PTS asked me to write stuff. I told them maybe, because I couldn’t guarantee it, because I’m already working close to 24/7 doing photos (daytime for creating them, nighttime for editing/deleting—just like life). Then John Morton asked me twice to write stuff, and twice I told him I couldn’t guarantee it. Then he said he would be OK if I wrote as much as I did around 25 years ago when I was around 40, as if this was some kind of compromise.

Writing can be fun though. You get to lie with relative impunity. Everything is a lie and God is the only truth. But some lies are closer to the truth. Some are more dead and some are more alive. Bob Dylan said that a song is anything that can walk by itself.

On the plane going to Israel I have so much energy that I have a hard time sleeping even though I have a fully horizontal bed. Usually the healing that erupts from these trips starts weeks or months in advance, with the lava flowing equidistantly through the past and the future. The energy from this one has been transformative, dream-altering, sleep-bending, and has been affecting me for weeks, burning out any holdings-on and thought-I-knew in its path.

I don’t know when this trip really started, but I think it could even go back to when I almost died in February (3 days in the hospital like Jesus in the tomb, and a colonoscopy instead of a crucifixion—“these things that I do you too shall do and even greater”—or at least more comfortably).

Or maybe it goes back to visiting the concentration camp that my grandmother inhabited in 1941, while we were on the MSIA trip to France in 2015. Or the subsequent death of my father that enabled me to inherit a violin that my grandfather purchased before his suicide in Germany 1939, which enabled me to endure a few months of body-recovery after my colonoscopy-crucifixion, in great ease and comfort, cared for by a girlfriend who looks and acts remarkably like my grandmother and mother.

Or maybe the trip started in Colorado in May when I had a sharing with John Morton that helped to heal both my illness and lifetimes of persecution-induced anxiety, and my family’s history in Nazi Germany, and god-knows-what-else.

On one of the last trips that J-R was on in around 2012 he told me “take care of yourself” and I thought-I-knew what he meant, but I didn’t understand the depth of the implications of it, or how far I had to go to follow it, until the chain of flames hopped forward in time to this trip. J-R’s communications toward the end of his life as he became more “zen” were like barely-audible rumblings of volcanoes to come.

My body has been slowly returning to normal and only came 100% back into action, coincidentally (ha ha) just in time for the start of the trip, going from barely-ambulatory to full speed in about 4 months. Like everything else on this Traveler path it’s been pain-free, graceful, and easy. When I was in the hospital John wrote and described the experience as “more fun”—and it was. I just had to give up some physical-body indulgences, and buried anxiety and impatience, and I couldn’t afford the luxury of a negative thought (that’s the title of a J-R book whose meaning I thought-I-knew). And now, like the songs of Bob Dylan (née Zimmerman), I can walk by myself.

Today is the first official day of the tour at the Dan Panorama Hotel at the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel. Kind of like southern California with twice the heat, four times the anxiety and eight times the impatience. Why do we always seem to do these trips in summer? Easier to start fires, sauna-like physical purification, more accurate outer reflection of the inner expurgations of Spirit? With the Traveler, the outer has a responsibility to keep pace with the inner. You can’t just sit yogi-like on a mountaintop without the lava catching up with you—which reminds me of a dream with J-R that I had just after my first Israel trip with him in 1987 (those trips included Egypt and were called “PAT IV”), long before I started doing photos-art-music-writing, where he said, “Spirituality isn’t sitting on a mountaintop. It’s poetry. It’s the sphinx.”

Orientation meeting at 6 pm. A couple of cancelled flights, several lost suitcases, no lost people. J-R said “not one soul will be lost” but he didn’t mention luggage. There’s about 100 of us. And probably everyone has a story like mine, some maybe not as dramatic, some more. There are lots of people who’ve never been on one of our Israel trips before. I’d say by the raise of hands it’s at least 2/3 of the group, maybe more than 3/4.

John seems transformed into a younger version of himself, back in the tour-shepherd role he played on so many Israel trips of 30 – 40 years ago, giving everybody a taste of the energy of those original trips. He looks happy and at-home to me, like someone getting a chance to revisit a particularly pure and tender part of his life, and as I’m photographing him, magnified through my lens, something in his eyes and his body movements reminds me of the younger John of the PAT IV trips.

Logistics, intro of tour assistants, more logistics, then dinner.

It’s 3:30 am and hopefully God and John and the lords of karma are satisfied that I’ve written enough and I can go to sleep, but I still have a lot of energy. More than before my “illness,” more than before I left.

View the Photos from PTS Israel Tour Day 1