Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 22:04:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Linda Whittaker" Email: olsvig2000@yahoo.com
Subject: shabbat shalom 23.05.08
To: "Linda Olsvig-Whittaker" Email: linda.whittaker@npa.org.il
Hi everyone,
It has been a week of quietly doing interesting but routine conservation work. On Monday I went to a FoE-ME (Friends of the Earth, Middle East) conference on a proposed binational park on the Jordan River, shared by Jordan and Israel. Anybody with time in this country prior to our peace agreement with Jordan knows how amazing a thing like seems to oldtimers. Both Jordanians and Israelis were at the conference, which was held in Jerusalem at the Van Leer Institute, next to the president's house.
Pretty swanky place, I must say. I'm used to working meetings held in crummy prefab ranger's quarters, where you pull up plain wooden chairs to a beatup old table to hammer out park management plans. And of course the "chattering classes" were there, the politicians doing their photo ops and the journalists recording what the important people were saying. It was so boring that I caught myself snoring about halfway through. (Yeah, no respect for Important People, I know...).
Still, there were some hardworking grunt regional planners there and I connected with them. Hopefully I can meet some of them again in Amman, Jordan, at the biodiversity conference there next fall. That would be more fun.
We also made progress on a monitoring plan for Mt. Carmel forests. I was up there last week listening to the wardens, and my botanical partner and I sent off a proposal to our project in Europe to add this to our list of work to do. I think it will mesh nicely, and anyway Mt. Carmel is a nice place to work. It is civilized, and one can always duck into an ethnic lunch in Daliyat HaCarme or something organic at the Carmel Forest Spa. You could almost imagine yourself in California, maybe somewhere around Santa Barbara....I wonder, do people in Santa Barbara ever imagine themselves in the Holy Land??
I also finished a case study of Ein Gedi to add to the Delos Initiative list of sacred landscapes. That was an interesting exercise; a quite different way of thinking about conservation. Had to do it in the spaces between other tasks, but it looks okay now, to my surprise.
Yesterday we had the first Bible study I've had in years. I've been nagging my pastor to start teaching a Bible study group for quite some time and finally he decided to do it. The conference room was packed, about ten people. (One doesn't a group bigger than that because it loses the ability for dialogue.) The topic is officially "the mitzvot", e.g. the Jewish commandments, but it begins as a study of ethics, which is of course a key feature of Judaism. This is meaty stuff and the group warmed up to it as the time passed.
I felt energized; these studies do me a world of good. There are many ways to approach religion and spirituality. Liturgy and worship are the key for most people, I guess, but they never did much for me. Work and study make the connection for me. Maybe it is because I am a lifelong scholar, or maybe I'm a scholar because that is my nature. Work and study have been the central features of my life as long as I can remember, so I guess that is the way I relate to the world.
Anyway I am happy to be doing this. I also ended up hosting a visitor who came to the study, which is a reminder that in fact I am a grumpy old woman who likes my privacy. But I am making an effort to be a good host. Like vitamins, I guess it is good for me. (But what do you do with a person who gets up at 5 am bright and chipper and talking her head off? I just sent her off to walk the dogs, and let me wake up.....)
Volunteering at the cat shelter tomorrow; I missed a few weeks because of my infected hand. It's healed now although still giving some pain which will take time to go away. Meanwhile I can do lighter work. They really need the help, they are shorthanded these days.
shabbat shalom,
Linda
Photos:
Mt_Camel_landscape.jp.jpg (163k) [View]
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