Omer, day 4 (and 5, there at the end)

Time is difficult.

It seems as if there is either way too much of it or not nearly enough. Half the time, I feel as if I'm straddling some wildly bucking beast, trying to hold on for dear life, sure that I'm losing the battle.
The other half of the time, there's a huge expanse of forever falling away from me, and every step I take leaves me farther away from its end - trapped by Xeno's paradox, in which I can only reach the halfway point from here to anywhere, never the end.
Of course, there's also the other other half - where I'm paying attention to something else entirely, and time slips by before I notice, and by the time I do, it's too late. I don't exactly know what it's too late for, not always, but I get a nagging itch to chase after it, to capture it back (as if I had passion of it in the first place!).
Time is so difficult, I end up with three halves of it.

Thing is, I spend so much time looking for it, chasing it, trying to bend it into submission, I run the risk of missing the time that is right here. See, I always want it to be the Big Moments (can't you hear the capital letters?), those grand entrance kind of timestimes require horns and huzzahs, perhaps even parades and confetti.

Even that grand expanse thing, that endlessness of forever time thing - it's the twin side of the same coin. Time isn't slow or boring. I make it stretch and grow until it blots out the sun. It's so big and endless, I still miss the stuff at my feet, the time that is right at my fingertips.
I forget the beauty of the right now. I forget the depth of small moments. Oh sure, it's not all profound and exquisitely joyous. Ugh. That would be the fourth half of the difficulty of time. No, the right now is just that - here, unfolding with or without drama (the "with" would be the completely within the moment kind, rather than what I slap on from outside of any particular moment of time, reeking of sweat and desperation).
One of the gifts of counting the omer, of this time of mindful intention, is that I can, once again, right-size my relationship to time. It is neither bucking bronco or infinite expanse. I can stop chasing all the other moments, stop killing time or wasting it.
I can be in this moment, this here, this now.
And with that, day four flows into five of the omer. Welcomed to now.

Gathered Family - a poem for the Omer, day 3

You are the gathered family,
the one found along the way,
not necessarily the one
of bones and blood; met, probably,
before time was measured
in hours, or days,
but merely collected,
like rain in a bucket.

Long past this now,
these hours, this day,
when hearts sigh, and grieve,
and all your gathered family,
we found ones who have loved you
since before time was counted,
we will carry you with us,
a sweet memory of gathering,
of finding along the way,
and blessing.


for my Aunt Donna,
zichronah liv'r'cha

The Sum of all my Baggage

Welcome 2018. Happy new year!

That said. I've already had my New Year, filled with all the pomp and circumstance that Rosh Hashanah can hold. Except this year, I was a little too preoccupied to notice much of anything, except that too-sharp focus of hospital sounds and silences. There was grief to be felt, and family to be held close. There was a miracle of healing, even within that circle of dying. 

Even missing that new year, we Jews do it right and manage to celebrate four new years throughout the course of asingle  365 days plus a smidge cycle. In addition to the hoopla of Rosh Hashanah and the birthday of the world, we celebrate the new year of trees, the reign of kings, and the tithing of cattle. We have a full service concept of years, old and new and everything in between.

Time is less a linear function, and more something with rounded edges. Today may be a beginning, and yesterday an ending, but those concepts tend to be muteable. The line between them is less engraved in stone and much more drawn in pencil. Or eraseable ink.

Never one to waste an opportunity, I will use any excuse for demarcation to, well, mark the journey. I will gladly use these perhaps arbitrary, possibly holy  and certainly randomly awesome moments to do a little diving, a little reflecting. I declare this day, this arbitrary day of firsts, to bend the light a little more, and so enter this new year a little more solidly. A bit more knowingly.

So to begin, at this beginning (at every beginning) I pause, and take a moment or three to ask my favorite question: what do I carry withme , and what do I  leave behind? I am the sum of all my baggage - carried, dragged, dropped. left behind and taken back.

Sometimes the weight of it all is crushing. And sometimes, when the wind is just right, and the scent of green is in the air, and I am feeling brave and grateful daring and fierce and bold (or any combination thereof; you get the point), there's no weight at all. I freely offer much of my baggage, all the weighted measures of stuff and ideas and hurts and pains; lost loves and lost jobs, missed opportunities and failed connections - all of the stuff that binds me, tethers me to a present I can only see through the funhouse mirror of my past (so not really a present at all) - and I let it all go, leaving it lie in a muddled heap.

This is my altar. I'm pretty sure, when I drop it all in that heap, and I set it on fire, it makes a pleasing odor to God. I'm just as sure, when it's time to move on, every single thing that went up in smoke, that released me from the bondage of my self, and my past, it's all there, ready for me to pick up again, just as bright and shiny and unscathed as it was before my metaphorical sacrifice.

It's mine, to carry it all again until the next holy bonfire.

Of course, there's a whole bunch of other stuff I can choose to pick up and carry away - things like faith, or courage, or joy. And yes, there are infinite variations of despair and anger and sundry slings and arrows of cruel misfortune that can be distracting and enticing. And yes, I have gone that route more often than I care to admit. There are times I swear I didn't do the picking, that these nasty little packages leaped up and stuck themselves to me of their own accord, really they did.

If I'm honest - and now's a good time to cop to honesty - I did the picking and the plucking and the sticking, all by myself. Ugh.

Still, there are times I go against type, and I choose the weightlessness of joy!

Things is - all this carrying and leaving and taking away - it's a thing I can do every single day. It's unbounded and knows no season. It's not tied to any new year - or maybe, it's tied to every new year, every new day that dawns begins the cycle of a new year. In every moment, I can choose, again and again and again. I can leave it all, burn it up, dip it in amber, take it with me every single, any single day. These days, this journey is a mindful trudge, and so I make a careful inspection and collection of the junk I lug around with me. I am grateful for the mindfulness. Messy as I am, I like frames, and this is a particularly good one.

So. What is it that I carry with me? What will I leave behind? What will I carry with me as I walk to the next altar, the next mountain? Today - just for this moment, this breath, I will sit for a moment, my treasures laid out before me, a sky of pewter and pearl above me, casting dull shadows on the lot. I will sit, and rest, and hope - hope that when I move on from here, I remember to let slip the boxes of pain and fear, so that I have room for a bit of joy, a bit of beauty, a bit of grace.

Happy new year to all I love and hold so very dear. To beginnings and endings and all this lovely, messy, beautiful middle.

After the Breaking

When the light broke,

When it shattered into its

infinite pieces

that drifted

in leisurely Spirals

that caught the odd

updraft,

so that,

just when you thought 

you had hold of one,

it slipped -
a half-skip -

in that syncopated

downbeat to

back up

again.

When the light broke 

in that glorious, 

inhaled

breath

that was -

is - 

will be -

Creation,

there was darkness;

there was light,

There was evening

and morning.

There was day to follow 

night.

It was all there,

in the breath taking

breaking of that glorious

first Light.

When the light broke,

When there was Now

and Yet to be,
each piece,

each jagged, holy piece
that drifted and
caught hold
and held
and drew near
and was neither
here
nor There
Was

(will Be)

an echo
of Worlds
and time,
Waiting, shivering
in eager anticipation,
to be Found
and returned;
to be tethered,
piece by piece
by jagged,
holy
piece,
to the beginning,
to the end,
and the yet to Be;

To become,
Again:
completed
and completely whole,
a single, sacred
Light,
to illuminate
a kaleidoscope
of Then and
Was
and endless
Now,
what has always
been:
olam haba.

Elul Day Eleven: Count

When I was about five years sober, I started listening to AA tapes. For those of you not in the know, these are (were? I would guess that the technology has progressed, but I'm not sure. we alcoholics really know how to cling to tradition and the way it used to be...) Anyway, these were cassette tapes of speakers, folks who shared their experience, strength and hope with us, a simple and profound message of living a sober life a day at a time. They were not Greater Than folks. we were not Less Than others. They just really had a story to tell and did it amazingly well.

I remember one such speaker well. I have no idea what his name is. I never met him. He was from California and he was part of the speaker circuit. we learned early on in AA that one of the ways to keep your sobriety is to give it away-- to share, and help another alcoholic to achieve sobriety. As we say, you can carry the message or be the message: pick.

These guys carried the message spectacularly.

So. This guy. He was speaking form the vantage point of 20 years or so of sobriety, and he reminded his (invisible) audience of the value of time. He talked about slips in early sobriety-- you pull together a bit of time, a couple of hours, a handful of days-- but apparently, you're not quite finished with your despair and your love affair with self destruction, not quite ready to get honest, be raw and vulnerable, far away from asking for help and getting humble enough (or desperate enough) to accept it-- and there you are: drunk again.

And that drunk is welcomed back into the rooms with open arms and gentle nods. Keep coming back. It works if you work it... It's ok, we say. We hope you get it. We hope you stay. We hope you get sober. And so they try again, climb up on the wagon and put together some time, a couple of days, a month or three. Maybe they make it. Most don't, but some of us are blessed beyond belief with this gift. Some remain scouts, testing the waters to see if being "out there" gets any better.

I've never heard a story, in over twenty years, that it has. 

So this guy. Again with the guy. And counting. because this is an essay about counting. This guy reminded us that it's about counting. Yes, he declared, the most sober person in the rooms is the one who woke up earliest  today. Today, because we are only given a daily reprieve. So the trick, the joy, the simple, difficult, terrifying and only thing that really matter, is to put together a day. And then another. And another after that. 

A day becomes a week becomes a year becomes a lifetime. Our days count. They add up. They mean something. This is the whole point of it: as we count our days, all of us, sober or not, drunks or "normal"-- we add our days: one + one + another and another to equal a life that counts. A life that matters. 

Now, on this eleventh day of Elul, as I consider my life, who I am and where I fit, preparing to stand at the gates of everything, to walk humbly with God, I understand a holy arithmatic. In living a life that matters, in making my days count, one plus one plus one equals infinity.

PS-- I am a little obsessed with counting. Go figure. I wrote this essay, Time and Light, about a year ago. It;s about marking and measuring time, and how that changes us, and who we might become. I hope you enjoy it. 

~~szr