Been hanging out with babies a lot recently. It gets me thinking about the oneness of all being... They're not conscious of themselves as separate from the universe yet - they have no conception of the ego. All the world is one big thing that either antagonizes (wet diaper, hunger, sleepiness) or soothes (rocking, a warm human, singing, milk) them. It's pretty amazing.
I was rocking Avery to sleep tonight. It was so sweet.
Living one and a half blocks away from Castro street has its benefits, but being around on Halloween is not one of them. Thankfully, the festivities stopped, and with them the rhythmic vibration of all our windows.
A & I managed to have a nice night together - making a small feast of our newly arrived produce box (tonight we snacked on a pomegranate while preparing fresh Blue Lake green beans, baking an acorn squash, and accompanying it with a great spanish rice...
Which brings me to a book I just starting reading, After the Ecstacy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield. I'm barely past the introduction, and no, I don't claim to have achieved enlightenment (though I personally believe enlightenment to be a state we get peeks at, not achieve permanantly), so I may be off base here... It seems the gist of the book, fairly self-explanatory as it is, is how to deal with the really real stuff in your life regardless of where you spiritual path takes you.
I feel like that's what I've been doing for the last month or so. The accident, of course, brought things back to some fundamental basics - the life part. After a pretty spiritually heavy couple of months, I have let life flow a bit, without tripping myself out. Too much.
I came to two realizations on Yom Kippur (where, btw, Jack spoke). The things that were really weighing heavily on my mind were a need for community - real committed community - and the fact that our trip to India really changed my life. The first of those I have been putting a lot of energy into at Beyt Tikkun. It is a work in progress, but has brought me great joy so far. The second bit I am just sitting with for the time being. Just allowing myself to think that has changed the way I'm approaching people, work, and life at the moment.
Speaking of life, again, I had (am having) an amazing re-connection experience with a long-lost friend. I haven't seen Joe in over seven years, and have thought about him, off and on, all that time. We were really good friends in college, and I always felt a psychic bond with him, even when we were apart. So, I would occassionally try to feed his name into the latest search engine or people-finder, and always came up empty. My last attempt was a few months ago, when I found him on our school's alumni finder. My luck with that thing hasn't been great, so I didn't hold out much hope. After a few days without a response, I forgot about it. Imagine my surprise, then, when I get an email from him 10 days ago from GREECE of all places! We have been corresponding (I owe him a note - I should be writing that instead of this), and it has been amazing. Joe - I love you!!!
It is difficult to speak of love - or any other fundamental truths in the world - without sounding corny or overserious. It's even harder to write about them, because there is no room for irony or cynicism, which make for much better reading, but here it goes. I guess that can be said for this site as well as this post...
A quick post before Shabbat -
We had a friend over last night. We spent a lot of time talking about her upcoming wedding and our recent one. It got me thinking about those weeks last year leading up to our wedding. I'm not speaking hyperbolically when I say it was a turning point for me in the way I think about the world.
I was floored by the outpouring of love directed at us leading up to and including our wedding day. It was like nothing else I've ever encoutered. I had normally gruff men admit to me that their wives were their best friends, and that marriage had been the best thing that ever happened to them. Friends and family from near and far went out of their way to express their joy at our union. The Aufruf we received at shul was overwhelming. On our way home from the big day in our decorated car, a Berkeley woman stopped in the crosswalk, flashed us a great big smile and mouthed, "35 years." That image still makes me well up.
The tradition is that a married couple can confer special blessings in their first year of marriage. I didn't fully understand the significance of that. After having experienced ours, I know: there is so much love directed toward you in those weeks and months, you have a very special reservoir of it to pass on to others. I still feel it to this day (2 weeks away from our first anniversary), and it STILL blows me away.
That is the power of love (this is where the difficult part happens - whatever you do, don't think of Huey Lewis & The News). The rabbi is always talking about YHVH as the transformative power of the universe. That is love. I really got it. The love that we were blessed with was nothing less than proof of God's existence. Even as I'm writing this, I feel incapable of fully expressing what I mean. There is something that happens when you open yourself up to love someone and take them as part of yourself, and in turn opening it up for the whole world to be a part of. It makes me ever hopeful for humanity. When I begin to despair about all the messed up things in this world, I think of my experience of love, and how it is universal. Everybody can love, it's what makes us human. Ok, that's all - if you got it you got it, if not, then I don't have anything better to say.
We are going away this weekend for an early celebration of our anniversary. Shabbat shalom and have a good long weekend...
Yesterday, I heard an incredibly moving pair of stories on NPR about folks recalling their experiences surviving Hurricane Katrina, almost exactly a year ago. I cried.
I cried because every statistic in that disaster has an equally heart-wrenching story behind it. I cried because every disaster has those kinds of statistics. It's too much for one person to bear, the pain and sadness in this world. Life and relationships are both so fragile, which is what makes them so beautiful.
The Talmud tells a story of Rabbi Eleazar on his deathbed, being tended to by Rabbi Yochanan. Rabbi Yochanan sees that he's crying (after lighting up the room with his bare forearm!), and asks him why. After several miffed guesses, Yochanan lets Eleazar speak, "I am crying for all this perfection, all this beauty which is fading into the earth."
Thank God that we are able to see the beauty and perfection of the world (and its inherent fragility), and also that we aren't so overwhelmed by it at every instant that we are incapable of functioning in our daily lives.
I am writing this on Shabbat, which shames me a little - not an auspicious way to start this blog! But in a way (traditional observances aside) this is what Shabbat is about - seeing the world for what it is and reveling in the grandeur of its creation without trying to impose our will upon it. I am glad for that.
A postscript from Rebbe Nachman:
Know! A person walks in life on a very narrow bridge. The most important thing is not to be afraid.
