How do you survive?
How do you sustain your practice?
Who is your audience?
How do you define community?
What matters to you as an artist?
What are your criteria for successful work?

-These questions are the ones we can't get around. They are awkward and difficult and absolutely necessary questions.
.
.
.
.
-These answers are, for now, present in my self

With Grace
With Care
Your listening heart
Reciprocal
Heart doing, feeling being
Time

Today in the Jerusalem post office I bought:

2 stamps for Europe
1 stamp for North America
1 stamp for Israel
1 stamp for Ramallah
…

“Ramallah…where is this?” Asked the teller.

“Ramallah. You know, Palestine? Occupied Territories? West Bank…?”

She looked at me.
She looked at the computer.

“No – it’s not in the computer” she said.

The Thorn in the World’s side

Where I have been there is no light
From any Sun; we have no Moon nor Stars,
No lightnings like these, much less any of this Fire.

There I must light up all around me.
By my sight all is illumined

(Ramayana, William Buck’s version)

…

At night, walking to the bus stand in Ramallah,
The ground beneath my feet shifted and undulated
Like a giant fish was swimming below the crust of the earth

(Below the cracked concrete
A giant fish rubs and scratches her scales
Helping to shift all perspectives)

…
I am, just for Now, willing to suspend my disbelief,
My fatigue and annoyance,
My doubt and my politics.

It is not negotiable:
Watching my cousin prepare for his bar mitzvah
Is watching the weaving of a thread of hope

I cried when my cousin Assaf stepped to the Torah
The beauty of the longing
The prayer…
It is real (even as the tourists photograph the men (my uncles) in their tiffilin and tallis)

The Word made to live again, lest we forget that the Spirit is real.
She is real
Ruah is there

This call for peace and awakening is in all the prayers.

This made me laugh as I slog through the density of info researching and prepping to tell stories, first in Ramallah then in Jerusalem, then for my cousin's bar mitzvah, then in the Negev :

"Jesus was a social justice, radical revolutionary Palestinian devout Jewish road warrior who rose up and challenged the job security of the Temple authorities by teaching the people they did NOT need to pay the priests for ritual baths or sacrificing livestock to be OK with God; for God already LOVED them just as they were:

feeling and perception
allowed for disembodied
presence -

despite invisibility
arahant remains

present inspiration
refuge of the age

body gone
heart dissolved
what is, is
.
.
.
revealed
...just for Now

This morning, bird songs
sunshine in the angles
the habit of frost, loosing its grip

May it be that all acts of
Love perpretated on this
night be magnified a
thousand fold

----

May it be that who lives
within the folds &
stripes of undying night
come out come out
to the light

----

May it be that respite and
requite
are given their
dues
tonight

_________________________

written sitting with self feb 14 '08

sangha takes the one seat
opens to presence
i am grateful

.....

(thoughts after sitting at home, knowing that folks had been sitting at the meme too....)