Spirit Guidance

I saw a stop sign in Johannesburg with graffiti stencilled on it. Underneath the word STOP it now reads BEING AFRAID.

The mountain village of Tsfat, in northern Israel, is the sacred city of air. Here I inhaled holy history and fell in love with living tradition and truth.

At 7 pm in central Durban, the churchbells pealed so powerfully that the tones streamed out like light into the dusk. I looked up at the tower. Through the window slits I watched the bellringer rhythmically working the ropes for 15 minutes without stopping. Those waves of sound, which seemed as if they emanated directly from God, were helped by human hands.

My eBike is up and running! I'm flying across Johannesburg, zipping up hill and down, and the sense of freedom is exhilarating! This bike plugs into the wall at night and recharges using only pennies of electricity. And it's *pink*, which makes me happy.

Last night I had the opportunity to see Coleman Barks, the premier translator of Rumi, do an amazing performance of 13th century Sufi poetry. Barks chose tabla and sitar music to accompany his reading, and the combination was mesmerizing.

The hills in Johannesburg are steeper than they look, a fact you might not realize until you walk or bicycle up them. While walking, however, I discovered something special: the hills are made of crystals. Yes, the small stones that scatter before my feet are white quartz crystals.

When Johannesburg celebrated the festival of lights in Newtown, I was delighted to see the Indian dancers on stage and to feel the family atmosphere, which lasted long into the warm evening.

Right now the jacaranda trees are in full bloom here in Johannesburg. The branches meet to form a Gothic church ceiling over the street. Nearly as tall as the elm trees of my childhood, the jacarandas carry lilac-colored thunderheads of flowers. Massive yet delicate. They rain their succulent blossoms all over the black asphalt and the grey cement sidewalks, leaving an inevitable tapestry.

If Jerusalem had a scent, it would be cloves, which cleanse the heart with fire. If Jerusalem had a sound it would be the internal song. If Jerusalem had a time it would be eleven o'clock at night, cool-warm replete with love for the fullness of this day and yearning for the next.

Where I'm from, the river. The water laughs, and so the creek is called Minne+haha. The trees alongside stretch upward for the sun and thus are called pine. Minne+sota means "the water reflecting the sky." I am from motion contained by earthly borders.

A man in a Durban hotel lobby, speaking into his cellphone and pacing back and forth with great enthusiasm: "Although not one of us is perfect alone, what I'm talking about is making the Church perfect -- with my presence, the presence of the elders, and the presence of each one of us. It CAN be done!"

I recently read a book called The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie: four intertwined biographies of Catholic writers and philosophers from the 20th century. Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O`Connor, and Walker Percy may have acted like ordinary human beings at various times in their earthly lives, but I think they are saints.

This afternoon when I put my key into the gate lock, another shape the size of the key darted off the gate and into the hedge. A tiny gecko lizard. He loves to wait on the gate -- the shiny black metal heated by the sun.

They didn't tell us where the wedding was going to be until the night before. Then they handed us an envelope with a special coin inside, the kind you use for a streetcar. In the morning the families boarded the historic bright yellow tramcar, and it pulled away from the station about 100 meters into the maples and elms, so that as the two exchanged their vows, the car glowed among the green leaves like a lantern of love.