A night I cried

Watch the video clip and then read the memories it evoked in manofesto:


When I did this the first time I think I fainted and only "woke up" when the parachute opened. Despite the fact I was pushed out of the plane like a sack of wheat I'm still terribly proud of it, for me it helped to somehow establish my manhood.

However once we landed after a night jump near maaleh Tzeh-aylim I was so tired from nervous exhaustion (we had been sitting on a runway almost the entire day, almost immobilized by our heavy packs and parachutes, waiting and waiting for night to fall and the mind trying to avoid the fear) I had no energy left for what was to follow. Somehow I had been given the body of a Browning 0.5 heavy machine gun to carry on my back (someone else had the barrel and other people the ammunition boxes, which were heaviest of all, I think 14kgs each and I remember someone carrying two of them. My Browning weighed about 13-14kgs, and with my galil and machsaniyot (magazines) and two litres of water and helmet I suppose I was carrying around 22kgs. We began this endless walk on a plain and then reached a steep cliff like ascent which required hands as well as feet to scale. My back and shoulders were aching and it was quite clear to me i couldn't or wouldn't do it. I felt is was unfair that I had been saddled with this elephant on my back, and complained to anyone I could, although many others in the retek gdudi were busy with their own troubles - heavy tripods for the browning, mortar bases, ammunition boxes and the other unnecessary paraphernalia of manouevres and war. I decided that once again Ttzahal (the IDF) had set the bar to high. If they wanted bits of iron manhandled up cliffs in the dark, they could do it themselves.

I asked to be relived of my increasingly crushing burden, concerned at any moment I would keel over and go crashing down the mountain side. No heroic thoughts urged me to stoicly scrabble on up on all fours (which is pretty much what I had been reduced to doing) and not burden some other poor soldier with my trouble. All I wanted was for someone to take the #$%$^ thing away. As a rather soft and protected child it was hard enough for me to conceptually swallow climbing up a rocky hill face in the dark but ok, I had put my hand up for the IDF and so I'd climb the bloody hill...but not with an impossible weight on me which kept on pulling me back and down into the desert air and the plain now seemingly far below.

At a certain point, after my requests that someone else take it "for a while", (as I disingenuously phrased it) had been ignored. and I had been assigned one or two assistants to push and pull me, my legs, already trembling uncontrollably from fatigue, simply turned to jelly and I keeled over and burst into tears. How the not so mighty are fallen! If only the enemies of Israel could see who Tzahal has as their recruit they would immediately attack. I lay there on my stomach, unable and unwilling to move, quietly sobbing "ani lo yachol, ani lo yachol -I can't, I cant". A fine figure of the reborn Hebrew soldier I must have cut. Fortunately if I had been ashamed - and I don't think I was I would have used and subterfuge to get rid of the paralysing weight - it was lessened by a few problems other people were also having. Some of the retek gdudi had sprained ankles, or worse, when they landed, and so other people had had to take their packs and were struggling with them. There were lots of kus amaks and ben zonahs filling the air, and the retek gdudi/chativati seemed to fall further and further behind the main column, and even the officers were cursing the batallion and brigade commanders.

Someone organised that the Browning be taken from me, perhaps given to a "younger" (i.e 19 instead of 22) and sturdier soldier made of sterner stuff than I. I can't remember if I was given something lighter to carry - like a 60 mm mortar or something...but having the browning of my back felt like having my mobility restored and my legs and arms untied. I wobbled to my feet and began climbing again, in the dark, following the soldier in front of me.

I think we walked almost the entire night, through mist and forests that appeared out of nowhere, perhaps passing a Beduin sitting cross legged and silent in front of a few glowing coals (tho this might have been on another occasion) and the gaps between soldiers grew wider and wider so that when day broke, I imagine we stretched out for several kilometers. We plodded on like donkeys (or at least I did) until eventually we came to water trucks and batashiot or whatever they were called...signs that this ordeal was over. Or perhaps we had to bed down in defensive positions and languish there in the desert sun....I remember shade netting and orders to drink so as not to get dehydrated, but I may be conflating several different maneuvers

But to return to the night jump: I could not believe that after pushing us out of an airplane in the dark they were not ready below with medals and hot chocolate. That they actually expected us to walk as well for tens of kms in the dark carrying impossibly heavy loads...my pathetic indignation was almost as great as when, in my early forties, I discovered I was supposed to earn a living.

Give us this day our daily Guru

It would be very useful to me - and possibly to "others" - if my living Gurus - for example Gangaji, Byron Katie and to a lesser extent Isaac Shapiro and Eckhart Tolle - could post videos of themselves not on the Satsang circuit, helping people during retreats and in carefully groomed contexts, but from during their daily round. For example

at the bank
in a traffic jam
dealing with a plumbing problem or a problem plumber
at the dentist (Isaac says he asks the dentist not to use anaesthetic of any sort)
interacting with very young babies and very infirm people and with mosquitoes, cockroaches and/or bad migraines
trying to find a parking place at, and in general, negotiating airports and modern travel

seeing these being handled might be even more helpful to me than helping people find out who they are, it might even point me towards what I truly am.

Also could I please see you working not just with the worried well but with psychotics, drug addicts, neo fascists, Down Syndrome and low iq people....or must they wait for another lifetime?

A Man is a Home

See also poems 2012-5772 and sulam yaakov

Above the village of Koke
sits Moimango
watching over his people
sometimes his son
Gematsu
now also old
comes to pay his respects
in Moimango's abdominal cavity
rodents have made their nests
on his toes and fingers
lichen goes
his head nods forward
around his people
the jungle grows

__________

Island

The rain forest

picabeen palms and giant ferns

perfumery of

eucalyptus woodland

and rolling coastal heaths

shimmering with wildflowers

that make soft the hardest gaze

are all the children

of mycorrhizal fungi

that send their slender threads

into the golden sand

and gently pry

from silicate fists

the building blocks of life

______________

bubbles of regret

like soggy spears

well up, wrench me

if only I had made something of myself

if only some one had told me at 30 or 35 that money counts

more than almost anything

and that as you age no one cares about anything much

except that you pay them for services rendered

______________________

Stuck in the cellar
of late capitalist consumerism
and internal contradictions
and running in circles
to be able to look my children and wife in the eye
sometimes the best I can do
is stuff electronic notes into virtual bottles
and set them adrift
on the faceless book

Why I use the term "Nazi's"

When I refer to Germans during the second world war I call them "Nazi's". I don't use the term "Nazi's" in order to absolve ordinary Germans of their role in supporting, abetting and in many cases implimenting the slaughter of Jews, Romanys, Homosexuals, Poles and Russians, but to differentiate between the Germans of that era who were imbued with the leadership sanctioned resentments of Nazism, and the Germans who preceded them and who came after tham and have nothing to do with the Holocaust - indeed other peoples - such as the Turks who have never acknowledged or owned the Armenian genocide - have much to learn from German reparations and legislation since the war.

And on the topic of Nazi collaborators and the current upsurge of Holocaust revisionism in the baltic countries:

Does a person
falling into a mass grave
like the tree in the earless forest
make a sound so feint
that after six decades
it cannot be heard at all?

What Hurts?

Of course thought takes you to a place of hurt, so as sages and clear see ers have always said it is our thoughts that hurt us. What thoughts about the Holocaust hurt? Not that six million were murdered in one way or another, because they would have died anyway, as must all flesh and blood, and who can say what time is right to die....so it cannot be their dying that hurts. Rather it was the hatred, resentment, agression, madness that underwrote the shoah that hurts (me)....

the murders were just the manifestation of that blind hatred which stripped Jews and others of their humanity....a hatred which appears to be resurfacing....and what is hatred but displaced psychic energy....and what about that hurts me.....whre dos it all start from? from the notion that we are body? that what we are is woundable? that this world of discreet manifestation is all that there is?

Beyond the person

The 91 year old mother of a friend of mine recently died, or left her body as we say. She had been born on the island of Corfu, where she learnt Italian, and grew up in Egypt where she learnt English, French and presumably Arabic. She then went to live in Israel where she and her partner spoke English (of a fashion) at home - their common language as her partner was from Poland. They came to Australia from Israel in the 1960s.

This woman had dementia, and as the dementia worsened, she reverted to speaking to everyone in Italian, (the later and more superficial layers of her being peeled away...? I have noticed this with my dad, who is reverting in some ways to his earlier identities, without the layer of religiosity which got added in his fifties.)

What is interesting is that my friend's mother went into hospital with pneumonia, had a horrible time of it, (as chronically ill people often do have in hospitals) and emerged far more lucid than she had been for years. She decided she did not wish to continue to live (in/with a body) and refused to eat or drink til she died.

This tale is similar to accounts of devotees of Ramana Maharshi, such as Major Chadwick and S. Cohen and Maurice Frydman, who had all become incoherent but suddenly "emerged" to make clear statements about the true nature of their being before the body died.

Invention dumber lebenty seben

Having trouble keeping floppy adolescents upright? Are you a parent whose child flops on you in shule? R U a teacher who faces rows of slumped adolescents staring blankly at their forearms or school jumpers. We have come up with a cost effective solution, Presenting: The teenage hangar:


We did not have a teenager to model the device readily available ( we could not get them off the computer) so instead we used a more rigid stand-in (forgive the pun), but one which nevertheless should give customers a good idea of the potential of the new device.