Aligning with Grace

I took this picture in Dachau last year. It was such a haunting experience and I have thought of my time there over and over again. It was profoundly moving. And while the focus of that trip was something totally different - this is what I think of the most and it is what haunts me. A friend of mine told me her father had been held there. I cannot imagine what that must have been like. Since then, I have read many books on the need for ancestral healing and how the wounds of one generation are passed on to the next and the next... I felt compelled to thank the guide I had for teaching countless others about what happened in that camp, so that we would never forget. I asked myself then, how could this have happened? But the truth is, I knew. And we all know. And yet it continues to happen. Like many, I am profoundly affected by what is going on in Israel and Gaza. I am also very concerned about all of this escalating into something much bigger. I have many friends who are Jewish. And I ...

This month is just about over, and I can't for the life of me, tell you where it went! I had a lot of goals and projects, and while I took care of some minor ones, it seems I hardly made a dent on my list. Perhaps it is the heaviness that seems to permeate so much on the planet right now - war in several places, including the conflict between Israel and Gaza, which I visited, just over 7 months ago. Even then, I was very much struck by how two people co-existed in the same, very small area - and were literally invisible to one another. The tension was palpable. I wanted to take them both by hand - the Jew and the Muslim - and say to them: "Here, look at each other! You share the same land and ancestry! You are children descended from the same man - Abraham!" There is also the matter of the planes recently shot down from the sky, particularly the one over the Ukraine, so many innocent lives needlessly taken. It just does not seem to be to me the kind of summer I had ...

I move slowly, quietly, mindfully, and deliberately - after returning from the trip of a lifetime. I journeyed far and wide to Jerusalem, the Holy City, arriving on the Sabbath, and leaving it on the Sabbath, to return to my own city, on a long and lonely journey home... I arrive at a city that has shut down for the night. It is unusually quiet, but I do not know that it will not remain that way for very long... I travel to this city that somehow remains in suspended animation - out of place and and out of time - a city of contradictions - sacred to three faiths, all known as the People of the Book, all three quarreling with each other, like siblings and cousins that cannot get along... In the morning after our arrival, my two traveling companions and I make haste to the Old City, arriving at Jaffa Gate, passing the occasional Orthodox male in his kipa, a skullcap and Tallit, or prayer shawl - on his way to prayer. The city draws me in and devours me - it feels so fami...

As I pack for my first trip to Israel, I try to pack as lightly and as consciously as possible, especially in a day and age when you are charged for every little thing!  Traveling makes me anxious, and it is nothing like it was back in the '50's and '60's, for those of you who can still recall that time... Travel in our current day and age makes me feel like an animal hauled and caged in a cattle car. Traveling truly deprives those but the very rich of any dignity at all. Still, it is a necessary evil to be endured if one is to go anywhere and see anything... And while I may fret about what to take and what to leave behind - often leaving behind what I most needed, and taking what was truly not necessary - there is one thing I never lose any sleep over and that is what to wear on my feet. I have a pair of Merrell's that I have taken everywhere for nearly the entire past decade - or, at least some incarnation of that pair. I have walked Paris, and London - and ...