THE BRAVE NEW LAND

This is my first blog post in over… a month, so we’ll have to cover some ground here quickly, but first, I just need to make clear that I have been struggling. Early on in this self-induced hiatus, I was even waking in the wee hours of the morning to an inevitable sense of irrational dread. At first I thought it might be about faith, but it wasn’t at all, as when I pondered this possibility, I came to realize that I seem to be fully cognizant of my place in the world and completely aware of ‘Who’ runs ‘it.’ I don’t know why, but I guess I just keep tripping on the rough edges, slipping ever downwards towards the ragged under-belly of… my perception of whatever ‘it’ is. If I were to have to describe ‘it’ somehow, I guess it would kind of feel like putting the last few pieces of a puzzle together and finding that there was more than one of the dang puzzle things mixed up inside the box. Now, when stepping back and trying to get a picture of the finished puzzle, I can feel the picture’

Quite often, when I sit down to write one of these blog entries, I swear under my breath, since my laptop is almost 10 years old and has become somewhat of a ‘hated’ machine. I purchased the thing from Costco (when they still had the return policy intact on computers), but ended up lugging it with me to Israel when I moved anyways. This computer has been through a lot. I used to strap it to my back, while pulling Cody, my three legged dog, in a Burley trailer behind my full suspension mountain bike (another antique that I still use) in Boulder, on my way back and forth to work at my custom cabinet shop. I never fell, but Cody did once. He tried to chase a prairie-dog and pogoed out of the trailer, but since he was leashed in with a harness, the trailer just flipped over on top of him. When I looked back, I thought he had snapped the leash and run away, since he was thoroughly hidden by the turtle-shell of a trailer, running along beneath the upended red and yellow thing that was now

Now that we all know that we don’t really exist (assuming that you have been following along), we can move on to more important things, like how we can have the most joy in life and how we can avoid the pitfalls of poor decisions. Yeah, sounds just like a parental lecture; doesn’t it? Actually, I don’t really remember too many of those ‘parental lectures’ growing up. In a lot of ways, I grew up in a vacuum (not a dust sucking machine, but the vacuum of space). I didn’t get the ‘birds and bees talk,’ for instance, until I had already been singing with the birds for a few years and had been stung by a few bees too... Maybe it was the radical difference between my parent’s generation and mine. After all, they may have looked like hippies, with their long hair, beard and ponytail, loose clothing, and general ‘free-love appearance,’ but, for all practical purposes, they acted like they were on the set of Leave it to Beaver. My dad, beard and all, even drove this great, custom VW van (real

 Space and Time: Finite Reality is Born into Non-existence... Having jetlag is like living in another dimension. I could swear that over the last week I saw rainbow trails in the air, as I turned my head this way and that. Often, my feet were behind me and reacted to my mind’s sluggish commands as if slung from a rubber-band-gun with all the sound effects reverberating in slow motion. I tried to work the day I returned from my emotion-filled flat-line adventure, only to find that it was like swimming under water fully dressed and wearing rubber galoshes. I know you have all experienced this—other dimensional feeling—whether from jetlag or other sorted endeavors; it reminded me of my youth, while exploring the cosmos from the confines of the straitjacket of physicality. It also reminds me of a few amazing occasions when I learned something about the Universe, while walking with a distant hazy view of the hills of Judea and Samaria, listening to Rabbi Ipod (R.I.P. Steve Jobs) an

After leaving my mother’s hospital bedside last week, I traveled south to visit my dad. I hadn’t really visited him since his funeral in October of 1996. We had some trouble finding his gravesite, as a marker was never installed… I sat on a bench, after finding the location of his grave, and talked to him about his wife, my mother. You see, she had decided not to be buried in their duel plot. She wanted to be in the mountains, closer to her ‘new’ life and her ‘new’ husband. I called her on the phone from the gravesite, looking out at the green fields covered with plaques and flower pots, and asked her again what she wanted to do if she was not to make it out of the surgery that she was due to receive in a day or two. I still don’t really understand her decision. Growing up, most of my friends, having come from broken homes, considered ‘my’ family the perfect family unit. I told my mom that she was going to have to explain her decision to Dad when she met him on the other side. I c

It is Wednesday and I am sitting in a hospital room in Fresno, California. I have been in Fresno for almost a week now, running around, trying to catch up on all the pieces that have been floating about and, yes, sitting. This is a really weird place. Everything is flat for miles around. It is hot like the desert, but has lots of agriculture spattering the landscape between hotels, run-down ranch houses, and fast-food restaurants. Everything is really big here too, which is probably similar to the rest of America; I just don’t always remember it until I get back here and experience it for myself. Even though I have been under a lot of stress as of late, being here feels like having a fogginess that has descended upon my head. It could be jetlag, but I don’t think so. It seems to me that with comfort, plenty of room to move and to breathe, and lots of space, personal and otherwise, we just tend to expand out and fill it all up, just becoming kind of spiritually-psychologically less co

The other day, as I was praying, I looked out the sliding glass and saw one of the Arab workers, building a wall for a neighbor, across the street. We caught each other’s eye and looked briefly at one another, but right to the core. I realized, in that moment, that a whole world of ‘hidden to the naked eye’ information was flowing between us. My Tallit (prayer shawl) was up over my head with only my Tefillin (phylacteries) showing from under it. I knew that this man, this Muslim who was working across the street, saw deep into the nature of what I was attempting to do, that I was attempting to commune with the Creator of the Universe. He, after all, believes that there is ‘one’ Creator of everything too. In the second that we locked eyes, a praying Jew in the Holy Land and an Arab construction worker somewhere in the Middle East, it reminded me of a story I heard once about how in the 1700’s, the Vilna Goan, Rabbi Eliyahu Kramer of Vilna, was accused of assisting a Christian in abandon

On Sunday morning, after an amazing bike ride through the Roman ruin covered hills by my house, I threw out my back while trying to get into the car to go work. I usually walk to work, as it is a nice 30 minute walk for me, but I got a late start, so my wife offered to give me a lift. I could barely sit all day long. I should have stretched a little I guess. Well, it could also have been the weekend warrior syndrome from the days prior to that morning’s ride, just being generally out of shape, maybe the looming UN unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, or it could have been the stress of my mom being in the hospital for the last few weeks. Looking back on it, I think it must have been all of the above. Last Friday, my back had ‘already’ started to bother me as we drove down south to visit my son at the base in Beersheva. At the time, I figured that it was because of being stiff from digging a hole with my younger son and his friend in the backyard (yes, weekend warrior syndro

I read that a 55 year old surfer died while surfing Hurricane Irene off of New Smyrna, Florida. He was found face-down, floating. He had hit his head, receiving a large gash, and was later pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital. Reading this article, I was reminded of a video that I once saw of a guy that actually made it on one of those hurricane waves in Florida; it is pure adrenaline to even watch something like that, much less ride it. Not that I could ever even consider it… but, there was that one time when I was a kid in California when I decided to take my 6’ 8” self modified pintail-gun out on a day that was way too big for me. You see, surfing becomes ‘kind of’ an addiction, causing a sort of deluded mental hysteria, and the bigger the waves, the more hysteria. Did you ever hear the word, ‘stoke?’ Yeah, that is just a buzzword for ‘adrenaline,’ as it pumps throughout your body, giving you a rush-buzz-stoke or whatever. The more your brain wants it, the easier it is to li

Well, this has been a doosie of a week, hasn’t it? Technically, of course, this week began on Friday with last week’s blog post; so, I’ll start there. When we woke on Friday morning, right up to our arrival in Beersheva two hours later to visit our son at the base, we weren’t sure that we would be able to even see him due to the terror that was afoot – well, unless you ask the United Nations, which will ‘not’ condemn the entire episode as ‘terrorism,’ after Lebanon's representative rejected the measure. He said that Lebanon would endorse a condemnation of the (terrorist) attacks if the council condemns Israel, as well, for killing the ‘terrorists’ who planned the attack. Um... isn’t that circular logic? Actually, I have no comment on that idiocy... But, no surprise there, really, since it is no coincidence that Lebanon – the only member of the Council that blocked the measure – is ‘itself’ controlled by Hezbollah, a Palestinian terrorist organization. By the beginning of the week,