More Catching Up

   Last night while R and I were at a poetry reading, we got a good hard jolt--an earthquake--that made me realize that I was well and truly home in Southern California.
  All is well, though this made me feel it is probably time to put together, belatedly, the earthquake kit I never quite managed to construct.
  But it also set me, as these scares do, looking into the recent past and thinking about the people and places I visited on my journey to Israel.
  On my trip, I spent time with people I had not seen or truly spoken with in years, met close relatives who were strangers to me, and learned things about myself and my culture(s) that I had never before grasped.
  Most importantly, I realized for the first time that there is no substitute for first-person experience, though armchair travels are pleasant and have their own charm. Steeping oneself in the smells, color, life, and of course the sights of a place is the only way to grasp a culture, a people, a region.
  It is hard to believe that not quite a week ago I was in the city of Haifa with my intrepid cousin Dan.
  Even before I came to Israel, I  knew I wanted to visit the Bahai temple in that seaside city, atop beautiful Mountain Carmel.
 Not being a Bahai, I cannot pretend to inside information about the place, but I can testify to the impression it made on me, and also the desire to return to Haifa and explore that city much more thoroughly than I was able to do this time around.
  Something I learned: there are a couple of ways to explore a place.
  One can get on a tour bus, as I did in Jerusalem, and ride around the city, getting a cursory tour of a place packed with worthy destinations, all with an eye toward coming back later and doing a more thorough exploration.
  Or one can pick out one tiny corner of the fabric and explore it as thoroughly as one is able in the course of a day or a few hours, filling the fragments of time left at the tag-end of a trip.
  In the case of Haifa, I chose the second course, since there were other things we had to accomplish that day, which called on me to deliver a few copies of my yoga chapbook, Balance, to my cousin Judy, who had brokered the sale of these books to her yoga teacher, whose class I had attended while visiting Judy in the North.
  It took a while to find the Bahai complex, which takes up a huge chunk of real estate at the top of the mountain. Initially, we had only one address, but it soon became evident that there were many more ways to approach the temple, more addresses, representing entry and departure gates. And we were on foot, having scored a scarce free parking spot, struggling uphill for much of our day in Haifa in the warm, overly warm, sunshine.
  From the street, shielded by discreet greenery, it was impossible to say which of the amazing vistas we saw  from the sidewalk overlooking the city was directly related to the Temple, and this of course is part of the effect of the place, when one realizes that the things seen separately, in innocence or ignorance, are actually part of a larger design.
  We forged forward, from one false entrance to another, until we found a spot in a queue for tourists, mostly part of organized tours, aboard those lumbering behemoths of tour buses that blocked the narrow roads and made driving the hazardous sport it often seems to be in Israel.
  Even then we had to dodge another obstacle: the request by the guard at the gate that I show my passport.
  Though of course I have a passport and couldn't have made the trip without it, I didn't make a habit of carrying it around with me. Too easy to lose.
  So I took my cousin Dan's advice and let him do the talking for me, as a resident of Israel. I was with him rather than with an organized tour.
  If our way up Masada had been haphazard (he lacked a hat, I was wearing long pants in the heat of a desert afternoon), our trip down the temple's 700 steps, carved into the side of a mountain, was also. I had forgotten my hat in the car, where we had also left the large water bottle we shared between us.
  Bahai is a recent religion, the most recent major monotheistic faith. Like the cities such as Akko or Caesarea built on mounds constructed of layers of previous cities, this religion incorporates elements of earlier faiths, all with the intention not of superceding them but of embracing them.
  Indeed, oneness of peoples and faiths is a major theme in this belief system, which is marked by a modern desire for rationality and a belief that people can turn their collective will toward overcoming the darkness in their own nature.
  The building of the Temple itself stands as a monument to such an effort, carved into the side of a mountain and maintained by donations offered by the faithful alone. The Bahai accept no donations from anyone outside this core of believers, though it obviously takes millions to maintain this place, to irrigate the extensive gardens in an arid land, to keep its buildings in good repair.
  The tour guide, an observant Jew, regaled us with tales of how difficult it has been to keep up the gardens. He drew our attention to the steep hillsides,  where it takes 3 people to mow the lawn: a man and a lawnmower have to be individually harnessed by ropes to keep them from falling off the mountain.
  Yet the goal of the Bahai in constructing this place has not been to control the natural world so much as to restore it.
  Our guide pointed out some brown spots in the lawn, declaring that these represented the garden's success in attracting local wildlife--wild pigs, whose foraging had gouged the otherwise perfect surface of the green ground cover.
  And the various buildings of the complex, like a quasi-Greek temple (the administrative center for the Bahai faith) and others are built mostly underground, extending for many stories down into sheer rock and earth, so as to minimize their effect on the environment and the view.
  This is an effort other urban planners could learn from and that all of us could aspire to.
  On an earlier day, I had visited the other holy site of the Bahais: burial place of their founder, near the city of Akko. But lacking the attentions of a tour guide like the one we listened to at the temple, we didn't quite grasp the significance of what we were seeing.
  And so on this day on top of Mt. Carmel, I saw with new eyes the wholeness of this site, something I had to witness for myself in order to comprehend.