Now and again I take a walk on my own. My body needs the exercise and my mind needs to dwell on nature. I carry my thoughts with me into nature, like a farmer with a packet of seeds. looking for good earth in which to plant them so that he reap a good crop.
Like seeds, thoughts take a long time to develop. Adulam Park, helped my thoughts to grow. It's a place where beautiful natural scenery surrounds one with flowers of every color, wild barley, waving green in the light breeze, gentle paths up and down the soft rolling hills of the Lowland of Israel, between the Mediterranean and the hills of Judea, in line with towns of Biblical fame, Bet Shemesh, Maresha, Azeka, Lachish and Gat.
All of a sudden stone walls of old towns make their appearance, perched on the tops of hills, overlooking the lands, where farmers of Biblical times tended their vineyards and barley fields.
One gets the feeling that these farmers enjoyed a peaceful existence, working hard, producing the good wines and pure olive oil, for which Judea was famous, before the foreign conqueror came and sucked all the goodness out of them and later forced all those who didn't follow the Christian or Moslem beliefs to flee for their lives.
They fled far and wide, mostly to countries inhabited by people far behind them in cultural achievements. They brought their know how to those new lands and helped them prosper, until yet again forced to flee because powerful greedy nations, used religious ideas as an excuse to get rid of them and take their land and force them to flee still farther afield.
In each of the places where they once lived they left their departed loved ones buried in the earth, they loved so much. These graves tell the story that no one can deny, that they once lived here and loved the land and one day they'd be back to start the process of cultivation and building one again.