Cynthia Lenssen Broshi  shares her Jin Shin Jyutsu Journal – Israel in The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter, issue Number 44, Spring, 2004:

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We wander the hills north of the Kibbutz, exploring dolmani – prehistoric cairns – three walls of stacked lava rock, roofed with massive flat stones. Sitting atop one, what a view!…to the south and west is the lush agricultural land of the Jordan Valley; to the north the ice-white and wild-cloud veiled Mt. Harmon, and beyond her, the hills and snowy peaks of Lebanon dissolving into lavender-blue sky. The Golan Heights surge up from here, eastward into Syria.

This is the second day broken with frequent booms of artillery. Helicopters pass overhead and occasionally louder booms shake windows – planes, always in pairs, breaking the sound barrier. People shake their heads, concerned and not knowing: practice maneuvers or “an action”? Thoughts of the human lives on both sides of the fire are heartbreaking.

The heart breaks with the ecstasy of this landscape. Such beauty, which has borne millennia of human desire, human hope, human design…the commonality of our suffering…and such divinity and mystery – while marked by human endeavor, past and present, the spirit of this land and the yearning of its peoples are untouched. The song of our one Source pours endlessly. The heart breaks, is entranced, is widened, lifts.

It’s a sultry, spring-before-spring afternoon. Three days’ sun has crusted the mud and sweetened a warm, thick grass. The narcissus aren’t yet blooming, and most of the red poppies have been eaten by previous generations of cattle, but a few early anemones open wide, violet and smiling. Tiny cyclamen – white, sugar-pink, edged with mauve – cloak the rocky ground and flourish, light-footed, in the crevices of rough black boulders. We pass the gravesite of an elder revered as holy in the Arab village which stood, now in ruins, higher up the Golan, and the three ancient oaks whose branches, in the early years of the Kibbutz, held ribbons of colored cloth tied by villagers in prayer. These trees guide us into a ravine and down the path through a solid web of reeds to find Mahayana Kadosh: the Holy Spring.

It’s a sudden clearing. Here sinuous limbs of an old fig tree vault a round space, light and dappled as new water. From thick branches snaking down towards earth and back up towards sky have jumped a lacy grille of aerial roots, diving into the soil, sprouting still half-rolled leaves…the first gnarled trunk here…over there a younger and there, one more…three trees with dozens of child-roots from and within a single tree. The highest branches weave a lintel, warding off the wall of matted rushes whose darkest crowd form the cave from which emanates an arm’s length plain of silvery, silky water…so smooth and pure that the cocoa-colored silt and round pebbles of its bed appear untouched and magnified.

High above, wind in rushes, and flute-like is the song of an unknown bird. The stream moves, silent as invisible Breath. Here, awaiting us, like the “young country” of the Kojiki: bubbles of algae glisten like drops of oil, suspended in their womb of opalescent water. I must bring my nose up close, close as my eyes can still focus to see: their roundness is built of tiny spheres of algae, all densely green yet foamy and refracting light into spherical rainbows; and the immense expanse within each foamy bubble of bubbles is lanced with reed-like shoots of even tinier aglae spheres densing into strands…flaring upwards…a microcosm…a universe…a beginning…a yearning.

“…when the land was young, resembling floating oil and drifting like a jelly fish, there sprouted forth something like reed-shoots. From these came into existence…deities…” Kojiki, translated by Donald Phillips.

Thank you, Cynthia.

Thank you, Mary.

Thank you, David.

Gassho, Namaste, Blessings

All issues of The Main Central Jin Shin Jyutsu Newsletter are available at http://www.jsjinc.net.