Ruins Revisited
Caesarea, Israel
King Herod walked the aqueducts that Bala Krishna and I walked upon. His patron was Caesar Augustus, and that's how this city of past splendour got its name. The ancient place was completed in 9 BC. It has a ten thousand seating capacity theatre, and a hippodome, where chariot races entertained crowds up to 30,000 (remember Ben Hur?).
For a special treat after walking 20 km, southbound to this spot beginning from Havonim, we decided to treat ourselves going through a virtual time machine. There were palaces, a major temple, ancient bath houses and more, all partially intact. A big part of imagining the glory of prosperous times was to also capture the natural unpleasantry. The place was seized over and over again through the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Crusader period, to the the early days of Zionism.
Conclusion, the world is an unstable place. Reading from plaques of what history tells, we were reminded of the world's fragility from Vedic stories of power swaying from gods to demons in their constant back and forth tug of war.
When you walk through stretches of land, the past always surfaces, telling of those who made their mark. Even now as we exist we are contributing to history in the making. Bala Krishna remarked that in the future people will look at our current architectural ruins (they may be disappointed), we concurred; as we were annoyed with contaminated streams of dead fish, we were forced to wade through in order to keep to the beach trail.
I pondered on the eat, sleep, mate, defend cultures of always. We were there and we will come there again. We will meet a Herod again as we did in the past, and so on we go until something changes. The Gita informs us that when ambitions are broken, when hatred dissolves and real love for the Divine is established, then the vicious cycle ends.
20 Km
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