wailing wall.

erf. what.

just went to the wailing wall. with zero expectations. and i’d have to say that it is the coolest part about the trip so far. yes, rivaling — and beating — petra.

huh.

maybe the reason for it is that it was more of an introspective time when otherwise the entire trip has been filled with extrospective bramblings. bramble. bumble.

hm. so. going there was pretty powerful. it felt that way. perhaps it was something about thousands — millions? — of people dumping their wishes and wills and prayers and concerns into this inanimate object… i don’t know that i believe in religion, but i certainly believe in the power of will, of souls, of connectivity. and something about that strikes me as extremely powerful, and really, really present at the wailing wall. shit, i didn’t realize WHAT the wailing wall was, or that it was even in israel. i had only heard of it by name before.

heading up to the wall, it is separated by men and women. men and women cannot pray with one another. it is customary, i guess, to walk away from the wall backwards, with your back away from it. i thought that was stupid. did not comply. maybe it was rude to say that i thought it was stupid, but i say stuff. oops.

… started walking up to the wall and the whole left side of it is the gates that separate the men from the women. alongside that are tables, with chairs, and tons of people sitting by themelves with their bibles or torahs, studying, reading, meditating. then you approach, and many people are doing the same. many are rocking back and forth, mumbling, praying, crying. … .. . even getting close to the wall felt really powerful. a looming presence. a present presence. whatever it means…

i didn’t have a prayer in mind. didn’t even know people prayed there. hell, i haven’t prayed since like, early college. i stared at the wall and considered three sentences that came to mind then and there, and kept them in my mind, and just decided to ramble out whatever else came beyond that. i forget what those three sentences are at this moment. it was almost as if i said all of these prayers and exorcized them from my soul and barely can remember fragments of them now. sherry and i were joking before approaching the wall that we would be praying about world peace and saving the environment, and funny as that is, that’s pretty much exactly the things i prayed about. albeit not in any particularly cheesy sense like that… mostly i prayed for human beins to gain understanding, and openness… to find importance in mathematics and patterns and underlying building blocks in the universe… and most of all, to understand ourselves so that we can spread that understanding outwards. evidently, myself in this stream of consciousness prayer believed that understanding was the ultimate key to, i guess, peace? there was visualizations — waves of energy, radiating outwards.

soon, sherry mentioned that she wanted to approach the wall, which is actually quite difficult considering how crowded it was. you basically had to wait a turn to get close enough to touch it. sherry went first, and came back and told me i should definitely go. i went the next time it opened up…

close to the wall, you can seriously hear wailing. from multiple directions… and even so far as multiple people away. very intense. everyone has her own style of wailing, of course… some mumble, some sob quietly, some cry noisily… .. . and it almost puts you in this trance-like state to be there, amongst all these tears and all this sorrow… again, wasn’t necessarily expecting to pray, but once i got there, i had to. leaned against the walls, and prayed… to nobody in particular… to just a universal energy force… and i prayed hard. got mazed, the physical world falling away… there was nothing but sound — sound and the fury of extending a will.

surrounded by all this sorrow, and with no plan in mind, the first words in my meditations were pretty much, “why all this sorrow” repeated over and over and over, like a mantra. it simply could not be helped. it tumbled out. and then… a general wish for people to attain what they wanted… not what they thought they wanted, but what they really truly wanted… that human beings as a whole would simply learn to go with the flow, to accept life more readily… and that that would yield a synchronicitous reality that made apparent — and granted — what was wanted. and beyond this… again… with the visualizations… a sweeping, swooping orange-tinted force, radiating outwards, scooping up everyone in the wall and bringing them inwards, and then to the entire courtyard, and then to the entire country, and then to the entire world, from a globe’s point-of-view.

what the fuck. i don’t even know. got mazed so hard.

but that is only from a spiritual aspect. later on, we went indoors and underground to check out some parts of the old town, and it was INSANE to see how far down the original streets that jesus christ SUPPOSEDLY walked on (there’s an endless amount of conjecture with no real fact…)… cause at the time of christ, to two thousand years later to 2011… debris and natural build-up puts buries the original land beneath a HUGE amount of sendiment. it’s crazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzy to actually see.

fuck. trippiest night. easy. and it also led the brain to spin off on a bunch of other tangents, including thoughts about my parents, and tons about mortality, in general, and how much i hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate fucking hate religion and wished that i had prayed for some kind of religious unification cause this shit is fucking stupid. as it goes.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESH.

hello israel / life.

i’m listening to… eets feats. (seriously, there is so much good music out there it is RIDICULOUS… .. .)… and now, elika. these are all albums that potentially need to be reviewed. drowning in a sea of them. hmmm probably going to pass on the elika now that it is being played. haha.

i’m typing this up as sherry is sleeping, because it is only 5:26am, but i can’t sleep, because i woke up with good ideas, and now the ideas have taken over my brain and i need to work to make it so! make it sooooooo! i’m waiting to be able to purchase internet but i need to call the front desk, and i wanna wait til she wakes up. the alarm is set for 5:45am. i’ve been up since 4:45am! last night we ate amazing fucking food at this hotel because the buffet was um, amazing, and had THE BEST DESSERT EVER… including this coconut cream thing and this hazelnut cream thing topped with truffle… fuck, but so fattening! i’m eating SUPER healthy — lots of vegetables and fruits and no carbs — except for the fucking delicious desserts! BLAHHH. such good dessert everywhere, it’s sickening. but after i ate all that food last night, i seriously kind of wanted to die. like, i could literally only sit at the dinner table for a really long time, unable to move. for once, we were one of the last parties out of there cause i was food coma’ing so hard. so, i don’t think i can eat dessert like that anymore, needless to say. if you can feel the unhealthy and feel your body like, unable to move to such a degree, then it’s probably a poor idea. it was funny, too, cause sherry and uncle stewart both had similar degrees of food coma; sherry got the mad giggle fits afterwards and was being really hilarious and stand-up comedian-like, and uncle stewart was answering auntie ruby’s questions and halfway through, was just like, “i ate everything here,” and motioned around the room, and never finished answering the question. haha. pretty amazing.

life is good.

in any case.
this is my first time attempting to write anything up from my trip to israel and jordan. currently, i dunno what city we are in, but we’re at the leonardo hotel in the dead sea. it’s fairly ghetto. floated in the dead sea yesterday, though, as the sun was going down, and it was a little strange, to be sure. the dead sea is five-to-six times saltier than regular ocean water, which doesn’t seem potentially all THAT harmful, but i guess if you get it into your eyeballs and shit, it burns like a motherfucker. sherry got some in my mouth and told me to try and taste a DROP… and i did. granted, it was a pretty fucking HUGE drop coming off the end of my fingertips, but that shit definitely burns your fucking tongue. it’s weird.

it also has this thing going where you’ll lift your hands out of the water, and they’re wet, yes, but not in any traditional sense. they actually feel kind of dry. it is BIZARRE. they also have indoor swimming pools with water from the dead sea, and i guess you can float in it, but i’m not sure how they regulate that so that it’s swimmable (since in the sea itself, it’s not really swimmable since you can’t really get it into your orifices without some pain). weird.

the water also burned my legs a lot!!! where i had cut myself shaving! and my face had gotten kind of dry because of the weather (and not drinking NEARLY enough water, fuck), and burned a little as a result, too. pretty weird. came back, looked at myself in the mirror, and realized i looked like hell and a half. look what the cat dragged in!

yesterday, we also went to masada, which is an old ruin of king herod’s. he had some palaces in there (king herod being the dude who ordered all babies in israel to be killed in his attempt to locate the great baby jeebus). masada is in this desert-y area, similar to the area near chan chan in peru! kinda, at least, geographically. same color dirt, same sandwiching between ocean and mountain. hot damn. you go travel the world over and there is much similarity in many places… (mom was like, “this place must be on par with macchu picchu, right?, and i was just like… dude… no way. not even bloody close!) i must say, though, israel is hands down one of the most beautiful countries i’ve been to. yesterday, we were passing this one section of the country that was the epitome of HUMBLING. that is all i can describe it as. it was jus these sandstone (?) mountains, but with tons and tons of manmade caves in them. i was just staring at them in awe FOREVER and didn’t even think about photographing them because they were just that marvelous. and then i finally decided to reach for my camera, got it out, and literally the landscape changed into desert mountainscapes. i was like WHATTTTTT. horrible timing. or purposeful timing from the universe. however you look at it… fine, universe, i won’t capture the beauty! fine!

i actually have barely been taking any photographs here. i think i’ve taken like… 175-ish so far, and we’ve been here for four days or something. maybe that sounds like a lot. i dunno. but that’s also keeping in mind that a lot of those are the same photograph, repeated, because one was blurry or whatever. as far as actual photographs goes, it’s probably about… 3/4 of that, at least.

everywhere we stop there’s these really funny explanatory history channel-esque videos, but with some of the worst narration ever. everything is like, made for old people, and kind of funny. not poorly put together or anything, but just cheesy funny, like science class display or something…

what else did we do yesterday………………………………..

before masada, we went to qu’ram, where the dead sea scrolls were found. there were some interesting paths going up into the mountains where there were caves and shit, but they were blocked off. so there wasn’t all that much to see, but there was this little ledge that was open for exploration, and we went over there and spent a good twenty? minutes there… and i was kind of in heaven! i’ve been on the hunt for a good godamned piece of petrified wood for a really, really long time, after seeing one that i fell in love with years back. i was not able to find the same one that i fell in love with — that was truly a special piece, replaced by black rock and with the wood grain very well-pronounced, still — but i did find some really awesome ones, and i found a really, really remarkable one… hands down the coolest rock i’ve ever found… which i’m going to give robby for his birthday (march 5th) just because it is extremely geometric and i KNOW that he would appreciate it. not everyone appreciates rocks, you know? but anyway. to find a huge stash of petrified wood is fucking AWESOME. none of the people i was showing the wood to were that amazed by the concept of petrified wood, but come on. just thinking about it makes me stoked beyond belief, especially when considering the darker pieces, which look as though they’ve been burned… like! COME ON! WHAT HAPPENED! SO FUCKING COOL!

ARR!

the night before that, i got four hours of sleep because i got a last minute powerpoint project from jonalayn. got $600 for like… three hours MAX of work — probably maybe like half of that of straight working. fugg, yeah. but that also led to me crashing out super fucking hard last night post dessert-binging, jesus. i literally got back, was going to do jumping jacks, i said, but i rolled into bed and never REALLY woke up again, though i did take out my contacts at one point and set me alarm, yarr. but it was like, coma sleep.

oh yeah! one funny update about yesterday! tried using a tampon for the first time ever! just because i wanted to go into the dead sea. uhhhh no thanks to those. dreaded every fucking moment of it! but it’s funny that my first time trying it is at age 27! haha. and that sherry had to teach me. aha!

argh, i just prepped all these emails to be sent and prepared to buy internet, and it was fucking busted! dammit, israel! the hotel we’re at tonight had better have internet. and reliable one! and preferably free! especially since we’re staying there for like, three evenings! if it doesn’t, i’m going to lose my shit!

gwar, gonna go eat breakfast now that i can’t use internet. so annoying!!!

just wrote a CLAPS review at least, though.

frag.