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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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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Each of Us is a Listening

I have been known to call myself the girl with the words. Language has always walked with me, the way some people know intuitively how to plant perennials so that they appear in just the right colors at just the right times and other people can throw open the door of a seemingly empty refrigerator and create a meal that will make your mouth water even as tears of joy pour down your cheeks. I am an amateur in the garden and the kitchen, but words colonize my brain and tumble out of my mouth, sometimes with mixed results. I can be a ventriloquist, speaking other people's unformed thoughts, but I can also be indiscreet, saying things that are better left unsaid. It is my observation that most of us discredit our gifts. Anything that comes so easily can't possibly have value. In that spirit, I have often worried that my love affair with language might be facile, immodest.....and here I am doing it again.

To mediate my self-doubt, I consider our mythic origins, the stories we tell ourselves about creation that add the dreamscape of consciousness to the irrefutable hard facts of science, for a certain balance. You don't have to believe the literal truth of scripture to resonate with its stories. In Torah, the world is created through speech...."and God said let there be light." The New Testament tells us "in the beginning was the Word." Language, this endlessly transmuting, shape-shifting opera of human and divine agency, predates the manifest world. Words come first. Speech is sacred. Sound is central. Sound is also the last sensory input to fade away when one of us passes out of this clamorous life into something more expansive and hushed. A dying person will fool you by appearing to be unresponsive. But even if you believe she is unconscious, she can hear your words and register their key, their intention. I mention this because I was too sick with the flu to fly to California when my mother was dying in a nursing home in Berkeley. My mother and I were sharing a virus the way we used to share a hot fudge sundae at the counter in Schrafft's. I called to say goodbye, to offer a prayer, but all I could hear was the whoosh of the respirator and the chatter of the nurses. I put loving words out into the world, but there was too much interference and I wasn't sure that they had been received. In my mourning, I reflected on the primal nature of listening, the ear that heard and continues to hear creation unfold, even at the very end of life.

Each of us is a listening. We receive the harmonies and cacophonies all around us, the stories the world tells, even when we are unaware of them. Each of us apprehends the surrounding sounds, speech, music and silence through our own receptors, unique as fingerprints. Running water. Scraps of Russian in the street in Brooklyn. Inshallah. Miles Davis. Mama dada. Hands up, don't shoot. What we hear depends on where we are in the world out there and where we are in the world in here, inside our awareness.

Hearing is symphonic in a way that seeing is not. We can only see what is in our range of vision, but we can hear many sounds coming from multiple directions and various distances simultaneously. Sitting on my porch, I hear the traffic on route 7 in the background. In the foreground, I hear birdsong. I know that for me sound has its prehistory in my mother's heartbeat in utero and will follow me to my final breath. I pray that the music I am playing in response is for the most part gracious, tuneful, and that I am making my best effort to hear the songs other people are singing.

I am not always successful. I was born listening, but I have so much to learn about how to understand the sounds I receive. I want to hear more of what other people are telling me, unadulterated by the interference of my own soundtrack, and I want to develop the ability to edit out the toxic static. Noise pollution. Political vitriol. Gossip. My own interior drumbeat of regret, judgment, worry.

When I am free of all that racket, I can listen to the world with the ears of a newborn. I can hear the onions frying on the stove, the breeze whispering. Sometimes, I can even hear the silence that precedes sound.

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Americana

Sometimes, you have to take a vacation. You don't actually have to leave the house to do this particular type of traveling. No packing, no tickets, no delays and cancellations, no sciatica from sitting in the same position on the plane for hours on end. This kind of vacation - let's give ourselves permission to plagiarize Ferlinghetti - is a coney island of the mind. It originates in the decision to give it a rest. By it, I mean all the slime of public life in this election year, as well as Orlando, Istanbul and Dhaka. I'm thinking of the pictures of children in Caracas standing in front of empty refrigerators, a shelf with one mango. I mean the feral rightwing populism spreading like mad cow disease in our country and throughout Europe. I mean the reality of climate change, right here, right now. To the anguished verse of this dirge, I'm adding a chorus of all the very real life struggles, my own and those of all the people around me, all the people I care about. Today, in the face of all that, I'm singing a different song. I'm going rogue, re-inventing myself as a person who is not exquisitely attuned to every ripple of suffering near and far, making space for celebration. Just for the Fourth of July.

Understand that growing up in New York in the '50s with the family name Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel in the news every morning, I was not brought up on patriotic overtures. We did not see ourselves as Americans in that fireworks, picnics and parades kind of way. My mother and father, well-spoken and beyond reproach, liberal Democrats by profession, were themselves raised by immigrants and had not yet acquired the full complement of native mannerisms. The next generation, of course, learning its lessons from Hollywood, from Dick and Jane, became more acclimated to the cultural landscape. We became more fully at home in our home. Now I live, literally, in a Norman Rockwell town, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the artist lived and used local people as models for his paintings, a cop and a young boy at a lunch counter, a family gathered for Thanksgiving. I know these images are sentimental. I'm not entirely delusional and I'm disdainful of American exceptionalism. But just this once, I've decided to make a random list, in no particular order, of aspects of life in our country that give me pleasure. Just this once.

I love the oceans, one on each side, framing the prairie and the mountains; the approach on the dunes at Marconi beach in Wellfleet where I drag my clammy canvas bag stuffed with towels, sunblock and those books I look forward to eating for lunch. I am all expectation advancing along the walkway, rose hips and and beach grass growing courageously out of the sand, until I see it, the Atlantic, and it disrupts my breathing. I love the Pacific at Big Sur, more enormous than the imagination, where I went to prepare just before my mother died. The sea stretched endlessly before me beyond the cliffs and the sky glistened overhead. I felt safe entrusting her to their care, my mother as I remembered her, breasts escaping her skirted floral suit, her hair stuffed into a pink bathing cap. In recent years, I have fallen in love with the Mississippi, doing its Mark Twain thing through the humid Minnesota summer air. Habits being hard to break, I find myself thinking about slave ships and steamboats bringing their human cargo downriver. But I catch myself in the act and wag a finger. Not today.

I'm listening, instead, for the sounds coming up the river and filtering into the aural awareness of people up north and all over the world. Gospel, spirituals and bluegrass, the indigenous music of the American outback that mothered the blues, jazz and rock and roll. I'm hearing all the sweaty, raunchy, gravelly, unschooled, uneuropean music that I listened to and danced to when I was young. Girl groups in slinky, sequined dresses, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East, come to mind. This was the soundtrack of our newfound sexuality and the rhythm of protest. We stopped for grilled cheese sandwiches off the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to the March on Washington in 1963 and put some coins in one of those juke boxes right over the table so we could hear Little Stevie Wonder do Fingertips Part II. Stevie was 13. I was 18 and teetering on the edge of understanding.

Still, this is a frenetic pace. I need America's pastime, a drowsy ballgame to rock me into dreams. I love all forms of baseball, major league at Fenway and Camden Yards and the Oakland Coliseum, vendors tossing bags of peanuts in their shells through the air; minor league parks like Wahconah in Pittfield and especially little league fields. Watching an eight year old take on those ritual moves, fading back to make a catch in the outfield, practicing a menacing batting stance, my optimism is restored. Baseball is a reprieve. When I'm tired, overburdened by pointless suffering that I can't remedy and need to give it a rest, baseball creates just the right level of white noise for a luxurious and unapologetic nap in front of the tv on a holiday afternoon. With any luck, there will still be a measure of well-being in the world on the Fifth.

Fragmentation

I have not been able to write since Omar Mateen walked into Pulse early last Sunday morning. There did not seem to be anything I could contribute to the keening over the bodies of the mostly young, Latino, gay men who perished in Orlando, even though I was feeling it in my cells. Even now, I certainly have nothing to add to the shameful, deafening second amendment brawl we are forced to listen to. I feel unworthy. What can I say in my state of secondary bereavement that could possibly comfort the mourners, allay the fears of people in communities under siege, gay people, Muslims in this country who are not extremists or psychopaths? I understand, quite suddenly, the awareness suffered by the children of Holocaust survivors. You experience the horror deeply, but at a remove. You weren't there.

At the same time, I am weighed down by the suspicion that things are going to get much worse before they get better in this homeland holy war. America, smugly distant from the rest of the world, an ocean away from the fighting in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe, is eating itself alive. A daily fusillade of hate rhetoric rises to a pitch until it explodes into real automatic weapons fire, the whole country a fragmentation bomb. On the Right, there is a story that people tell each other about good guys shooting bad guys. In this fairy tale, a salsa dancing reveler reaches for the gun strapped to his ankle and takes down the terrorist with the AR-15. Never mind that under other circumstances these same second amendment junkies would probably not be in a hurry to defend the rights of gays or brown people. They just want more guns. They can never get enough guns. On the Left, there is another story. In this beloved sentimental fiction, a tragic event, the slaughter of twenty children or forty-nine Latin music fans, proves to be the tipping point, the moment when sanity finally prevails and the culture begins to dress its wounds. Never mind that gun sales go up dramatically every time there's a mass shooting. Never mind that several bills proposing minimal attempts at gun control have already failed. You know I want to believe the redemptive vision, but some days, forgive me, I just don't. If Chris Murphy isn't standing on the Senate floor day and night, I waver. I seem to be a person of little faith.

You can see why I've been reluctant to write this past week. The day before the assault in Orlando, I was sitting up in bed trying to read Don DeLillo's latest offering, Zero K. The book is a chilling, kafka-like fable about mortality. Out of nowhere, my eyesight became fragmented, as if the normal optical mechanisms had gone on vacation. Objects in my field of vision were shattered like the pixelated images on TV of criminal associates in the witness protection program. Everything looked like broken glass, nothing cohered. It was an ocular migraine which passed in a half hour, but during that time, I recognized clearly that things fall apart. I understood that this fragmentation is one aspect of both the natural order and its poor relation, the social order.

It is easy from this point of view to become a teller of the third tale, the one that takes place in a despond of cynicism, a place to be avoided if possible. So far, I have encountered two living artworks that have had the power to rescue me from this swamp. The first was the sight of a woman I care about deeply beaming at me from twenty-five feet away in the produce aisle near the strawberries. I beamed back. We never spoke. Our connection was a bridge of endearment, not engineering. Chris Christie has no authority over that bridge. The second was the discovery of a sheep farm on Seekonk Crossroads in Great Barrington. I haven't been on that road in a long time and apparently missed the arrival of more than a hundred sheep, milling around in all their biblical wooliness, making their consoling, reassuring sound. It turns out that sheep have a bad rap. These sheep were not falling in line, mindlessly conforming to expectations like Republican congressmen. They were a peacefully congregating community of equal beings, absent any scent of blood lust, the living antidote to cynicism. Meeting them unexpectedly allowed me to breathe. I exhaled fear and inhaled hope and remembered for a moment, as Howard Zinn has written, that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. It is all those things.