"Keturah", the first cabin built for the hosts, blending into the desert

One of the Succah friends, Itamar Kechteil, gave me this gift;
a wheel-barrow
which helped me to bring equipment to the farest succah

In the diary I am hinting at the immense troubles
I had with the technical installations
for water, gas, solar electricity and kerosine stoves.
These present (2002) solar panels with their batteries, converters etc.
could only be bought towards the end of my "term".
During my "term" all the installations were much more primitive and troublesome.



The main problem with which I had to cope in that week of March 1993
had to do with the "bell-tower".


It was Rami Kharuvi [Haruvi?], one of the first creative supporters of the Succah,
who suggested to have bells
with which to call the guests from the far-away succahs.
His idea was
to buy old oxygin bottles from a station of distribution in Mitzpe-Ramon,
and to find a machine to rub them clean,
so that the rust could develop evenly and give the "bells" a desert color.
I got 5 bottles for free, and only the cleaning cost a little money.

The man whom I charged with erecting the poles to hold the bells,
was called Abraham, was also from Mitzpe-Ramon and was ---- deaf!

It took some experimenting, until I found the right hammer to ring the bells,
and the right musical harmony between 4 of them. The fifth I discarded in time.

24.3.93, First of Nisan, - re-edited (mainly graphically) on Sept.17, 2012, First of Tishre, Rosh Hashanah

"They were redeemed in the month of Nisan ,
in the month of Nisan they will be redeemed"

On my very fast walk this morning along the Zin-Wadi, upstreams until its unimpressive beginnings, I lost my precious tights which I had taken off from under my trousers, when it became warmer. But I found a song, five lines of words and one line of the tune:

It's based on my "monologue" in the workshop "Mastery" last October, but it's the essence, the direction, the affirmation, which I want to have present with me in every single, every single, every single interaction with people.

It was triggered by Meirav's walking out on me, because I told her, in writing, that my silent meeting with myself was starting today, and that the co-counseling session would take place in a way, that only she would talk about herself or she would breathe, or she would go out with me and scream or she would look into my eyes. Since in yesterday's session she had a real revelation about her suffering, I dared to put these demands on her.

After my talk with Renata late yesterday night about how to run the registration of guests for Pesach during my three silent days, I remembered, what Harvey Jackins, the founder of "Re-evaluation Counseling", had said to me:

"You always try to make it easy for people,
that's why they despise you."

I had come up to him in the name of the Israeli friends, who had organized a Palestinian-Jewish workshop with Harvey, scheduled at Kibbutz Shfayim two months later, and asked for a reduction in price. The talk took place somewhere near New-Castle in Northern England, August 1978.

This minute I remember another talk about "ease": I must have been 20,
when I see myself saying to Annemarie Mayer, a friend who was 16 years my senior and my teacher in some very important issues:

"What I want most in life, is, that people should feel at ease with me".
"In this you'll never succeed!" she snapped.
I had learnt the English expression "feeling at ease with somebody" only recently~~~

This painful prediction was confirmed - without an exterior link - when Martin, my fiance, wrote to me in his last letter before he came back from his scholarship year in America and I came back from my scholarship year in Israel:

"With you I'll never feel relaxed, but only with you I'll feel deeply at home."

It is what I wrote to Meirav, once I recovered from her angry note, scribbled before she walked out:

"For somebody who doesn't belong anywhere, there are too many laws around here. I loathe these games."

 

I wrote:

"...Right now I feel suffocated by your rejection of me and of what I have to give, and by the fact, that as usual "fear fulfills itself", i.e. my fear that you would reject me, if I 'would not please you'.
But you belong, Meirav! You do belong to where I belong. Don't be too proud of your defense-pattern, - the feeling of not belonging."

She is at home with me, as I am at home with her. That's why she can train her powers with me, without the fear of loosing me.

When I walked through the dry, thirsty wadi (no rain this winter!), I kept repeating to myself one of my four recently declared desires:

[Translated from Hebrew]
I have the money, the strength and the talent
to choose and to train and to guide
the creators of the Succayah:

- Hosts and hostesses
- Maintainers and builders
- Solvers of problems
- Investors and investresses

I understood, that one of the trainings I am getting now is
towards coming home into my full power, not needing to please people anymore, not needing to be "seen" as I am. The aggressive interview with Dudu ben-Tzur yesterday, which overrode all "tact", was such a training: If I can accept the fact, that "people" indulge in misunderstanding me, distorting me, slandering me, shunning me - I'll be free to be what I am meant to be for people; "not easy, not somebody with whom you can be relaxed and feel at ease", a stumbling stone, 'aeven negef' in the Bible [Isaiah 8:14], or - such a good German pun, 'ein Stein des Anstosses and Anstossens' (a stone, against which you hurt yourself and which pushes you forward, challenges you). This IS the way real redemption will work.

So I was referring to all of Dudu's "innocent" questions which provoked a defensive answer on my part:

1. There are rumours in Mitzpe Ramon, that you are a Lesbian and that especially Lesbians come here!

2. Did you become rich through the Succayah?

3. Seeing the black woman working in the kitchen, seeing the Bedouin woman playing the flute for you, seeing Renata building the cabin, it occurred to me, that you are having a little bit of colonialism here! You are very dominant and enjoy exerting power, aren't you!

4. (Looking at the Succayah, when I was accompanying him from the bus to his car:) "There must be a lot of sex here!"

5. Aren't you a Guru?

6. Belonging to Germany, to Christianity, to Israel, to Judaism, having worked with Palestinians, living in the Desert - you seem to be going through too many drops without getting wet, but aren't you "grapping too much and therefore not grapping anything" [ancient Jewish proverb] ?

Only a year and a half later did Yacob make that pergola,
which I so deplore in this diary. It looked to me like a fairy tale mushroom.

Then Renata built exactly what I had imagined
or - as usual - built it better than I had imagined.

The bell-tower and 3 of our pyramidal tents - Ram Eisenberg's first R&D generation.

The day before he surprised me:
His journalist way of jumping from one subject to the other, never letting me finish an answer to one of his questions, constantly watching his watch, had let me say: "It would not be bad for you to come here for some peace of soul." He said: "But it is because I want to do so many things, play the guitarre, write~~~" I don't remember the other things, the sentence was like taken out of my mouth.

For lately I understood finally (???), that I'll never get out of the time-pressure. It's not so much because of my commitments and obligations, into which I throw myself time and again, but because of "too many things I want to do". I found this out, when I was in the desert the first time - did I write about this already? Alright I'll probably often repeat myself, but this will be very interesting later to see the differences of contexts and texts, it was my main source of getting understanding from the Bible, or from the New Testament or from the Qur'an - to compare repetitions! So I shall not even attempt to edit these pages.

Anyway, there in the Zin-Oasis, in November 1987, I saw, that I constantly had to choose between 3 to 5 things that I wanted to do, and therefore even in that solitude I felt the pressure of time. It is a pattern which I chose before coming to this life, just like I chose to be born as a woman and as a German three months before the "Crystal Night", when Jews were first murdered and there shops demolished [9.11.1938].

 

Just look at the beginning of this passage and at its end. I am demanding from you, my readers, to jump from one emotional complex to the next. But then - didn't I say, I would not make it easy for you any longer. You are - as my song of 1993 sings:
"to increase your powers with me or against me" ,
"to discover your choice against me or with me",
"to redeem the Messiah, the Redeemer, inside yourself."

I didn't like Dudu, though something around his eyes reminded me strongly of my father [as I know him from a few photos]. Is he another fragment of my father just like Avram (Rami) Lapidot? Reflecting to me all those parts that I have difficulty in accepting, obviously, because if they are not parts of me, why did I become defensive? Or did I become defensive, just because I was distorted by him in general, while I want to be and to appear "so good"? What will happen to the Succayah if I'll answer laughingly to all those questions:
"Yes, of course, it's just like you say: I am a Guru for people, I am a colonialist, oppressing and overriding other people, I am greedy and rich, I am Lesbian and overflowing with sexual passion etc. etc."

While attempting to find the spot, where the waters start running towards the East (the Zin wadi) and towards the West (the Nitzana Wadi), I was making silly rhythmically rhymed verses about accepting all of people's projections and distortions, on the base of the story which I wrote down for Meirav this morning:

 

 

Creator Ram Eisenberg's amphitheatre in the back of the Succah wadi

"Colonialism" ? Hamdah, our Bedouin neighbor, teaches me
and Sarah Zimin, a university professor, to make bread without yeast

So, walking fast towards the West I was rhyming:

[Translated from Hebrew]
I sweat liters of toqpanut [aggressiveness]
I sweat liters of ragzanut [irascibility]
I sweat liters of khamdanut [greed - the greed to accomplish, to complete]
I sweat liters of shiga'on gdelut [megalomania]

koakh ve-kesef, power and money are my only concerns
koakh ve-kesef, power and money are my only concerns
koakh ve-kesef, power and money are my only concerns

The fear, Fraenkl and Zwi Zohar were talking about, is actually a specific fear, the fear of shame. Shame has been my main subject in the last days and weeks. It is incredible, how often I am overwhelmed by feelings of shame. I cannot tackle GUILT yet, but it seems to me, that I am on my way to tackle SHAME, the SHAME about not appearing as the "Good Guy" - which reminds me of Fritz Pearl's "Gestalt verbatim": I stopped in the middle of the street in Stuttgart, when I read that while walking: "will I be called a good guy or will I get rotten tomatoes thrown into my face?" (I am looking for the book with all my underlinings, but - as so many books - people borrow and never return them.)

What will happen to the Succah Vision, if I sweat those "ugly" qualities? even now, while writing this, I feel shaky inside: what if you my readers really believe that I "am" like this?

Before I sat down to grant myself three and a half hours of writing
"One Story of my History", I wanted comfort from my coloured books.
I opened the violet book, page 66-77:

"Most people have rationalized the reversals, caused by Lost Will's attempts to gain recognition, as the inevitable swings of the pendulum"

the Nazis versus Bach and Rilke?
ein Vok der Dichter und Denker [a nation of poets and thinkers]
versus
ein Volk der Richter und Henker? [a nation of judges and hangmen]

"Some people have anger that they cannot just get rid of Lost Will and many of these people have tried to do just that by redoubling their efforts to deny it whenever Lost Will has tried to make its presence known. Others are afraid of Lost Will and do not want to allow themselves to feel what it is holding for fear they will have to experience it."

Hamdah explores a camera

Gadi's kids Maya and Nimrod and my dog Larqa and I, in a festive gown,
ring the bells on Passover.

If I do not allow myself to "confess" these seven uglinesses, and thus "own" them
e v e n   if they are not my "own"!!!! - will they not appear outside of me, and then I have no mastery over them?

Isn't this what drew me to Judaism more than anything else: the solidarity with the sinners? The Yom-Kippur confession: "We lied, we murdered, we cheated", always "we"? Isn't this the "vicarious suffering" linked with the image of the Messiah? Wasn't I right, when I always got angry about the sentence in the New Testament; "He was in everything like us, but without sin!"? Wasn't I always saying: "So how can anybody say, he was like us, if he did not experience our main suffering - sin?"

Oh no! Since I am an aspect of God/Goddess All-That-Is, I do own all these "sins". It is not important whatsoever, if those are real qualities of mine or not. If I am everything,then I am

greedy, horny, Lesbian, a Guru, dominating, angry, aggressive, oppressive, megalomanic

I remember again, how deeply impressed I was, when my friend Yanina told me - just by the way of telling me something else:

This is one of my favorite photos representing the Succayah, made by Gadi
on the Eve of Passover 1993:
the rising full moon - the Tent of Appointment
seen through Renata's renewed bell-tower

Visitors drinking tee in the shade of the bell-tower, as I had imagined

By the way, Channah: Yesterday we were sitting on the rocks next to the new Hagar cabin, in the middle of our working hours, Renata and I.
I was giving her support in her love problems, when I saw someone coming down the dust-road.

"Is this my enemy?" I asked.

Renata was shocked: "You still see her as your enemy?"

"Oh, yes, someone who clogs the whole wadi with her minibus, so that people cannot use the wadi for shitting, someone who defies my law of temporariness and stays here so as to demonstrate, how wrong I am in having made this law, someone who forces me to cope with her every single day, when I see her bus or see her or see and hear her dog - she surely is my enemy."

I hardly believed myself saying this. But when I did not hide it, did not try to appear good, I felt very relieved: another step in getting out of the "GOOD-GUY-GAME", WHICH IMPRISONS ME,
WHICH PREVENTS ME FROM FULFILLING MY TASK
OF LETTING PEOPLE BECOME MASTERS "AGAINST OR WITH ME".

It is really not playing the role of the Lord's Servant and becoming an even better guy. I do not at all want to imitate Yanina and her husband. I do not at all want to trust people that they can grow through or against my blaming. But it's time now,

after I finally got out of the VICTIM-GAME,
to get out of the GOOD-GUY-GAME
AND ACCEPT THE SHAME.

Extreme contrast between sky and earth

Mystical mist surrounding the bell-tower

Renata's thatched structure is still the bell tower of the present Succayah [photos 2002]

to have money, strengh-power and talent
to choose, train and guide
the creators of the Succayah
hosts and hostesses
maintenance-workers and builders
investors and investresses
solvers of problems
(the poetry gets totally lost in this translation)

When I was standing in the ten meter gap between the waters running to the Dead&Red Sea and the waters running to the Mediterranean, I was pleading:

Please, let me now have all the experiences, which make me able to have "money, strength and talent to choose, train and guide" as fast and as strong as I can bear without breaking.

It was so wondrous to see the modest beginnings of the two main Negev rivers. Though about 200 meters more to the West a rather big and wide canyon carries waters (in a normal winter, not like this one) to the Nitzana-river, here - at the beginnings of the Tzin Wadi no one even notices the beginnings. But what struck me even more, was the fact, that it is the same water, coming from the sky, the water that once rose up from the earth in its endless circle, but while running through the mountains, it creates different landscapes, different situations, so the one is called Tzin and one is called Nitz-ana, the letters reversed, the same water, different rivers.

I am All-There-Is, but I am running just in one river-bed, which I created over ten-thousands of years. I want all the water to be visible, flowing joyfully, creating new mountains, new valleys, sometimes destroying, sometimes fertilizing, but always creating!

Always creating? Even if I destroy?

"What you build with your hands, you destroy with your behind!"

Aren't we creating while destroying? At least a pain in the soul, which then can become a healing?

Wasn't this a valuable course in the university of life, which cost me only 300 Sheqel and some days of fury and shame?

I had asked Yacob, who was a volunteer in 1991 and who belongs to those "creative men with golden hands"
like Itziq, [who helped me to convert an army bus into my mobile home],
like Danni Qish [the sculptor from Mitzpe-Ramon, who proposed and built the shape of a succah]
and like Ram Eisenberg [who - among many other inventions - installed the first electricity system in "Abraham" and later created the pyramidal tent, the basic element of the future Desert Economy, as I foresee it]
to build a Pergola, so we would have another place for visitors or guests to sit and view the desert, since the "porch" of "Abraham" is becoming too crowdy.

Renata - denying any ego whatsoever - could have prevented me from this step, because I told her about it before. But she didn't, and so I had a last (!!!) experience (tiny compared to the Ram Story) with my need (?) to give SPACE to creative people without putting or being limits.

[God's Light]

Renata with my daughter Ronnit and her firstborn Jonathan
and Renata with our long term guest Erika Knoller, who at the age of past seventy
had started to paint and did so high up in the Ya'acov succah.

The diary journalist Dudu and the media: blessings and curses.
The media were always flocking to us and I was asked to represent,
even after I had relinquished the Succayah in the hands of my successors.
- like on the photo above and below - in 1995/96

In fact, I started the right way: bringing him here and telling him, what I wanted exactly. I even continued in the right way, pointing out to him when I saw him working, that he did not stick to the agreement of having the support-poles 1.20 meters apart from the iron supports of the bell-tower. But when he argued, that the wooden trunks he had found, where not long enough, I succumbed and even suggested a solution myself:

"Maybe, if you let the palm fronds protude enough, the area of the shade will still be enough."

Why couldn't I say right away,
that he had to take it down?
Why 
D O   I   A L W A Y S   T R Y   
T O   M A K E   I T   E A S Y   F O R    O T H E R S ?

AND THEN COMES THE DEEP FALL.
Like Shakhar, the ranger and friend, said:
"YOU ARE VERY DANGEROUS.
YOU LET PEOPLE CLIMB ON YOU,
HIGHER AND HIGHER,
AND SUDDENLY IT BECOMES TOO MUCH FOR YOU.
YOU SHAKE THEM OFF,
AND THE FALL THEN IS VERY DEEP."
[Mentioned again : September 21, 2008 !!!!!!!!!!!!]

 

The sun is setting beautifully.

Oh how grateful I am to be able to have my "re-creation" right here in my bus, right here in my Desert. How grateful I am, that I am able now to detach myself from all this rush. The rush is good, I do not want to avoid it or liberate myself from it anymore. It's me. It's the limitation, which I created for myself for this life on this planet, so that I would experience through it, but the rest is also good, the rest helps me to see, that I still rush because of things I do not really want to do, like yesterday and the day before yesterday - trying to please so many guests, to find solutions where I should simply have said: "No, there is no room, everything is booked." Is it the money I need so badly for maintenance? Is it my pattern of "making it easy for people?" It's both.

I lost 150 Sheqel because of Rita's mistake - not having waited for a family of seven, which were booked for the office flat (not to talk about the hardship that was caused to them, but they accepted my apologies and who knows, why this had to happen for them or for Rita or for me). I lost 300 Sheqel, which I paid to Yacob as a deposit.

But I am getting all the money I need: the silence people paid much more than they needed to pay. Like in February, when the director of the bank in Mitzpe sent me a letter, but before it even arrived, Cornelia's group paid more than I owed.

So the financial viability or success of the Succayah is not depending on mistakes I make or on refusing to register a guest, even if - by my exhausting efforts and waste of time for arguing on the phone - I could squeeze them in. What about my law of not having more than 12 people in the Succayah? I want to make it easy for ME. I WANT TO MAKE IT EASY FOR MYSELF, FINALLY! And YOU will give me the money from elsewhere, if I cannot find it through my exertion and exhaustion!!!

I want to focus on that new idea, about making myself financially independant from "Succah in the Desert",
by giving concerts, by playing the organ and singing my songs. But first - and the last thing today - I want to copy
the rest of the passage in the violet book:


From the Violet Book
[It was only in 2011-2012 that I copied the book ]
p. 66
"I would like to say something here about anger and fear.
Anger and fear are not really separate,
and as long as they are expressed
as though they are separate,
they have not been expressed effectively enough
to find the connecting link between them.
Healing the imbalance here
involves finding the connecting link between them.

"For example,
if a person is expressing anger over and over
and healing is not taking place,
the failure to evolve indicates
that the understandings needed are not being gained.
In this case, the person most likely needs to notice
what emotions are not being expressed.

Repeated expression of some emotions
can indicate emotional habit patterns
that may give the appearance of emotional release,
but are actually participating
in furthering the denials of other emotions.
In the case of repeated anger,
the denied emotions are likely to be fears.
Grief can be present here also
and some people use Grief
to deny both anger and fear
that lie guilt-ridden beneath the grief.
Grief comes from a feeling of powerlessness
which arises from the splits an individual is experiencing
such as the split between anger and fear.
These splits can be within the individual
or between individuals.
(!!!!!!)
"In the beginning,
We did not have the understandings on Lost Will;
then, We only knew that experience was going to be necessary,
since without it, it did not appear
that the spirits could understand the teachings
we had to offer.

 

Shim'on Peres had promised quite in the beginning,
to visit the Succayah.
I had put my stupid hopes in a human savior,
believing that he could make the breakthrough
of the understanding,
that only a common challenge
as big as
the development of the Desert's Space, Purity and Silence
could dwarf the gap in selfesteem
between the Middle East enemies.
Peres never came.

"Instead" came the Minister of Labour, Ora Namir.

No tangible results came from this visit,
but I'll be forever grateful
for her thoughtful, sensitive, womanly question:
"Who is doing the laundry around here?"

With all the pressures, troubles, worries, sufferings
there was so much beauty:
a spring flower between a sunrise and a sunset

If there would have been rain that year,
a tulip like this would have appeared

This is why we decided
that Meirav has to leave soon
and bring herself into a more "normal" situation
to verify what she has learned here.

"We looked at the spirits' need for experience.
as an opportunity for them and also for us.
We needed to have space from them
just as much as they seemed to need room
to experience without their parents standing over them.
The spirits were going to have to experience things
that We had already experienced
in order to understand
what We had been trying to teach them,
and we were going to have to go on
with the experience we needed to have.

"Even though We knew this was true,
We also had plenty of things
We enjoyed sharing with the Manifested Spirits.
When We told the spirits
how hard it had been for Us to figure out
how to manifest them,
they had fun telling Us
what they had experienced from within Us;
knowing they had awareness of themselves
and not knowing how to come forth.
Lost Will received the unexpressed fear we all had had
that the spirits could not find a way to manifest,
and that We could not find the way to manifest them."

I think this is exactly the great suffering
that I have experienced for 40 years and which Meirave became aware of experiencing.

"Why did you let me babble about my childhood and youth," she said. "There was no hardship, no trauma, it just doesn't fit my character at all."

"You created such a good exterior life for yourself so as to bear the burden of not knowing your task. All you know, is that you want to change something in the world, but how - there is only frustration and doubt and self-hatred."

She had finally tears in her eyes, and even running down her cheeks, when she confessed, how often she was staging her burial~~~

We wept both, and it was such a relief for me at least to know, that someone had the same experience: that there was this secondary suffering of not finding a justification for our suffering.

"Everybody has such a terrible life, my life is good, so, for heaven's sake, why am I not happy?"

 

Elly Katz, this genious woman, this very rich woman - why was she telling me yesterday on the phone; "I feel so empty, that I devour food again, but at the same time I am so fulfilled, I can't understand it."

It is this, isn't it? The enormous urge to bring forth, to manifest something and not knowing how to do it.

"In getting to know the spirits,
We found that they all had understandings based on what interested them,
and areas that did not interest them
were often a blank.
These early emergences had focused
on certain aspects of Us
and gained their awareness in these areas.
They all had a feeling of universality
because they all had white light like I did,
but they all had feelings
that did not allow them to open to everything
that I had to offer.
The spirits were all given the opportunity
to embrace more awareness than they had,
but they all turned the opportunity down.
All the spirits had emerged
with aspects of Me,
but did not, at that time, demonstrate interest
in utilizing their full potential to receive more.
The time has come for understandings
not gained then to be gained now
because the necessary experience
has been had.
"The reason that the experience gained
has not brought the healing needed now
is that the experience has not been understood.
The reason the experience has not been understood is
that the spirits who set out to have these experiences
had the intent to prove to Me
that their misunderstandings were right
and that what I had to offer to them was wrong.
These spirits originally denied
that they had misunderstandings.
Rebellion against me
is the one Karmic tie
that all beings on earth have in common.
It was not wrong to rebel against me,
and it is not wrong to continue rebelling against me
if you want to continue going it alone.
If you do want My help now,
these teachings are being made available
to bring you the help you need."