Talk to Me

I pray because it helps me to remember that I'm still here. Much of the time, I am wandering around in my life, daydreaming about missteps in the past or possible pitfalls looming in the future. If I find myself unexpectedly in the present, I am likely focused on explaining the origin of the stain on my skirt to the woman from Ecuador who works at the dry cleaner or concentrating very hard on cooking the pasta al dente. Prayer happens when I simply notice that I'm alive and spontaneously feel a boundless gratitude for this existential situation that I can't explain. I can't explain life or death. They are equally mysterious. I am just awestruck. To give the experience some shape, I sometimes begin with a prayer formula, like the Hebrew baruch atah adonai...I say, dear God, Holy One of Being, thank you for this day. Other times, I don't speak at all. I simply see pictures in my mind's eye, a place of vision that is not dimming with age.

Lately, I've been reflecting on Psalm 118:24, This is the day that God made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. The first phrase comes easily. This is it. This is the day. It will not come again. There is an awareness of mortality folded into this is the day. Every time I open my eyes to this knowing, I see that my days are numbered. A minor slip-up can catapult me out of life and into something else that I cannot be expected to understand. I can be taken by surprise. I can be taken. The Hebrew word zeh, or this, is one of God's innumerable names. This and this and this and this. Anguish and babies and elephants and grapefruit. Thunderstorms, Tolstoy and dog shit. All happening, all renewed in every sacred sunrise.

Like light from a distant star, let us rejoice and be glad in it has only just arrived in my awareness now that I am in my seventies. I am not being called to party which I was once very good at. I am not being asked to pretend that people in Syria are not being attacked with chemical weapons or that people I love are not suffering. The psalm is suggesting that I remember to rejoice in my aliveness, my witness. Beyond that, it invites me to join in the universal heartbeat. Let us rejoice...for better or for worse, we're all in this together. The witness is collective.

I wasn't brought up with prayer. Like many people, especially people from largely secular Jewish backgrounds, I found the idea of prayer foreign and disquieting. It felt like a form of propaganda designed to disempower me, to transfer my agency to some invisible, elusive, but at the same time all-powerful being outside of myself. Alternatively, I would worry....what if I'm just talking to myself when I think I'm praying? But over time, the border between my consciousness and the larger consciousness became porous. I now feel less earnest about prayer, more like a small child humming and telling stories to myself while I draw pictures with crayons or look for pieces to a puzzle. Small children are still connected to the breath of life through words, music and images. All of us project our individual experience out into the collective story that some people call God. We just don't call this prayer. Children understand how the limits of one person can dissolve into the enormity of all there is. When I come to that understanding, I can sing the truth of a particular moment, while washing dishes, walking in Stockbridge, drinking cold water on a hot day. Even if the prayer arises out of a sadness in my life, I lose exclusive ownership of it when I share it with all that is listening. The sharing is an act of generosity, a way of saying, here, take this piece of me, even the anxiety and the despair. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.


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The Persistence of Nature

Written after traveling in Minnesota and Wisconsin

Who are the people who feel what the earth feels? Who are the ones who do not position themselves outside of nature, looking on with varying degrees of empathy, but understand instead that they are embedded in nature, that their cells are the cells of dromedaries and daffodils. Without them, the weeping earth might experience an even greater sense of abandonment. But nature is persistent. It doesn't give up without a fight. So even as skyscrapers rise like towers of babel over the teeming streets of coastal cities, thrusting uninhabited penthouses into the clouds, and even as the sea rushes over the streets at ground level and the water we drink is contaminated, nature gives birth to certain people who are indigenous speakers of its original language. These people are here to translate the stories of tigers and typhoons to make them intelligible to the rest of us. They are here to bear witness from inside the integrity of the cosmos, to give testimony to its grief and its yearning to communicate. They travel incognito, like lamed vavniks, the thirty-six holy people of Jewish spiritual culture said to exist in every generation, who in their essence preserve and transmit sacred teachings without ever identifying themselves. It may be that they don't even know the purpose they are serving. Still, without them, the rest of us would stumble along messing with the syntax, missing the nuance. Most of us can't grasp the long arc of nature's narrative. We are still learning the vocabulary. We think that the suffering is happening somewhere else out there, that we aren't all breathing the same air. If we are fortunate and watchful, we may stumble upon a teacher who invites us deep into the forest. Meetings between generous teachers who have something to pass along and students who are hungry for learning are not arranged marriages. They arrive like thunderstorms, unexpectedly drenching us in awareness, lifting the veil from our eyes, and illuminating the murky, cluttered world so that we can see its heart.

My eleven year-old grandson is that kind of teacher. Here he is reaching out to caress a snake like an Appalachian serpent handler, familiar and unafraid but without the religious fervor. Here he is arranging his backyard vegetable garden according to the inclinations of the plants, tomatoes next to basil as if anticipating our human salad preferences. Standing knee-deep in the creek with his sun-bleached hair winding its way down his back, he is the kind of boy who says getting bitten by a snapping turtle one day in July was his best birthday present ever. It hurt, of course. But he respects the way of the turtle and rejoices in their meeting. He is the kind of boy who floats down the river in a kayak and stops for a long minute to make eye contact with a motionless deer who stares back at him in some kind of appreciative recognition. Somehow, he has inherited the gestures of the Ojibwa and Dakota, native to his home in Minnesota, and wakes each morning to the commotion of modern urban life, feeling somewhat displaced, unnerved. I imagine being born into the wrong time, the wrong sensibility, possibly even the wrong species, might be a little like being born into the wrong gender. He might be literally a fish out of water. To cross into the other non-human world, he will spend hours with his pole and line at the pond or the creek and wait for one of his fellow creatures to visit. Then he will carefully remove the hook and throw the catfish back where it longs to be. It's their brief time together that sustains him and that gives him the intimacy with animal life that he craves. He is continuous with the natural world, an intermediary between its infinite secrets and the hooks that the rest of us hang onto. Without him, I see the trees, but rarely the forest. To me, his city-born grandmother, he is a necessary link in the chain of being. Just a boy doing a boy's thing, but somehow also an adept, a messenger and interpreter from the great unclothed world.


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