Art By Tali Landsman

Our value system, and thoughts about rural poverty In all the years I have been living in rural New Zealand, I have listened to many talks about rural poverty, about how to create more work opportunities in rural places and how to educate and help those who have few opportunities to make money. During the cultural revolution in China, Mao Tse-Tung had the idea to build numerous industrial factories all over rural China, to provide work opportunities to farmers and thus eradicate rural poverty. His experiment was not successful. Farmers, who had labored hard in the fields, but also had quiet and uncomplicated lives, working in the fields by day and listening to the crickets and the cicadas by night, abandoned their crops to become factory workers. They lost the basic joys of peaceful rural living, in order to earn meager amounts of money that never made them financially abundant. Instead of enjoying harvests, dancing in traditional clothing and celebrating ...

Memories and Reflections On How To Prevent Police Brutality  We retain memories very selectively. When reflecting on the past, it is obvious that many names and events fade into the grey unconscious, while we vividly remember small moments and seemingly insignificant events and things that were said. I think that we remember certain events from our own perspective, and retain fragments of things that were said to us, because of the healing that we still need to do inside. But this thought about the nature of memories is apart from what I wish to share. While living in the USA, I have noticed that often the national news is filled with reports of horrific police brutality. Once, while reflecting on the subject, a remote memory from my own childhood surfaced from the past. It was a summer holiday, and I was reading in my room on the second floor of our house in Raanana, Israel. I heard people screaming, right below my sister's bedroom window, which faced the quiet st...

Our Upcoming Trip To Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro  I often hear people say things like: "I am a country boy, I love the smell of horses, the wild outdoors, and I hate city lights," or "I am a simple person, I have no big needs" or "I am a blue collar traveler, I only stay in budget places and avoid crowded cities," etc. These are just a few small examples of how we "box ourselves" into fixed categories.  Life is dynamic, and when people define themselves too narrowly, situations will unavoidably end up making them unhappy. It is best to be flexible and dynamic, and not to lock ourselves into a rigid mindset of likes and dislikes. We can be adaptable and enjoy a wide array of experiences. Of course you can make choices based on your predominant preferences, and spend most of your time and money doing the things that you think you enjoy most, but it is also good to try new ex...