A New Year: The Path of Paradox

 Paradox is the beating heart of spirit. There is a tension between accepting what is and yearning for a better world. Contemplative practices bring us back to the moment, to the startling awareness that, really, this is the only moment that we have. The now carries a gratitude-centered spirituality. In Judaism, we say a prayer, Shehecheyanu, to mark beginnings, the first apple of the season, the first snowfall, the new year. The prayer gives thanks for the gift of being alive in the precious, unrepeatable moment of newness. At the same time, prophetic consciousness whispers in our ear, calling us to lean into the future.  It resonates with the suffering of this moment and dreams of deliverance from poverty, racism, environmental degradation, and war. It is animated by an aching desire for change, for a better life for all the world's people. Gratitude and yearning are the figure and ground, the yin yang of awareness. We wake up every morning in the light of this paradox. We eat it for breakfast.

This year at Rosh Hashanah, I am thinking about paradox and about a blue farmhouse with a wrap-around porch that I lived in for twenty years. The house was opposite an enormous barn. The woman next door owned the barn and all the land except the six acres around our place. She rented her acreage to a farmer who raised beef cattle. The air was pungent with manure and the airwaves carried the deep, comforting lowing of the cows. They made the best neighbors, never playing their music too loud with open windows in summer, never operating machinery early in the morning. They just mooed and chewed. They just stared at our strangeness, like the cows in a Far Side cartoon strip.

Every year in September, the farmer would come over to ask if he could bring 'em over to our side of the road for fresh grass. He and his farmhands would put in temporary fencing with a gate along Division Street creating a large pasture on my side. When the fencing was complete, a date for the cattle herding would be set. The gates on the farmer's side and our side would be unlatched and the herd would cross the road like a group of very large, spotted kindergarten children on a field trip.

Often the arrival of the cattle would coincide with Rosh Hashanah. One year, my teenage son and I came home from services, changed out of our synagogue clothes and made ourselves tuna sandwiches on challah. We took our plates out to the back of the property and sat on the strip of grass just on the near side of the fencing. Several large cows came over to watch us eat. They shooed the flies with their tails and stared at us with loving incomprehension. After a while, there was a minyan and we felt deeply prayerful. We received the new year with gratitude and expectation.

There is value in remembering that the whole idea of a calendar with an annual cycle that begins at Rosh Hashanah is an artifact of the exodus, of liberation. As long as the Israelites were enslaved, every day was just like every other day. There was laboring and there was trying to stay alive in the midst of hunger and violence. The grammar of the calendar is grounded in choice, in an orientation towards the future. Today, I will feast.  Tomorrow, I will plant my garden. Today, I will shop for a new coat. Tomorrow, I will visit a sick friend. But, elsewhere in the world, not very far from the biblical backdrop, life has been reduced to its most primitive. It has come down to surviving another day, without the luxury of imagining a future.

Here in New England, where neither Bashar al-Assad nor Vladimir Putin is trying to kill me, where the American air force doesn't rain bombs down on me either intentionally or by accident, I drink green tea and read a novel entitled Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. I live my day as if everything were alright and then I watch Syria on TV. There are what the BBC calls disturbing images, followed in the next segment by Brad and Angelina in happier times. Carrying the disconnect between the goodness of life and the blood on the streets of Aleppo, not to mention Charlotte, is my greatest challenge as a conscious person. Giving the moment its due, lingering in the memory of bovine communion here, cannot crowd out my witness to the daily struggle there. Understanding that my comfort is an accident of history reminds me that I am here, but I might just as well be there among the hungry, the hunted. Every day offers me another opportunity to acknowledge the miracle of being alive and to hope for an end to injustice, the repair of the broken world.

On Rosh Hashanah in particular, the present is pregnant with the future like a mother and her baby. The gratitude for the present and the hope for the future are entwined in a rapturous caress that embraces the paradox of what it means to be alive.

Glitches in the transmission of my last post, Less Time, More Space have been fixed. Please give it another look.

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Less Time, More Space

 Posted on my 35th wedding anniversary

I remember exactly where I was fifteen years ago when I first heard a spiritual teacher use the word spacious. I was standing beside an enormous desk in a tiny room, more of a hallway really, talking on the phone to a rabbi in Seattle. I knew immediately that the experience of claustrophobia, of imprisonment, was at the root of all my struggles. Ventilation saved me. Not literally opening the window, but oxygenating the narrow capillaries of doubt and fear so that I might be able to see what's out there.

As a child, I experienced a dash of both agoraphobia and claustrophobia. I was visited by nightmares featuring enormous indoor spaces like the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there was nowhere to hide. At the same time, it was hard for me to breathe in small places, the filthy bathroom up the crooked stairs to the attic of my father's antique store. The comfort zone of my personal geometry originated in the five-room New York City apartment where we lived, neither vast nor cramped. It took decades to inhale and exhale into the world outside of that apartment, that family.

Even now, I am preoccupied with space. The outer space of nebulae photographed in the infrared and spiral galaxies in the ultraviolet. The inner space where, on the far side of the somewhat arbitrary boundary of my skin, my memories and intuitions lie in wait, as immaterial as the solar wind. In the middle distance, all the rest of it, the space between you and me, the space between my house and the one next door, the vast space across the Arctic tundra, the Gobi desert and, most remarkably, the subatomic space between particles. All that emptiness we can't even see. The great discovery turns out to be that what's out there is mostly nothing. No walls to close in on you. No fences to separate you from your heart's desire.

Time is a tyrant. It goosesteps through all this nothingness, staring straight ahead, a bit of a bully. Time makes things happen, whether you like it or not, while space just is. Without time, without decay and mortality, space is the Garden of Eden before the picnic. Growth, awareness, suffering, art are all a function of time. In this science fiction movie we call life, we are called to tango with time in empty space. The universe continues to expand. There is more and more space, but the number of chapters remaining in my particular book of life continues to dwindle. There is less and less time.

One way I manage that is to tango backwards, back through history and, better yet, prehistory, so that time is liberated from the hourglass, so that I can experience its elasticity. Human civilization has been around for a nanosecond, a sliver of space-time, only a little more than 5,000- years. Machu Picchu, Chinese porcelain, Venice, fish tacos. We are all infants in the light of geological time. Scientists tell us the Earth was formed some 4.5 billion years ago. I swim in that temporal spaciousness when I go down into the limestone cave in my basement. My house, an 1884 two-horse barn, sits on a limestone shelf. The rock is what remained of the coral after the salt water receded in western Massachusetts. This part of the world, scenic with haystacks and church steeples, was once under the Atlantic Ocean. It was more like Buccoo Reef in Tobago where we snorkled at the turn of the millennium. The fish were chartreuse and aquamarine. The creatures in the basement are grey and brown. The ocean has retreated, leaving only the limestone and my amazement, the caress of the spacious.

Now, with the clock ticking on my sojourn on the planet, the practice of extending my vision in both exterior and interior space-time has become increasingly healing. I understand when a friend facing surgery goes to the beach to visit "the blue doctor." The ocean is ancient and panoramic. Like a Victorian consumptive, I breathe better in salt air. The distant horizon dissolves the artifical boundaries I have created. Going to the ocean is like breaking out of jail. But I don't need to get in the car to travel. I practice contraction and expansion, an accordion pleated way of being. Inhale. Exhale. I breathe in and focus on what is directly in front of me. Purple phlox. I breathe out and hear the prehistoric ocean rushing through my house. Both geometries stretch my awareness, opening me to the long view, backward and forward, and the wide-angle shot, this way and that.

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