2 feet, but 1 mouth.
Now I see, that for breathing, - the one function,
without which I would not live longer than a minute, -
there are also two organs - how wondrous!.

I give thanks to the dictionary of "Babylon",
which allows me to stick to my self-limiting way of sculpting
in a language which is not my own,
and which therefore forces me to think of every word,
and to often struggle with finding words for concepts,
which do exist in one language but not in another.

I give thanks for a good idea I had while walking to the pool:
Calling her to wipe away any remnants of uneasy feelings
which may have stayed with Efrat after I left Shoham,
by thanking her for what she had "bequeathed" to me:
the delicious pie, the fruit-salad, the enriched cream,
which she had made for the Eve of Shabbat with Micha's family,
and for the orange cloak,
"which Immanuel hates, since I wore it during my post-natal depression",
and which - when the stove burning spirals are not enough to keep me warm -
wraps me so comfortably.

Late at night I hit upon an interview in Channel 2
with the actor Mohammad Bakri
about his father Saaleh Bakri.

Back in 1984 I saw the movie, which made him famous:
"Beyond the Walls", 1984

The sadness I felt after that interview is still with me.
In 1948 Mohammad's father was 16.
Israeli soldiers rounded up the people of his village Bi'ine, in the Galilee,
women and children apart, old men apart, young men apart.
A commander asked,
if someone would volunteer to bring drinking water for the people.
4 young men volunteered.

They were shot.

Simply shot.


Ever new atrocities come to my knowledge,
but my eyes have been opened to the fact,
that the perpetrator is within each of us,
for each of us is a ray of the one sun,
a wave of the one ocean,
a color of the one light.

In writing this now - trembling all over, with tears in my eyes -
I remember, that some hours before
I had seen a short report in the cultural magazine of 3Sat
about the only opera of Robert Schumann called: Genoveva.
The production by Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Zurich Opera House
wants to show this:
that each and everybody can become a perpetrator.

Mohammad Bakri seems to be ignorant of metaphysics and the fact,
that we all must "become parental" to our lives and destinies.
He is so frustrated with the world,
with Palestinians and Israelis alike,
that he seems to have wanted to shorten his life more than once.
"I have one dream only,
that after 60 years Israel will say about 1948:
"slikhah~~~~ ta'inu" - "We are sorry ~~~ we were wrong".
If they could say that, the entire Arab world would make peace with them,
the peace I've been waiting for all my life , but it has never arrived."

I've experienced the power of such asking for forgiveness:
After "The Coastal Road Massacre" in 1978,
"Partnership" invited Jews and Arabs
to Father Elias Chacour's village Ibellin,
for a workshop where we trained
how to mutually acknowledge our pain...

Nourishment from Others

"Born to be God" in SEEDING COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS ON EARTH

This, too, is from Jean Hudon's compilation, sent to my e-mail on Febr. 17

I'm ashamed to admit,
that I only now found out, that Jean is a man, not a woman...

I resonate with the excerpts I'm quoting here,
except for the use and misuse of the word "spiritual"!

…. But the odyssey of learning every possible shade and nuance of what conscious awareness can encompass is what makes the Universal One in us happy to Be. Being the All Seeing, sensing all that can be sensed, touching with our mind's grasp every single aspect of experiential knowing is what makes the heart of Omniversal Creator in us throb.