Gary Badke

I’ll put a couple of pictures on this blog; taken by Gary Badke, of British Columbia. he and his wife Joan were on pilgrimage with me. His website is www.badke.ca/windflowerflutes and he is a wonderful photographer.

i don’t know what pics i’ll put here, so i’ll be surprised too!

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Naw Ruz

A lot of people need prayers. Some people need a “Happy Naw Ruz” also. So to my good friends who are Muslim and Baha’i, much love and joyous beginnings of a new year.

On the prayer front: certain my twin, Elizabeth, and a family in Pasadena. The great grandmother is our friend, Sara, and a long-time Baha’i. She’s lived in Africa, and China and been of great service to humanity. She’s in advanced stages of Alzheimers. Her daughter, whose name I’ll keep private, is one of the bravest, stand-up straight, tell the world what it’s like,” has had several strokes (she’s 50 ish) and cancer i think has returned. This daughter has a daughter who has a physical disability but who has taken to the helm and is caring for her grandmother in her apartment. They all live in the same apartment complex. The daughter went to the hospital yesterday; totally in pain, unable to eat for weeks, much more. Her youngest son who just graduated high school has been by her side. If ever this family needed prayers, it’s now, and loving help. So if you could that would be great. I will post a Healing Prayer as an image also. Blessings and love to you all; we are really part of one Great Fabric.

Falafel in the Merkaz

Halo Moon Meets HyperPhysics Over Falafel at the Mercaz
Esther Bradley-DeTally

I sit here at the top of Mercaz in Israel, in a small, dart-in, take-a-quick glance-to-the-left at a glass counter, a man stuffing a half pita with round crusty balls, and a cabinet filled with icy drinks, coke being my Falafel companion.

There’s no halo moon sitting inside besides me on my chair, my Pilgrimage badge tucked into a pocket, so maybe baby I won’t get overcharged as an innocent on her search for the proper Chickpeas – big round ones, resting on a bed of hummus, surrounded by lettuce and pickles and cabbage and onions and tomatoes like it’s the best Our Gang pita to hang out in.

Are you with me? How about these Hills of Haifa. Yeah, I’m a newly emerged mountain goat who just hoofed, cavorted her pilgrim heart right up to the Mercaz which is a shopping area in Haifa, to wolf down a falafel, remember the other day when Johnnie and I were here, and to find a few gifts to take home.

Pilgrimage is not always about whispering of the “Face of God,” which if you want to know, believe me, I’m not kidding, I found a phrase of that exact saying in a book I read today. Yesterday I said in my small writing, “There is no Face of God,” well if I’m lying, I’m dying; there in that book, small red-crimson cover, about the Blessed Beauty, it referred in small black ink that “Face of God,” is a title used for the Manifestations, Prophets, Messengers, Divine Educators of God, so I am not just whistling Dixie when I tell you, “Boy was I surprised.”

But hey back to the Falafel and me and relationships. Someone mentioned a halo moon, and I Googled it because I have empty spaces in that vat of a brain of mine that resemble someone who had half a head severed like logs going into big blades, and the part that was severed for me was math, science, biology, stuff with details, and makes me wonder, “Why did I only see my eyelashes in the microscope”?

Are you with me? So before I sit down and feel the hot crunch of chickpeas in the back of my throat, I am going to tell you this Google led me to click on Hyper Physics, and I thought that’s what I am as a poet; I am trying to connect all my words and images and feelings into a Hyper Physics mode where everything is interconnected.

So I say, I’m going to connect a Halo Moon because I feel pretty stuffed and fortified right now, cuz that coke and falafel hit the spot and make me feel round and as if I’m producing extra circular rays of satisfaction around my round spots, just like a Halo Moon. And I’m going to tell you this hoofer and hoper has been praying her brains out (well parts anyhow) and she’s praying for Peace, because as I said previously, it has been promised.

Now don’t give me any half hearted reply or responses that peace isn’t possible. Because if you do that, you’ve just been listening to all those boys at play on the planet who want parades and neon signs and national anthems, and bling, lots of bling so they won’t think of the real stuff that matters, like the soul and its journey either to falafels or hallowed White Spots, and do you think people, all of us on Planet Earth, can actually be stopped in our coming together, our hyperphysics dance of oneness, cuz aren’t we about creating an ever-advancing civilization. Are you with me?

Memories of Pilgrimage

March 19, 2007-first essay upon return-

What exactly was it I did hear in those silent moments where timeand the soul, my soul to be exact, took a ride to another dimensionand time flattened out and I stepped with stockinged foot and measured gait towards the Threshold of the Blessed Beauty.”I consented to be in chains that mankind be released from its bondage,” and I found my forehead resting upon a pure cloth, on which were scattered crimson rose petals, and a silence from the White Heat of God’s Face enwrapped me in a certitude.Outside of time, the soul’s hangout, I took in knowing, God has no face. I took in white plaster walls, silent curving lacy ferns yearning their way up to pristine skylight. I took in the Pilgrim’s stockinged feet from Turkey, Peru, Canada, China, feet carrying the beseeching heart for mankind’s ordered life to be revolutionized, galvanized into an everlasting peace and the beginning of the Advent of Divine Justice. Outside in the world, the leaders played, hurling rocks and phrases suggesting “My testosterone is bigger than yours,” but for a time,nine days to be exact, I listened to my footsteps across lightly molded curved pebbles, witnessing sounds of my feet across broken tiles, calling to mind brutalities of leaders gone by. Empires stopped, majesty stamped on gardens on Mt. Carmel, every leaf, every mineral opening up to serve the blessed feet of the ordinary humanity who will come together no matter what. No boys will be boys machinations can stop this quiet soundless step towards ouroneness, and besides the white heat from the Face of God, bleachingmy bones towards selflessness and service, a promise is made,viewed, and the silence shouts, over Akka, “the silver city” and to Mount Carmel, the “mountain of God” Isaiah’s call: “Get thee up into the high mountain, O Zion that brightest good tidings,” and David in his Psalms predicted, “Life up your heads, O ye gates…theKing of Glory shall come in,” and I call to mind whilst standing in thick dimensions of purity the words uttered to Orientalist, Professor E.G. Browne, words of light going into the world as beacons of hope, “These fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away and the “Most Great Peace” shall come.”