“El Ranchio!” shouts the bus driver. A flock of peddlers cling to the windowpanes like locust to the crops, offering water bottles, rapidly melting ice cream scones and mango slices. The thought of being on their side of the window in a minute sends a shiver down my spine. I’m the only passenger dropping herself into this chaos. I’m trying to move with confidence, throwing my backpack on the floor and sitting on it pretending to read a book and evade my presence, but the attention focused on me sabotages my concentration.

It was 1997. The government of Guatemala has just signed a peace agreement with the guerrilla rebels and the rumor was that many of the newly unemployed armed fighters in the north of the country have taken up robbery. It was a bad timing to be lured off the beaten track and follow Alex to Coban; that city that offered absolutely nothing besides him, and then again he didn’t end up offering much either. So here I was, alone for the first time, waiting for the daily bus to Petén, to Tikal.

As I’m working on playing cool and concentrated in my book, I’m missing another bus that stops right beside my backpack. The sound of the driver peeing on his wheel in my vicinity is the only thing that makes me jump off the backpack and move it seconds away from being splashed. The peddlers die laughing and I join them. Ironically, I start feeling safer here. Every time a bus leaves, the junction becomes very quiet. The peddlers retreat to the tin pavilions to hide from the sun, and loose interest in me. It’s time to find out when’s the bus to Petén. “Excuse me, when’s the bus to Petén?” I ask in Spanish.

I think I really noticed her only after the question was already asked: very old, very skinny, her face’s wrinkled and her spine’s curved, her black and gray hair is gathered behind her back and her clothes are worn out. “In about an hour” she answers, “I’ll tell you when it’s here”. She turned away but I couldn’t. I kept following her with my eyes. She had a big pot covered with a cloth on a collapsible wooden tripod. She was too old and too weak to push her way between the peddlers onto the buses but she was very quick to lift up that tripod and rush towards descending passengers or private cars that occasionally stopped at the nearby gas station.

She would gently drop the pot near the potential costumer and lift up the cloth exposing the hot brown chicken legs. If the costumer nodded, she would quickly wrap it up with a hot tortia hidden in the cloth and offer it to him respectfully, with two hands, chin down and a slight bow. She treated every portion as if she was diapering a baby and all of this for less than 50 cents.

Her movements fascinated me. I think I witnessed the practical meaning of pure honor and humbleness for the first time and I felt big tears welling up in my eyes. Although it’s been 12 years since, I tear immediately up to this very day, as her image comes up in my mind. Even now at the moment of writing, and every time I re-read for editing. This person strikes a very deep trans-personal chord in me, and I remember missing home and feeling deep gratitude for the life that I have.

I was flooded with those feelings that people experience in the presence of Gurus and after deep meditations. Was she even a real person or a fallen angel, a portal channeling the misery and beauty of the world’s poverty? “Hey, Peténera!” she calls me suddenly; “there’s your bus”. Between all the hard works burdening her wrinkled curved body she was able to keep my request in mind too.

Six years later I arrived in Guatemala again, and the bus from Antigua to Panachchel dropped a few passengers at El Ranchio junction. The noisy peddlers did their routine but my eyes wondered beyond them, hopelessly looking for the world’s grandma with the chicken pot tripod. Six years of physical labor in this blazing sun must have killed her already. And no one else was selling chicken tortia. Maybe she had no offspring or maybe she was irreplaceable. I mean, the function is always replaceable- everyone could sell chicken- but one’s imprint on the souls of people they meet while doing that function is unique.

Twelve years have passed since the first and only day I saw her, and I see her image so clearly and that’s the only thing I need to think of in order to cry on demand. It makes no sense but so does life. And she ended her life without knowing her ripple effect; not knowing what she meant for a strange person in a strange country that engraved her on its heart as a symbol for honor and humbleness; not knowing she was and will always be someone’s portal to that tree of life, that something deep and unclear in the root of the world.

That is how I imagine sometimes the Goddess, the feminine part of God. In the Jewish tradition we call her Shehina and the story tells she is being exiled to earth where she suffers with the people until they’re ready to become her and heal that consciousness to reunite with God. So while in exile, she might as well be selling chicken tortia at El Ranchio junction. But since she is the Goddess, her every move is meaningful and fully present, revealing that grace that awakens one’s ability to see the world for what it truly is for just a moment, to connect to its texture and experience the suffering and the beauty wrapped together like a chicken in a tortia, only to emerge as pure gratitude in one’s heart.

p.s this story has nothing and everything to do with thanks giving. For those who celebrate it, feel free to share this story on your holiday.

]]> http://absolutecarmel.com/?feed=rss2&p=295 0 http://absolutecarmel.com/?p=284&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-wagging-tale-theory-or-zen-and-the-art-of-social-media http://absolutecarmel.com/?p=284#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:00:07 +0000 carmel http://www.absolutecarmel.com/?p=284 Suggested background music for this post:  Ironic/ Alanis Morisette

Read this post in Hebrew

Does web content model follow mass media or the long tail phenomenon? I say neither and both. The web is in constant flux, thus content created in one context is consumed in another. And too often, whatever you wanted to say so badly faded away so fast, while that misfortune discharge becomes written in stone and that stone rolls around and gets consumed by the masses. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the wagging tail (trademark!) theory of the web.

The true story of social media content is a tragedy: when you share from the heart, let’s face it, your ‘long tail’ is pretty short, and you get used to its familiar warmth, far-off the public eye though right under its nose. You know you’re basically talking to the same ten people and you’re getting used to talk intimately, update some too-much-information statuses and treat every application as ephemeral conversation, more ephemeral than speech even, since it disappears from the news feed even before your three best friends have seen it. Sometimes the sea of information is so noisy and vast and the flow is so fast that it feels more like you’re echoing your thoughts into the web void to be dug by no one.

But right there and than when you get comfy with being a netzien and start speaking your mind freely, the pendulum moves and the tail wags: it’s always a short forgotten tweet about a person no one assumes will ever bump into it, that one video in which you really embarrassed yourself, or the one too personal/outrageous line in that too-long-too-read-anyway post… and the tail wagged! – Forward, retweet, share, link, like, rate, tag, digg – and you’re flooded, penetrated, taken out of context and tossed to the masses, fried on the tribal fire while the social media exposes her mass media teeth and your last sane thought is: why didn’t I think for just one second before sharing broadcasting this???

Social media is a fickle bitch

Social media is a living creature, social media is a fickle bitch, on the web everything moves and flows and changes without rest and you cannot enter the same application twice, heck you can’t even tweet the same tweet twice (try it, I am serious!). Everything changes; everything passes in a diabolic speed, but where to the rivers of Information flow? To a bottomless dark server-pit that unfortunately remains publicly accessible though only Google and selected info mining algorithms can pull it from under the cybernetic ground to stab you in the back with it.

Sometimes this wagging tail makes you feel important: when the PR person of a firm you complained about digs up your blog post and writes an apologetic comment, or when the constantly unavailable costumer service reacts to your whining tweet, but sometimes it’ll make you feel mean or stupid, when the celebrity you gossiped about shows up in your mailbox or the aunt you forgot you had in Australia participates in the YouTube meme mocking you.

But when you really wanna be heard, when you have something beautiful, useful or important to say, no one will hear it, even your long tail is chopped, attention-dried and with no mind-share left for you. And your three best friends will give you that speech again, how reading you DOESN’T equal caring about you as a person. Even when you wear your heart on your tweet, squeezing your best into 140 characters, no one gets to see it, and your beautiful tree falls silently in the woods. And it gets worse: some day, someone else will say something very similar, much later, in a lesser beautiful way, but more people will dig it, and it’ll get popular, might even get its own Wikipedia entry. Randomness is a fickle bitch too.

The economy of attention moves at the speed of thought: when you put all your cards on the table she sniffs and turns her back coldly only to turn back suddenly just when you took your clothes off, dazzling you with her spotlights, flipping contexts and frames on you like flipping a coin. And only social media experts are arrogant enough to think they have recipes for this fickle flip flop.

Since every media is social by nature, I assume “social media” refers to these days of digital folklore, when society IS the media, and the message is carried on the heart muscles of the people, thus each and every one of us depends on the change of heart of each and every one of us: should we spread the virus or break the chain letter? So if there’s a recipe for social media success it must be a very ancient one, for whatever touched people from the dawn of times has never changed, even when hearsay was replaced with tweetsay and word to mouth became word to mouse.

I have much more to say but like every tragedy it’s time for the (social media) choir now. Wagg your tails.

Over 50 years of mass communication research and we still don’t know how media effects work. We can map an effect; we can see the numbers going up and down, we know media influences public opinion somehow but how? It’s not as simple as brainless imitation of media behavior, so what is it than?

While pondering that, Elihu Katz was looking at models of personal influence as a different issue. He suggested we all have opinion leaders among our acquaintances that mitigate media messages for us and we trust their opinion and often shape ours accordingly. He called it the two steps flow hypothesis.

And now we’ve got a third component in this equation: the web, a space in-between mass media and interpersonal communication and now we’re wondering how bloggers or other web agencies make influence happen. Half the literature on bloggers compares them to journalists assuming their influence model is mass media like. The other half tries to frame bloggers in terms of collective action or even social movements suggesting that their influence might resemble personal influence models.

Those social networks early media research tried to map are alive on today’s web. But the meaning of opinion leaders has changed. They no longer have to be real life contacts. The real life component in the perception of acquaintance and trust may no longer be relevant. In a time when boundaries between mass media and inter personal communication blur, your personal connections might be colonized too by commercialism and be interest driven, while an idealist blogger you follow might earn your trust. It is the genuine passion and reflective transparency that makes an opinion leader whether he is a journalist, a blogger or a childhood friend.

I came to think of the need to redefine opinion leaders in the age of the web during my ethnography of the political campaigns in the Israeli blogosphere. Here’s a paper I gave about it at AoIR 10 a few weeks ago:

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bloggers as opinion leaders: AoIR 10 paper from carmelv on Vimeo.

Blogger’s influence was evident and could be separated from mass media due to pushing different agendas, but the process of influence in the making was yet to be analyzed through defining blogging practices. Do they do it like journalists or like activists? The answer was a little bit of both. But maybe both aren’t that different. Maybe the cognitive process of influence is one, maybe mass media stories always influenced us in the same way personal influence worked, but this could be spotted only after getting used to celebrity and fandom culture.

Maybe we feel personally close to mass media figures, we perceive their passion as genuine, and we trust their recommendation like we’d trust a friend’s. Maybe that’s why we let journalists and actors become our politicians too. Opinion leaders cannot mean people we actually know anymore because the meaning of actually knowing has changed and dissolved into a subjective perception of itself.

To be continued (in terms of research)….

Today, for the international day fo peace I want to share a personal selfish thought with you. If you’re not Israeli you can either sympathize with me or hate me for it (and if it really touches you, it should be able to feel a little bit of both).

Pumpkin spiced latte

It’s a Starbuck’s original. I’m having it almost every day for the past two weeks. It became part of my routine here and drinking it feels so foreign, exotic. It’s nice to get used to something that you won’t be able to have when you’re back home. In a globalized world where you get the same things everywhere; in the Internet era when you can be on facebook, twitter and skype with your friends and family, and experience the events back home – I hold on to those little differences that weave the sense of actually being in another place.

I’m in Hawaii, carrying out a routine of paradise on earth, and yet I miss home so much. I get to be in a fantasy setting and I find myself longing to just hang out with my dog again in that ugly square near my house in Tel Aviv. The Americans I meet feel lucky to be Americans. They always assume all of us Middle Eastern would rather be Americans too and be away from all of this war crap. I don’t blame them, they got long immigration queues that give them that idea, but I find it hard to explain to them why I can’t really make myself at home anywhere but in my home. Why I love visiting their country and all other countries, but no matter how many years I’ll drink it, that tasty pumpkin spiced latte will never “taste like home” for me.

Home is where ______ is

What’s that got to do with peace day? I’m getting there. You see, I happen to live in a place of dispute. My ancestors claim it was their promised land and wave their bibles, while some of my neighbors and web friends claim their ancestors were on that land too and hold keys to the old houses they fled from during our independence war. How would an American feel if a Native American will knock on his door one day and claim his ancestors actually owned this land before there were U.S property laws and he should just evacuate himself to Canada or something? (At least until the Canadian Eskimos will realize they can pull the same trick…)

The Native American (or in my case, Palestinian) may have a point there, but would you leave the house you were born in, the only place that you will ever call home, because the guy has a point? Furthermore, will that guy really feel like home in your house? I’ve talked to this Palestinian guy online and he told me his family is originally from the Israeli city of Safed and he dreams of coming back home.

Since he was born in Gaza and never saw safed, I was compelled to ask him: Are you sure it’ll feel like home to you? Safed is a myth to you as the vague Promised Land was to my biblical ancestors. I’ve been to Safed a month ago, it’s a very poor city living of its peculiar mystical tourism. Honestly, after you’ve seen the city I bet you wouldn’t wanna live there. A home is not just a construction or merely a location, it’s what was cultivated on it and in it and with it, and it’s the culture and the community that emerged in that space and has already merged with it. “And that, my friend” I told him, “isn’t yours. It can’t be yours. It’s foreign to you, and you’ll feel it”.

The secret formula of home

Many people ask me how come I continue to live and love Israel, why won’t I use immigration as a form of resistance to my government’s actions. Heck, I even threatened to do so myself, many times. But obviously I can’t. I mean, of course I CAN, technically, I’m a friendly educated person with a global consciousness that can take root practically everywhere. You can remove me quite easily from Israeli territory but you can’t remove my roots – the Israeli culture and identity – it is with the same roots that I go to a foreign land and although it will rarely be noted on the surface, my roots may never really fit in perfectly in the new soil.

Even if I wander as far as the north pole, I’ll always be asked where I’m originally from, I’ll always be held responsible to something by someone, I’ll always feel guilty about something, I’ll always care about everything that happens back home. *sigh*, yea, home will always be “there” even if whatever I had there didn’t exist anymore.

It’s not politically correct but it’s true so I’ll just go ahead and say it: as much as I am peace seeking and sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, and aware of the injustice that keeps me safe in my home, I am still grateful my home is unchanged, that the circumstances that make it my home are maintained.  Living in Israel you normally meet Palestinians who speak of an independent country in Gaza and the West Bank and that seems just fine and far away, but when abroad or online you meet many other Palestinians that speak of the entire land as Palestine, that want to return to Jaffa and Safed and hey, wasn’t Tel Aviv actually “Sheikh Munis” once?…

I fear that the concept of home, like love or identity, is a complex caotic fractal, a secret formula, that if I change one component I’ll lose it entirely. Tel Aviv just won’t be Tel Aviv under Palestinian rule, with a flock of new Palestinian residents or when its people and cafes and beaches are moved, as is, to Uganda. The geography and ecology create symbiosis with the community and the culture: it just doesn’t grow the same way in a different environment, in different circumstances.

There’s no clear right or wrong, both sides have rightful claims. Palestinian grandmothers should be allowed to return to the homes they fled from and at the same time Israeli children should be allowed to live in the homes they were born in. It doesn’t matter that it’s a small territory barely spotted on the world map while vast fertile lands wait to be inhabited someplace else. This is the fu**ing home for both of us and that’s that, i guess. Go figure. May we find a more peaceful and creative way to share it in a way that maintains those secret ingredients that make it a home for all of us.

The people of Israel live, homeless

As I was wrapping up this post a miraculous thing happened. I overheard the Israeli hymn, the tikva (that means “hope”), coming from downstairs across the street on waikiki beach, played by a homeless violinist. I left the computer and went down with a video camera. By the time I crossed the street he was already playing the popular “Jerusalem of gold” and I managed to capture him with the finale of the patriotic chant “am Israel chai” (which means “the people of Israel live” and is often sung by religious people in hard times, to cheer us up and remind us of the liveliness of our people and what we accomplished after all that we have been through).

The mixed nationalities tourist audience cheered without even realizing what they listened to. During the break he took after “hava nagila”, the homeless violinist told me he wasn’t even Jewish, he just knows many popular violin tunes from different cultures and he was playing there for hours before i heard him.

Tears came to my eyes as I realized this was just a message from the universe, from God to me, a manifestation of the ability of my culture to follow me everywhere, even in the most unexpected places like Waikiki beach, and always strike a chord (pun intended this time) weather I like it to matter for me or not.

The people of Israel indeed live and they live practically everywhere in the world, but only few lucky (?) ones can come to terms with calling another place home. I am continuously amazed to meet Israeli people living in the U.S and Europe for many years, seeing success and wealth there and yet giving it all up, settling for much less, only to return home again, to Israel.

Before you have any dialog with us, I think you should understand this about us. It doesn’t justify occupation, it doesn’t justify anything. I suppose even the most serious left wing activist feels this dissonance as he or she still live here and not just write an angry blog from their NYC residence… it’s just how thing are and that’s what I wanted to talk about today. Happy peace day to everyone. I still blog for trust!

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What is home to YOU? Is it a distant cultural memory or the actual smells of your mom’s cooking, the flower bushes outside your house, the angry salesman in the local grocery store….?

I’m in Hawaii right now, on the other side of the world lagging 12 hrs behind the Middle East. I wake up with the beautiful blue-green Pacific Ocean outside my window watching surfer-newbies take a shot at the waves as tropical birds stop by my porch checking out their food options.

On the street everyone smiles, many girls wear flowers on their necks or behind their ears, vendors open oysters and embed the pearls into jewelry in front of my eyes, and within 10 minutes walk towards the beautiful green mountains, one enters tropical jungle kingdom with fantastic waterfalls straight from the iconography of LOST.

If there’s heaven on earth it must be here: great weather all year, colorful tropical vibe and the best of American consumerism’s abundance. But instead of simply enjoying that, all I can think of is why can’t we have that too? Why are we condemned to fight for territory? why people in our area are so angry and obsessed? Why can’t we focus on joy and happiness as a top priority as well?

I used to blame our religious differences for it, but my Muslim friends say religion is used as political means in a much more basic struggle for money and power. So few people play this game and yet they manage to keep entire populations apart, breeding hate and stereotyping each other through misguided media.

Today, 11.9.09, a day that is remembered as an international trauma, we choose to start melting these stereotypes through the impartial medium of blogs and align with the light, the love and the hope. Thus, we start with the basis needed for all of that to breed, for the bridges to rebuild: we start with trust.

It’s no secret that our administrations don’t trust each other and as people we barely trust our administrations, so can we trust each other, as people? What needs to happen in order for YOU to restore your trust in the other side which you might perceive as an enemy but actually you don’t know too much about? What needs to happen in order for us to be willing to take a chance on that?

One thing I realized about Israelis lately is that we desperately need to be safe, always in the comfort zone. And so it’s really hard for us as to bare the risks of openness for peace: we feel we’ve done that before and all we got was hurt and terror, so we freaked out, closed up and built a wall on our land and in our hearts.

However, the same way we don’t close our hearts after a love gone sour and we’re willing to be hurt again in order to feel love again, we need to keep that gate open for peace even if it’ll be abused by some on the way. I know, I’m afraid too. But to think peace will sneak up on us peacefully on our terms only is a bit childish, isn’t’ it?

I mean, do we have any other choice but open our hearts in trust even when it’s hard and scary, especially when it’s hard and scary and pray love gets the upper hand?

What do YOU need in order to open up to trust again? Bloggers from the EuroMed area will blog for trust today as part of the “restore trust, rebuild bridges” campaign. Please join us: add “I blog for trust” to your posts, spread the word or record a video response to our clip.

[video]

I would also like to recommend a new blog that attempts to build such a bridge to warm up the cold waters of the Israeli-Egyptian peace. Meet Mr. Foul and Mrs. Falafel. I strongly recommend following them as it seems it’ll be both informative and funny.

I blog for trust,

Carmel, Honolulu.

read more bloggers who blog for trust:

Ezz tells the story behind our meeting he never told me before

shehata tells about the monk and the samuai

Sarah tells a tale about a bridge

Stephen Spillane’s flower of identity

samar’s story about the blue glasses

Laurent podcasts for trust

Ari suggests a buttom-up approach

Mehdi writes for trust, in french

Michail asks 5 questions and gives 1 answer

Xavi: 4 funerals and a wedding?

Many religious people await the mythic war between the light and darkness without being aware that the war is already being fought and they’re in fact aligning with darkness. It is the war between the people who love only the ones who are similar to them, and the people who love and embrace diversity. The war between people who think there’s only one truth and they’re holding its key and the people who see the complexity of many truths in different contexts and for different people. The war between those focused on exclusion and separatism and the ones focused on inclusion and connectivity.

Last week, an anonymous killer still running loose, started shooting at a community center for gay teen in Tel Aviv. Two teenagers were killed and 15 were wounded. The liberal city of Tel Aviv in the democratic country of Israel was shocked such a hate crime is possible, but some said that they always knew Tel Aviv to be a liberal bubble, inside a country that 46% of its people think being gay is a form of perversion and its formal religion explicitly bans gay relationship, comparing them to animal sex and condemning the parties to death.

These are not the words of God. There are enough God-wannabes spreading disarray through messages “channeled” by different people, only nowadays we take them less seriously than our BC ancestors. God, the spirit and consciousness of all living things, cannot be a fundamentalist, cannot afford to exclude some of its parts. It’s not so divine and barely even makes sense: if God wanted everyone to follow the same rule he/she/it wouldn’t have made everyone so damn different.

God doesn’t live between the pages of a book and doesn’t speak only to the ones who grow beards. god is in the world, it is in the details, in the small things, in everything. So God must love colorfulness, God must love diversity because unity is made of diversity and a ray of light breaks into the colors of the rainbow. This is the true face of God. Indeed, we’re all made of both light and darkness, like the Yin & Yang symbol suggests, but are we aligning ourselves with the light, containing our darkness, or aligning with the dark, swallowing and oppressing our light?

Some of my best friends are gay and I always thought sexual orientation was a private thing and either than that one could hold various opinions on different issues, but I understand now that being a gay activist and having a gay identity is necessarily taking a liberal stand, it must also mean being feminist and respecting minorities etc. We identify with complex identities in order to create bridges: while our national identity might be rivalry, our sexual identity might create something more important in common for us.

I stand with the gay community in Israel these days because it moves me to see them forge a strong political identity due to recent events, showing everyone their true size and true colors, and I’m so proud of them. God has made them a bit different so they could appreciate the beauty in our differences and help fight for the freedom of love, thus I count on this community as a partner for the vision of a new world.

I took this footage (with English subtitles) at last night’s memory, pride and tolerance rally held in Rabin Square a week after the brutal shooting:

[video]

]]> http://absolutecarmel.com/?feed=rss2&p=224 2 http://absolutecarmel.com/?p=212&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=alf-euromed-bloggers-training-the-video http://absolutecarmel.com/?p=212#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:34:04 +0000 carmel http://www.absolutecarmel.com/?p=212 I have blogged about an aspect of this unique experience but told you almost nothing about the beautiful bunch of people and the stuff we did. I’m making up for it with 2 videos: the first introduces us, our blogs and our blogospheres in various exercises we got to do on… paper! The second video is culture night, when each blogger presents their culture. Watch out especially for Samar from Tunisia who truly stands out. Only 20 years old and holds a Guinness record as the youngest author in the world (12). I’m sure one day she’ll be a great leader in her country and I’ll be happy I knew her.

[video]

[video]

On the second morning of the ALF bloggers intercultural training, the Luxembourg abbey was turned into a casino: we were seated arbitrarily at 5 tables, and Xavi, our non formal education trainer, taught us to play “Barga” (which is Whist with a twist). After every round, the winner moves to the right table and the loser to the left, thus two people are replaced at each table. Oh, and we aren’t allowed to talk during the entire game. What we didn’t know is that every table got slightly different game rules that were taken from the table when the game officially started.

Identity politics, decaffeinated

I lost the first round, and as I walked towards my new table, I realized the game must be a metaphor for immigration to a new culture. Indeed, this new table culture was weird. When they claimed I won, I laughed and showed them they’re crazy in sign language but I was happy to go back to my original table. I was zigzagging between winning and losing so I visited only two tables besides my original and the vibe there was weird. I played calmly without even understanding the rules by which I was playing, letting others lead and assuming different interpretations in different tables. When I got back to my table I was received with hugs and laughs and I was so happy to come back “home” I was almost sorry I was winning again.

At the end of the game we broke the silence and broke down the metaphor. We perceive ourselves as liberal and global but “Barga” proved we all fall into our unaware cultural stereotypes when we encounter uncertainty. I was the classical Jew, turning her home-table into a happy sticky Jewish family, focused on the community rather than the laws, and although I seemed assimilated at other tables I was clueless, I wasn’t having fun and I couldn’t wait to be back home. Deep down I think I even believed my table had the real and right understanding of the rules (the chosen table? Mmmm).

Another blogger from my   original table, Greek Orthodox from Cyprus, took upon himself the missionary/imperialist role and spread our rules to all other tables, confusing players even further. The “world” gave in to him until he met resistance from the Palestinian blogger, who was sick and tired of being confused. Later she confessed no table felt like home and she was angry and felt deceived by everyone. I felt great compassion to this “trust no one” refugee consciousness that we share in our cultural genes, although we employed different strategies to deal with it.

The Lebanese blogger confessed the game felt like Lebanon for her, when every group plays by different rules and the only way to survive is to form alliances. She indeed formed an alliance with the British blogger and they were showing drawings to newcomers socializing them to the rules they’ve established. Finally, kudos to the Egyptians that were adapting quickly everywhere, having fun and winning, bringing back new integrated methods from other tables.

Tolerance means stepping outta the comfort zone

We went back to our study room, confused and troubled, to get some theoretical explanation for what we felt. Xavi explained people do everything to get back to their comfort zone but real learning occurs in the stretch zone only. However, if you stretch too much you’re in the panic zone, where anger, hysteria and frustration kill learning again. When one is able to endure the stretch zone, growth happens and one’s comfort zone expands.

When we encounter Otherness most of us become ethnocentric. Even if it doesn’t normally get to the point we deny the Other’s humanity or defend ourselves from their danger, we all minimize. Minimizing the Other is a sublime daily ethnocentrism in which we come with good intentions (or just politically correctness) to respect others but we are pretty fixed on our views and think their interpretations are lesser than ours. Xavi asked us to entertain the idea we are rarely in real dialog. We rarely listen when we are truly open to accept and integrate.

This intensive training actually provided numerous opportunities for me to dive into the stretch zone. The farther I’ve stretched was probably the culture night, as I had to witness the Palestinian blogger present Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth which to me form part of Israel. When she joked even Jesus was Palestinian, I couldn’t find my sense of humor to remark that Mel Gibson must stand corrected and do another movie to get off our Jewish backs.

Honestly, I didn’t expect I’d be bothered but this training proved the Jewish gene comes uninvited; channeling through me that ancient fear of being homeless again, losing that little piece of land that comes without the peace of mind anyway, after my ancestors paid such a heavy price for it. My voice was still a bit shaky as immediately afterward I started my presentation, thanking God I went for stuff like Bamba snack, Ilan Ramon and the Israeli high tech creativity rather than retreating into the state city of Tel Aviv, my comfort zone.

Being strong means becoming comfortable with the stretch zone

That night I cried. I couldn’t’ sleep and I wasn’t even sure why. After two days of reflection I think I can offer some explanation, though. I cried because the stretch zone isn’t necessarily a fun place to be in and growth is a painful process. I cried because both our people are nomads nobody wanted around, and instead of embracing each other we duplicate and mirror the exclusion.

I cried because we fail to break the magic cycle of victim/aggressor, celebrating the panic zone or rushing back to the comfort zone at any cost. The Israeli public opinion is too edgy to be stretched these past few years; it looks away and pretends it didn’t notice the price paid for restoring comfort zone ASAP.

I cried because I am constantly attempting to ground myself within a vortex, when half of my community consists of dark souls, disgusting racist morons, and the other half consists of amazing, sensitive and creative people who bring so much light and knowledge to the universe, who can turn swamps into a heaven with a research institute beside it. And all and all, that’s all I got, that’s my home-table. I cried because the things I’m ashamed of and angry about in my country equal the things I’m in love with and proud of, and even if I resent my family I still love it and depend on it for my safety, like a tree can’t deny its roots.

On that culture night, the Palestinian blogger brought bracelets as give-aways with Palestine’s flag colors. I took one home because I feel uncomfortable to look at it, but every time I look at it I’m stretching out a bit, experiencing that little sting of real encounter with Otherness and the threat to the ego that comes with a competing frame for my reality.

And by looking at it I’m reminding myself that being strong isn’t about arrogance or defensive attack. It’s about taking deep breaths, feeling and containing the anger and anxiety and taking baby steps towards feeling more comfortable with that.

* I find this title ironic since Luxembourg is peaceful to the point it puts you to sleep.

]]> http://absolutecarmel.com/?feed=rss2&p=191 11 http://absolutecarmel.com/?p=186&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-liverpool-in-tel-aviv http://absolutecarmel.com/?p=186#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:38:13 +0000 carmel http://www.absolutecarmel.com/?p=186 When i was 14, my musical taste was completely kitsch, on the scale between Modern Talking and C.C Catch… My first encounter with quality was Suzanne Vega’s first album. I was hooked and ever since i followed every other singer that imitated her style, from Tanita Tikaram to Alanis Morisette. It’s been over 20 years and i still remember by heart the words of “Marlene on the wall”, “the queen and the soldier” and even able to do a perfect acapela performance of “Tom’s diner” which I’m saving for some electricity-cut-in-a-Karaoke-bar opportunity….

Suzanne Vega is already 50 years old and her voice and looks have barely changed. On Sunday i finally got to see her preform in Tel Aviv and i forgot how much i love her. Even her new song “New York is a woman” was love at first sound.  She gave two performances in a row that day and I’m happy i went to the second, since we got a second encore with “in Liverpool” that was sorely missed by the audience of the early show. The YouTubers say i got the best quality materials from that performance, so enjoy a clip of the best moments:

click here for part 3