Photos from SEKEM

Nikki asked if I could put a few photos up... here's a few impressions from SEKEM, the initiative that is now launching the university that I am working for.

A misty morning over the Calendula fields.


This is SEKEM's own mosque. It is the simplest mosque I have ever seen anywhere in the Islamic world. This simplicity and the plain beauty in its oval shape really make it a place of concentration, meditation and prayer.


Our companies at night. Left is the textile company Naturetex (with lights on), right is Atos, the pharmacy company.


At our Spring Festival in March: One of the Bedouins that have been working in SEKEM for decades. Many of them roamed their camel and sheep on and around the land that is now the home of the SEKEM Initiative. When it started in 1977, it was nothing but desert. For miles.


This is a part of the bi-annual complete circle with over 900 Employees, students and trainees from all parts of SEKEM! This was for the occasion of the Spring Festival.


Here it is -- the complete circle!

I saw a one-armed motorcyclist yesterday.

Slain

Something special and beautifully random just happened, but with the kind of randomness that might as well be destiny:

I killed a mosquito.
With a book.
By opening it on a random page and closing it quickly as the damn thing flies off the wall.
It left a thick blood mark in the margin of that page.
My blood. From last night, during which I only slept 3 hours.
The red mark was next to a single word at the beginning of a line.

The book is Khalid Gibran’s “The Prophet”, from which I have quoted before.
And the single word is ‘heart’.

The blood-marked passage reads (and I could hardly believe it):
“When you kill a beast say to him in your heart: ‘By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.’”

Friday at last...

It's been a while now since the last real Friday. Today, though, it has finally come again. The farm is quiet. It is already afternoon, so the mosques have gone silent till the evening. Only faint village-sounds come through the open window from the few houses that lie beyond the mud wall across the field from our kitchen.
I just went to get water from the well in front of the school and the whole place seemed suspended in serene piety and joyful calm. Our house still hasn't been connected to the sweet-water system - the slightly salty desert water that comes out of our tabs is OK for showering etc, but doesn't make the tea taste very much like the British tea I'm used to - oh how I remember those days when Chris and I were both studying in our rooms and I could hear him get up and shuffle into the kitchen with his red glittering slippers. "Wanna cuppa tea, mate?"