Just being

In between music and silence

Just breathing

Between each spoken word

Just living

Amongst the hills of speculation

Just loving

All there is to fear

Just humming

What I’d like to hear

Just drumming

On the table where I sit

A beat to which I

Just keep on going

Past all the places I’ve been

Just touching

All that remains to be seen

Just feeling

All that is looking unclean

Just writing

Searching for a twist

As I just build

All that can’t exist

Here in the port

On the water’s edge

Casting off the shore

 Like jumping off a ledge

You’re leaving me behind

Or am I leaving you?

We both journey on

As if there’s something else to do

You are not the one

Not sure anyone is

With happiness we come

And all that’s left is this

My dreams are full of distance

Both near and far from home

And although I stand beside you

I know I am alone

Whether in the desert

Or here beside the sea

It was never about you

It was always about me

And the world is full of wonder

When it’s only me

Between the sun and thunder

Is somewhere you can’t be

And so I walk alone

Toward an unknown place

Never once forgetting

The beauty of your face

It will forever be there

Whoever she may be

Dancing in my mind

My phantom bride to be

Praying to something

Hoping for change

A new road to walk

Beside what remains

Praying to someone

Not knowing to whom

Slowly creating

All you undo

Praying to my god

In my universe

Releasing the mind

Undoing a curse

Praying toward something that’s better

Better than “then” ever was

Capturing life in a sentence of letters

Without asking why just because

Praying to father and mother

To be there when I return

From a road where all are ‘others’

One ‘round every turn

Praying to friends I know

To keep on knowing me

Not to forget my face

When I’m washed up with the sea

Praying to the water

To cleanse and start my day

She is my god’s daughter

With her I want to play

Praying to the passing time

To make me old and wise

Knowing that  happiness is

In constant compromise

Praying for the sky

To remain far from the sand

Always catch it with my eye

But never in my hand

Praying to the source of all

To take me where it may

And in every place I leave behind

A piece of me will stay

Everyone knows that moment.

You’re walking down the street, it’s a sunny day and you’re absorbing everything around you. The sky and the rhythm of the street, the people who race past you like possible loves, enemies and dreams. All of sudden everything slows down and you zoom in on a couple sitting on a bench on the boulevard. They keep stroking each other’s hands and kissing. Not in a vulgar way but in a soft and charged fashion; something you don’t see every day. Something that puts the rest of the street out of focus, and surrounds the young lovers with a fuzzy halo of obscurity.

Then comes that moment:

 You can’t help but sighing to yourself… I wish I had that, you think. They seem like the very idea of lovers. The very ideal of happiness, for the fleeting moment that you share with them. That they share with you. But you keep walking and the lovers always remain the ideal that you turned them into, frozen in time, like Romeo and Juliette. However, as you walk on down the street tears may be falling from the lovers’ eyes as they embrace for the last time. It’s over and they wanted to say goodbye on neutral ground, at the spot they used to go for coffee.

You roll on down the road and the young man whispers to the young girl “feel like coming to see my place”… they are slightly intoxicated after a particularly good first date, and all the man really wants is sex. The girl hasn’t decided yet…

The warm feeling you feel is slightly clouded by something icy, something dark. Jealousy. You’re actually jealous of an image, a frozen moment in time, an ideal. It’s so easy to fall in love in the city, which sells us ideas that we can’t have. Dreams that are merely dreams…

As you arrive home evening has begun to fall and so has the rush of the street, the rhythm of the day. Slower, slower, winding down…

As you approach home the evening is pierced by a scream… and another. A man and woman are fighting passionately, fighting as if their life depended on it. Every syllable is so charged that it’s almost beautiful. You should be jealous of them. To fight that way you must really need to care about someone…

We meet them every day, but we don’t always see them. They are there when you need them most, gently leading you to where you need to go, even if you don’t know it. The soft touches that make you look in the direction you never thought to, and then you see the meaning of it all. Just for a few moments…

They have the same wings that we do, but we forget to use ours. Don’t worry, if you let them they will show you how. For they are amongst us, as everything is. A part of us, as we are a part of everything.

I can see angels. Can you?

I believe in angels

They brush across my face

When it’s least expected

Somewhere far from grace.

Carry me to somewhere

I forgot that I could go

Tell me of the kindness

The kind we all should know.

And hearing all the voices

That are real in my head

Surrounded by their presence

On my shoulder, in my bed.

See no wings and hear no harps

They do not sit on clouds

As far away from god as us

With whom they share the ground.

This second post was supposed to be about language. I was born in England but have lived in Israel my whole life, since the age of 6. Yet here I am, writing in English despite the fact that I live my life in Hebrew… But I feel far more inclined to write about how it feels returning to Israel after a long absence over seas. Each  day the news headlines get worse… It seems that the extremists are taking control of the delicate situation in which the country is in. The beautiful notions of Zionism and other idyllic notions of a Jewish state have crashed into reality and the casualty will probably be the state of Israel itself. Looking back through history one can see that it was always religious extremism that  forced the Jewish state into collapse; there is always a body that believed that being religious was more important than being human, that casts its shadow over the ruins of what was once the embodiment of all those ideals that were only dreams or ink stains on paper.
Religious fanaticism has always been a part of human nature; our lack of ability to except that the world we inhabit is beyond our understanding and comprehension has forced us to invent a reason for being here. So, instead of being content with a simple existence we invented a narrative to make sense of it all, to give us a purpose for being here. Many people cling to these beliefs so hard that they suffocate the world that surrounds them and see only their world, their beliefs. The result is a moral deterioration that leads  a man, or woman, to move so far from being human that murder in the name of God becomes legitimate. These people read the old stories of heroics and bravery, yet refuse to recognize that there is far more to learn from these stories than blindly emulating inhumane crimes against those who think differently from them.
For instance it might benefit these people to recall the Jewish rebellions against the Roman empire; these rebellions were the initiative of radical Jews who refused to accept the yoke of Roman rule, however liberal it was. The result was the end of the Jewish settlement in Palestine and the destruction of the most religious symbol of all: the Holy Temple. Rather than seeing this account as a subtle message against blind violence and encouraging the acceptance of the other, the extreme Jews of today go out and burn the mosque’s of their neighbors and attack the very soldiers that leave their families behind in order to protect these extremists, because they have a different religion or are not religious enough.
Robert Graves once wrote that “religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity” in a book that told of the same period in history I mentioned in the former paragraph. Now, nearly two thousand years later its time to realize this and end it. If the sane, moderate people do not rise to oppose this wave of “dangerous insanity” the state of Israel will be consumed once more, just like it had been many a-time before. Once again the reason will be most ironic: the Jewish state will be sacrificed on the altar of the Jewish religion by those to whom no state can ever be religious enough.
Here we stand on the frontier between faith and life, progress and deterioration, civil war and unity. Here we stand and realize that even today, despite all our progress, that the dark force of blind faith can still topple empires to the ground; and most certainly a small and unstable state in the heart of the most turbulent region in the world.
I think that my writing in English rather than Hebrew might not be solely to do with language after all…

This is being written on a cold and wet December morning in the very center of Tel Aviv, Israel. This is my home; it is where I have grown up and lived most of my life. I went to school here, I served in the army and have had many jobs. All these have been conducted in Hebrew, which may not be my first language but has certainly become my main language. Despite the fact that I’ve always spoken English at home with my parents my mother tongue became secondary, as a young boy who’d just arrived from a different country it was so important to me to be Israeli! To speak Hebrew at home, even if it was terribly unnatural and when I accepted the fact that I lived in an English speaking household in Israel I feigned an Israeli accent. I was embarrassed to be different and soon read only books in Hebrew, listened to music in Hebrew and kept notebooks of writings in Hebrew. I was different, and all I wanted was to be the same as everyone else.
However, the connection to English was always somewhere in the background and as I grew I moved further away from the Hebrew that I once revered towards the English that was a nuisance as a child. I started reading books in English and found myself relating to them much more that I did to books in Hebrew. Soon I was only listening to music in English and writing in English, I was reconnecting with my roots whilst wondering how much language counts for who you define yourself as, and where you define yourself to be from.
I’m still wondering this today, it seems that my roots are like those of two trees that have become deeply intertwined to the extent that is is nearly impossible to see where one starts and the other ends. I will never have the experience of the children’s programs and games that my Israeli peers had, for I was adjusting to a new world and was raised by English parents. On the other hand I’ll never have these things in common with my English peers either, for I have grown up in Israel. Does this mean that I belong nowhere? Or does it mean that I can belong everywhere? A constant notion of being slightly on the outside, yet forever at home in both places, with both languages. Does my passion for the English language mean that I should live in an English speaking country? How can you resolve such a conflict?  Is it even a conflict that needs solving? In the meantime  I write of my home in my mother tongue… That’s my resolution.  

And suddenly the wide open spaces are changed into the narrow streets you grew in. All at once the new and exciting becomes the old and familiar and all the dreams that you turned into a reality become dreams once more. The streets of former lives take me back with great pleasure and hold me tight, it feels as though they really did feel that something was missing in my absence. Falling back to former lives and making them new again… reviving all that was left behind whilst using the energy created by travel. As it turns out all that created this energy has also been left behind. That’s the way it works, that is how we move. Always in motion, forever leaving the traces of our lives and loves in our wake. Forever is a favorite concept, but forever is only in movement and whilst in movement you can never take all you want with you… Most will have to stay behind! So I discovered myself by leaving my home, and discovered my home by leaving the world. I moved as far away from myself as I was only to become even more myself than I was before. And all these ideas and notions, all these conclusions and assumptions, all will change again tomorrow. As we all will, as everything does. So being back on the familiar streets is not so bad, for they seem new to me and they will seen new again tomorrow. Being back in the land of my memories is beautiful, because I can see their old scenery change into something new, different. And it is then that I realize that I might of stopped travelling, but my journey will never end.

I never said a word to her, and probably never will. She just happened to be there, amongst the silence and the trees, not really knowing why. None of us really knew why. But I will always love her even though I never spoke to her, never got to know her. How many people have you loved without hearing their voice? Without knowing what they think about current events, what their favourite bands are and what books they’ve read lately? I knew nothing of her at all, maybe that’s why one smile, one act of kindness were enough to make me love her. After the performance of that act she disappeared into the distance, stopped existing for me just like the rain just stops all of a sudden. Despite all that I will never let her go and she will always bring a smile to my face.
We all chose a world of silence, just for a few days, to see how leaving the sounds of everyday life behind could change the way we see ourselves and the world around us. During this period I sunk deeper and deeper into myself, yet was simultaneously very much in touch with all around me. The sounds of the birds took me back to the vast land that I left behind and then made me realize that their magic is the same here, somewhere in between all this land’s troubles the birds’ song is still as sweet as in my realm of fantasies beyond the sea. The way the light shone between the trees and lit up the grass was as enchanting as it’s always been, majestic almost. All these sensations were between me and my surroundings and did not involve any direct contact with the many people that were with me. We had chosen silence.
The sun was shining brightly as the rain grew heavier and we all sat enchanted by the golden downpour. The glowing drops of rain became the centre of focus as the rest of the scenery became mere… well, scenery. The bond between the sun light and the raindrops was too powerful to ignore.
When I looked away from the sight for the first time my eyes found hers and she smiled. The past few days had envolved many meetings of eyes most of which ended with someone looking down awkwardly. After all, we chose silence and eyes too can speak even if they make no sound. She beckoned me toward her and I started stumbling closer to her without knowing where I was going or what would happen, but I trusted her smile. I trusted her eyes. When I reached her she pointed in the opposite direction to the one where we all watched the golden rain and as I followed her hand with my eyes I received what she wanted me to have. The sky was split by a full rainbow that stretched perfectly from the ground up through the sky and to another spot of ground in a perfect arc. We stood side by side for many minutes admiring the world’s magic, though I was admiring this girl’s kindness, her smile. She will never speak to me and never know who I am, but she gave me a rainbow anyway.
I will never know what she was thinking while we were staring at the wonderous sky and its colours, but maybe that’s part  of my love toward her. In a land of miscommunication and greed she gave me a gift which was exactly what I needed and that was pure for there was nothing to gain. I could not even thank her. But I will always remember her, her smile, her gift and the moment I shared with her.