Baruch's Blog

Last night I dreamt over and over (waking up, going back to sleep, to the dream) about my mother's murder. I wasn't dreaming of the actual event but of her being missing, finding out she'd been killed, and feeling powerless and enraged. Over and over. I woke up feeling sad and heavy.

I read, a couple of days ago, about a bomb, which came out of Gaza and killed a woman. I thought about how tragic that was, and all the other tragedies, the daily deaths in Gaza, all equally tragic. I wrote to a friend who lives in Israel, what will it take for people to learn? Her response, that we are learning and that love is the answer, rings true. I believe it.

What is belief? A mental construct of reality, a lens through which to perceive, a set of guidelines that we use to determine trajectory and behavior. Belief, as a human activity, is and has been the basis of our species' path for thousands of years, whether we call it religion or ideology. Now we are on the brink of self-destruction. Through our heedless actions we bring about the daily extinction of life forms on earth, climate change continues to accelerate, cultures clash and a minority ruling elite continue to amass resources at the expense of the non-elite majority.

I travel and teach love, joy, personal empowerment, connection with spirit and self, belongingness. I believe in all of it. I feel good when I teach it. I see others feel good when they work with these ways.

Here in this quiet valley, in this stone village which has stood for hundreds of years where people have been growing food, making olive oil and wine and cheese, where the church bells ring hourly and birds sing, flowers bloom, people are born, live, die; here in this place I find myself. Through the amazing technology of internet and wireless microwave transmission I read articles, peruse newspapers, dialogue with friends.

Somehow there is a space in the world that I fill. I touch some lives, and hopefully they are enriched by this touching, and they touch my life too. Sometimes the love and kindness blow my mind. Sometimes I encounter tightness and scarcity in others, and in myself. I do my best to work it through when I encounter it in myself, to get back to kindness and generosity. When I meet those walls in others I do my best to be compassionate, and to find ways to get/do what I need to when others are not sharing. Sometimes I do this better than other times.

I feel fear about the collective situation, and I feel fear about my personal situation sometimes. Rarely do I find myself immobilized. In my dream last night I felt immobilized, in a bed on the street in Burlington outside if the old Grand Union, people walking by, and I was invisible to them. I knew she'd been killed and I couldn't find her.

The government of Nevis covered up my mother's murder because they didn't want to damage the tourist trade. The government of Nevis, along with the US Consulate, the FBI and the Dade County Coroner, lied about what happened in order to protect their financial interests and political affiliations. How disgusting is that? And yet it is certainly no more heinous than the daily killing, through direct and structural violence, that occur in so many places on this beautiful planet; violence perpetrated by governments and their agencies, by corporate policies and practices, and ultimately by the complacency of regular people who, for whatever reasons, collude in order to maintain the familiar comfortable status quo.

Words like hope, despair, futility, possibility, all crowd my mind and make me wonder, as I face the sun and the infinite sky, about the great mysteries we humans have contemplated for millennia. What are we? Are we spirits in bodies? Are we just biomachines with nervous systems and built-in self-preservation mechanisms? How is it that we can feel and share so deeply and at the same time turn our backs on life itself in order to be comfortable? Are we evolving towards a more fully realized existence or is this a wheel spinning conundrum which we must pass through on our journey to whatever lies beyond the veil of this life?