remembering

Gematria for Nachash (nun chet shin) = 50 + 8 + 300 = 358

Gematria for Meshiach (mem shin yod chet) = 40 + 300 + 10 + 8 = 358

Nachash is Serpent

Meshiach is Messiah

"Nachash is the guide that tempts us to incarnate. Meshiach is the teacher that leads us to wholeness. Two sides of the same door.

"All experience of pain comes from separation. All experience of joy comes from (re)union. In order to have the chance to re-member (-->joy) we need to choose to first forget." - Rabbi Ted Falcon

I am going through my notebooks for the past more-than-ten years, choosing to remember after a long time of forgetting. These notes are from 2002.

with you always, in here

I have posted parts of this Rumi poem other times before, but the moon is very bright tonight, and it's both the birthday of my friend & rabbi, Ted Falcon, and the first anniversary of the passing of my friend & teacher, Bill Mitchell, and these verses are whispering again in my mind.

Be Melting Snow
~Rumi~

Totally conscious, and apropos of nothing, you come to see me.
Is someone here? I ask.
The Moon. The full moon is inside your house.

My friends and I go running out into the street.
I'm in here, comes a voice from the house, but we aren't listening.
We're looking up at the sky.

Lo, I am with you always means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There's no need to go outside.

Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.

taking care of the name

"We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure."
~Macrina Wiederkehr

I have felt lately as if I'm walking on the bottom of the river, and all the words and images are on the surface, in the light, where I can see them but not quite reach them right now. As I begin to describe what I'm seeing, I imagine they will seem to be separate fragments, and numerous, floating there on the surface -- but from down here they I know that they all send down filaments that criss-cross every which way, in time and space and meaning, way below the surface, and that's why this is such a long blog post instead of several separate ones.

((.)) This morning I spent a brief time holding the hand of a colleague and friend who last week was diagnosed with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Six weeks ago she was still her radiant self: seeing clients, and writing, and immersed in her wide circle of friends and spiritual community, with no trace or hint of disease. From the outside she looks like she is sleeping. On the inside, I know that her brain has filled with little holes, like a sponge. On the deeper inside, I know that in a day or few, perhaps by the Solstice, she will have completely dissolved back into her radiant Self.
A message just came from the website her family and friends have been keeping, to tell her many circles that our friend "...left us just as the Solstice came to be this mid-morning of June 21, 2007. She is free now to move to another plane, her abiding spirit able to move to even greater heights. She had a smile on her face as she departed."
The last time we had coffee together was a few months ago, and we talked a lot about our mutual friend Bill, who died abruptly in January.

((,)) Last month, I phoned a friend to see if I could join him for a "bird-sit" the next morning, a pre-dawn meditation in the woods that he and some other friends had been doing -- being present and listening as the birds wake up in the morning. It turned out that he was in New York, called back because his twin brother had had some trouble breathing, been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, and then had a stroke while in the hospital. My friend's brother died less than a week later. They had just turned 41 in February.

((*)) In March, a cheer-ful and energetic woman whom I got to know while we were in Israel in 2004, was diagnosed with cancer in the gallbladder and liver, after having had many months of stomach pain, and after having lived through breast cancer 9 years ago. After extensive surgery, she was set to undergo follow-up radiation treatment when a routine CT showed that the cancer had already come back and grown more tumors in her abdomen. She manages to be devastated, deeply accepting of whatever comes next, and entirely open to miracles, all at once. She was at services two Shabbats ago, and looked great; you couldn't tell what was going on inside (the surface of the inside) if you didn't already know.

The stories aren't connected, except that each one is so intense, and abrupt, so peculiar, and life-threatening, or life-ending.

((')) Jack Ricchiuto writes in his beautiful new book, Conscious Becoming (which he wrote after an abrupt near-death experience of his own) (and which you can give as a wonderful gift to yourself or someone else, just by requesting the pdf version from Jack) : "When we are conscious, we love all the stories."

((-)) Almost a month ago was the holiday of Shavuot: the commemoration of revelation, of the people receiving the ten commandments (it turns out that a better translation would be the "ten utterances" or the "ten principles") at Mt. Sinai.

My sense of revelation right now: a moment fished out from the stream of light, a stream that could be -- and sometimes is -- a continuous dialogue, which lasts only as long as I am really listening.

Our rabbinic intern, Olivier, offered a traditional Shavuot night study session (well, we didn't stay up till the birds started singing, so it was not entirely traditional!) We talked a lot about the reverberation, the dance, between Descent and Ascent, the Yin and the Yang of creation and awakening. In the story of Sinai, the people (who are the Eternal in manifest, multivarious form) go up the mountain to meet the Mystery; the unmanifest Eternal comes down the mountain to meet the seekers/finders. Olivier says, "The universe wants this to happen, and it steps forth: God comes down" and we (all of us aspects of God), we go up. "But there is only so high we can go, while we live in bodies -- God has to come down." In our tradition, we also come back down, we don't stay on the mountaintop. For as long as we live in human form, we come down and go up and come down.

((~)) (I used these quotes from Jack and from Olivier in the "d'var Torah" (which means "Torah talk" and/or "Torah thing") that I gave recently at a Shabbat service celebrating the energies of the Divine Feminine. I've posted it at Ashley's generous forum, On the Wings of Curiosity.

Much later in the study session, we each drew a number from 1 to 10, our "utterance" to contemplate till next Shavuot. I picked number 3, which is the one that's translated "you shall not take the name of God in vain."

Olivier shared Rabbi Ted's teaching on this:
(It would be so much more charming and surprising and potent if you could hear Ted or Olivier tell it. In the meantime, you will have to settle for this paraphrase which is mixed with my own responses:)

It is only on the surface level that we would perceive that this should mean something as small as, "don't say 'God' as a swear word or curse."

Under the surface, on the inside, we remember the Self-name of God, the name that rumbles from the blazing bush in response to Moses' wondering who was speaking to him: Ehyeh asher Ehyeh ~~ I AM as I AM

If the name of God is I AM,
then who am I?
How can I take good care of this name?
In what ways do I use the name I AM unconsciously and what consequences does that generate? How often do I channel it into narrow pathways by the thought-less identifications I choose? Can I imagine I AM without bounds, without separation, without any identification at all?

((,)) I am filled with wonder and tears to read Chris' post, and all the keen and tender comments, on "Going to War at the Art of Hosting on the Art of Hosting" -- about clarity and surrender and collective shadow, about "fierce commitment to defend the territory of the open heart" and "the responsibility of love...never to push our adversary or interlocutor into a place they cannot go unless we are prepared and awake enough to go with them to guard their back."

((')) In a workshop over Mother's Day weekend, 5-element practitioner and Sufi healer Thea Elijah guided a classroom full of people in a practice of opening the heart and mind and body to whatever-it-is we conceive of as source (I am): First, let yourself trust the world to hold you, trust whatever- it- is you're sitting or standing or lying on to hold you up. It can help to widen your base (what Thea called "pyramid butt"). At the same time open the throat to awe and wonder (around the throat are many of the acupuncture points called the Window of the Sky points) -- that place in the throat that gets tight when we are very moved -- and open your mind and the crown of the head up to the Mystery and the "I don't know." Connected all the way Down, and all the way Up. With so much space going down and up, the heart space, the center of the body, can expand more easily. First, at the level of personal heart, at the front of the chest, where emotions are felt. Then let yourself go back, into the deep chambers of the heart, to the back of the body, the spine, which is our pillar of eternity, our connection to the Infinite. Then allow yourself to open past that, falling past eternity, and with the back body ("we are prepared and awake enough to go with them to guard their back") open, let yourself fill up from that source, which we can call by so many names ~ allah ~ elohim ~ deep love ~ I am ~ until you overflow into the group heart, the collective being.

((!)) During a summery, flowery, lunch on her deck, Anne asked me to describe that practice to her again. When I'd finished, she said that it reminds her of a sensation she often thinks of: when you are rafting down a river, with your feet pressed firmly at the front of the raft, and your arms lifted, chest open, feeling the current of the river through your back, holding you up, and carrying you on.

(cup of Anne's blooming heart tea)


((*)) On Saturday we attended the bar mitzvah of a friend's son, who in her apt words is "growing up beautiful and strong," including having healed from a brain injury from being kicked in the head last year by a group of kids who thought he shouldn't be in their neighborhood. He was magnificent, charming, genuine, funny (as my friend also said about her shining son in her little speech, "stylistically, there isn't anything more Jewish than the combination of intensity and humor").

Included in his service booklet, for the period of silent meditation, was this Rumi verse:

...Lo, I am with you always, means when you look for God
God is in the look in your eyes
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self
or things that have happened to you,
There is no need to go outside.

Be melting snow
Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.

Eating a fig on a sunny morning, I look at its curious form, the flower growing inside the skin. I think of my friends, and the look in their eyes, behind their eyes. It is very clear to me that whatever is happening on the surface, all of them are flowers growing perfectly on the inside, and so am I.

ripening self

There are many names and quotes and terms I would normally make links for, in this post, but I want to publish it before sundown and the beginning of the holiday.

Today, for another few minutes, is the last day "in the wilderness" between freedom from enslavement (the story of Passover) and "revelation," stepping into the responsibility of freedom (tonight begins the holyday of Shavuot). It's the last day of "counting the omer," (didn't that seem like a long time?), counting the steps between two ways of being, making each day count.

Shavuot is the cyclical experience of standing at Sinai with all the children of Israel ("isra-el" meaning, "one who is wrestling with god") from all time, of hearing a voice which tradition says was/is outwardly silent, inwardly shattering. Rabbi Gerson Winkler of the Walkingstick Foundation writes about his experience, including this encounter with Miriam, the sister of Moses:

"...You want to explore the meaning of life? You want to achieve Nirvana? Go attend some self-discovery seminar, or read some bestselling paperback on how to attain enlightenment in six easy steps. You want to explore the will of God? Be ready for some seemingly mundane stuff about wholesome, conscientious relating with your ox or donkey, with your laborer, your housekeeper, your children, your partner. That's what God wanted to talk about directly, and chose to do it in a direct open major revelation so as to draw your attention to what is really important, not what you surmise is important; to get the point across loud and clear that the theme of this life is Relationship: relationship with self, other, earth, and with the mystery from which all emanates."

"Every Shavu'ot I recall my encounter, with God at the Mountain of Sinai; with Miriam at the Tent of Meeting. Every Shavu'ot I feel myself ripen, so much so that I trust enough to release my desperate grip on the Tree of Knowledge, and allow myself to fall onto the earth."

Following the energies of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life has brought us today to the Ground of the Ground, the day of the energy center called Malchut, in the week that also corresponds to Malchut. Rabbi Ted writes, "We are here, in this world of countless wonders. This is where we must realize the energies of the Tree. This is the space in which and for which we have responsibility."

Malchut is also called Shechinah, the in-dwelling, the filling up, the brimming over Presence.

Jay Michaelson writes,

"...There's a wise teaching that while the mind may know that all is one, the heart still experiences two. You and me; here and there; now and later — or before. And so the heart experiences a yearning which is sometimes sweet, oftentimes holy, and other times bitter and tinged with pain.

This yearning is also part of our reality. Our experience of separateness is part of our reality. And that which is present is not mere illusion: it is the Presence of the Divine, the shechinah, the tenth sefirah, also known as malchut, sovereignty...

...In Divine terms, malchut is the world that we experience, which is filled with the Shechinah, the Divine presence. Malchut is that aspect of the Divine which is totally immanent, absolutely here and now, closer to you even than your concept of "you."

Consequently, malchut is also that aspect of God which — as expressed poetically, and in ways that would horrify some rationalist philosophers — experiences what we experience. When we experience joy, malchut experiences joy; when we experience sadness, malchut experiences sadness. Most radically, when people are oppressed, enslaved, or even exterminated — this is malchut's experience as well."

A journey of only 50 days -- plenty long enough to be very challenging to my ability to sustain attention. Marking each step with a very brief ritual blessing was easy to remember almost every night; following along with the specific meditations was manageable for a few weeks out of the seven; making each day count, paying attention to how each moment is worth counting -- so much more challenging, so much more important.

George Por writes, "...a pattern that I sense as essential to our survival: for the new (temporary) states of collective consciousness to lead to the next stage of social evolution, they call for the sustained attention of groups in the tip of the wave to evolutionary dialogues, learning journeys into the future that wants to come into being through our loving attention to the 'magic in the middle,' as the late Finn Voldtofte used to talk about it."

I like to think that "the sustained attention of groups" can mean that the heart and mind and intention that I give to the groups that I care about, contributes to the habit and the practice of attention that calls forth "the future that wants to come into being" through us, and then that attention can remain steady and sustained and available to me and to all of us, even as some of the individuals in the group have their turn to lose focus (me, this week).

Rabbi Ted writes, on the threshold of awakening, "We are already the One we need to be."

halfway through the wilderness

Tonight begins not the 26th day and not the 28th day of the counting of the Omer. The movement through the wilderness that began with Passover (the beginning of freedom from enslavement) and will culminate on Shavuot (the revelation of the responsibilities of freedom) is counted as 49 days/steps, so we are now a little more than half way. At this point, I am aware that I am often saying the blessing as a quick thought- between- thoughts, and sometimes forgetting to say the blessing at all (I would forget many more nights except that I am on a daily "count the omer" email reminder list!) and that at a deeper level, haven't been consciously "making each day count" as fully as I want to.

Being a glass-half-full kind of gal, though, I can choose to receive this momentary waking up, already halfway through the wilderness, as a blessing -- I still have a little more than three weeks to participate ever more fully in this ritual counting of the days, in this ritual focus on the lifetime practice of making each day count.

Rabbi Ted writes this about the Day that begins tonight, the day of Yesod (Foundation) in Netzach (Victory/Vitality):

...Yesod, [is] the seat of ego, the place of our lesser "i," the identity with which we interact with our world. This is the Foundation from which our energies will reach out to our world.
Yesod brings this Foundation for expression into Netzach. From our physical sensations and perceptions comes our experience of the world. Netzach encourages our appreciation of that which is behind all specific forms of sensation; Yesod provides the avenue through which those energies will be able to act in the world.
Daily Focus:
My energies flow more freely now than every before. I honor the work I do in the world, and breathe new life into my being. I know the blessing of my lesser self that carries my energies out into the world for good. I am a center of energy expressing Life this day.

Artwork above "Ain Ode" (c) Avraham Lowenthal, Tzfat Gallery of Mystical Art

meditation for the 17th day

"In this week of Tiferet, we are given a Day of the Heart. We are blessed with Tiferet in Tiferet, encouraging our focus on the higher identity we call ruach, the non-ego identity which senses itself in all beings.

"What is healed in Tiferet, in the space of the Heart, is the overwhelming sense of separateness with which we often experience ourselves in our world. We reach beyond that fragmentation to perceive the deeper Consciousness within each of us. In this Consciousness we are always connected. That which animates all Being is One. And in Tiferet, we touch that One through the gift of Compassion.

"Through this awareness, we understand that all human possibilities live in each of us. There is nothing which is truly foreign. When we stop throwing others from our hearts by pretending that we are better or that they are better, the possibilities for the healing of humankind can be realized. In Tiferet, we know intimately that any person's pain is our pain, that we are part of all humankind. In Tiferet, we celebrate the awakening of others and understand how their awakening supports our own.

"Today we renew our dedication to healing by realizing how all human energies awaken in the One Light of this Greater Self. Indulgence of our violence makes a mockery of evolution; Compassion for our darkness opens the way to true growth.

"We seek to balance the energies of light anad dark, high and low, heaven and earth. From that balance, transformation emerges. In Tiferet we accept all selves, so we might more clearly discover the deeper Self we share. Through this Identity, we awaken to the deeper truth of our own uniqueness."

Daily Focus:
"I release myself to the Light of Tiferet now. I allow this Light to reach outward from my heart-space to fill my entire body. I feel this Light expand beyond myself and reflect back to me from those I meet. Now all the energies of confusion and doubt within me meet in this Light. A deep inner healing flows as blessing through every cell and every level of my being. In this Light of Comapassion, I am One now."

~~Rabbi Ted Falcon, PhD, A Journey of Awakening: Kabbalistic Meditations on the Tree of Life, pp 78-79

neohasid

From neohasid:

"We don't know whether our actions will make a difference now. That puts our efforts in the realm of ritual, where the invisible consequence of what we do is often more important or more recognizable than the visible or physical element."

Oops! How appropriate that I neglected to blog all the Counting the Omer meditations for the rest of the week of Gevurah, which means Discipline (and Limits, and Strength). So now we are in the week of Tiferet, which is translated as Balance, Beauty, Compassion, Harmony, and which is at the heart-center of the human body and at the center of the Tree of Life. (The Tree is diagrammed onto the body, with each of the sefirot corresponding to a particular place.)

Rabbi Ted says, "Tiferet is the Center of the Tree of Life. The right side of the Tree signifies force, and the left side, form. The central pillar symbolizes balance and identity. The identity of Tiferet is the 'Inclusive I,' the inclusive shared-Self behind the exclusive ego-self.
"In Tiferet, there is a balance between the self which resides in the body and the Universal Self beyond individuation. Here the worlds are connected.
"At Tiferet there is also a balance of force and form. Tiferet is the 'heart-space' of the Tree, reflected as the heart-space within each of us. Tiferet holds an ever-expanding Compassionate Awareness."

The Meditative Focus for this week is: "Now we allow ourselves to awaken to a greater sense of balance. There is a peacefulness which expands within the Heart of our being, a peacefulness which gradually radiates through our consciousness. We open to an awareness that holds compassion for everything it touches."

Tree of Life painting above, Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918)

the most whole heart

I had the great fortune, and fun, to have been part of a group of people from my synagogue who chose to step into our "official" roles in the community as B'nei Mitzvah ("children of the commandment" or, a deeper meaning that Rabbi Tedhttp://www.rabbitedfalcon.com/ uses for Mitzvah, based on the word's linguistic root, is "path of connectedness"). The seven of us and our teacher, Amy, studied and sang and ate delicious food together and got to know and love each other for over a year, and two weeks ago welcomed family, friends, and our amazing community to co-create with us a space and time of powerful and very sweet blessing. It felt to me afterwards as if we'd all managed to catch and ride a huge wave together, and make it smoothly to shore, after a really long time of paddling in the sun and the rain (and sometimes in circles).

Each of us did a little talk (a "d'var," which means "word") about our "birth portion"--the part of the Torah that was being read the week that we were born. (You can enter your birthdate and find yours, here--Rabbi Ted teaches that our birth portion, like an astrological chart, contains seeds of wisdom that will bloom and ripen in specific and particular ways for each of us.) All of our little talks were very different, and came together to make a beautiful mosaic of meaning and experiences. Here's the transcript of my "word" (well, pretty much - I forget to look at my notes when I'm talking) (and my birth portion is Eikev, Deuteronomy 7:12 to 11:25) :

Shabbat shalom! which means, Shabbat “hello”, Shabbat "peace", and Shabbat "wholeness".
Thank you to everyone here for sharing your radiant and singular presence with us—as Rabbi Ted said in a workshop the other night, this community is “a community of Presence.” My special thanks to my mother, and mother-in-law and father-in-law, and my sister (in this photo with me) and my brother-in-law, for coming from far away to be here today. And, to my husband Robert and our boys who have always been at the heart of my spiritual journey.

Jewish mystical tradition teaches us—and when I say “Jewish mystical tradition,” I really mean, “what I’ve learned from Rabbi Ted and the Bet Alef community,” because even if I read or heard some of the teachings years ago, they’ve only really made sense since being here—The tradition teaches us that every story in the Torah contains the essence of the wisdom of the whole; and not only that, but every word, every letter, and even the spaces between and around the letters, contain the essence of the whole teaching. Some of the teachers also say that every person and every being is like a letter of the Torah—so, each of us is a Way in, to the Whole thing, and the space between us, the relationships we have with things and with each other, are all ways in to the Whole, too.

As my friends Joel and Michelle often teach, "anywhere you dig deeply enough will take you Home”

The Jewish tradition gives us an amazing and beautiful framework for doing that digging, which consists of four layers of interpretation that I’m going to apply to my birth portion. I’ll touch on the first two just briefly, since it’s really the deeper two that make my “homing instinct” start to hum:

∑ The first layer is “P'shat” in Hebrew, which means “Simple”. This is the literal, surface understanding. I think of this as corresponding to the skin of the body (and you’ll see why I’m using body metaphors in a moment)

∑ The next layer is “Remez,” which means “Hint”. Where we start to see that the place where we’re digging is connected to lots of other places… so I think of this as being like the connective tissue of the body.

∑ The third layer is “Drash” or “Midrash,” which means “Search” or “Interpretation.” Now we’re looking between the lines, paying more attention to the spaces between. This is the realm of metaphor, poetry, archetypal energies. To me this corresponds to the internal organs, because in Chinese medicine--which is my other spiritual training and practice—the internal organs are respected as beings, with spirits, and functions, and minds of their own. Just like what we’ve all experienced, when we have a gut intuition that’s different from what our mind believes; or when our Heart or Lungs or Stomach, or some one of the other organs, tells us very clearly that it needs something or other, and right now, regardless of what the rest of the bodymind was happy to go along with…So we respect the organs as one of the ways that the universal archetypal energies move in us.

∑ The Fourth, last layer is “Sod,” which means “Secret” or “Hidden.” This is the most interior, deepest, and the vastest, realm—because here we begin to glimpse eternity. I think this level is the Heart. Which is one of the family of organs, but is also special amongst organs—in Chinese medicine, the Heart is the place where Heaven and Earth meet; it embodies the archetypal energy of the Emperor/Empress, who is the one with the most direct connection to the Way of Heaven—which in Hebrew we could translate as “Torah.”

My “birth portion” is in the section where Moses is giving reminders to the people, since they’ll be leaving the wilderness without him. Reminders to be good, to be grateful, to take care of the orphan and the widow and the stranger in their midst. And, it includes this very curious line, which in English is translated variously as: "remove the barriers of your heart," or "cut away the thickening around your heart," but which in Hebrew says literally to "circumcise the foreskin of your heart."

There are many many tribal and personal resonances that I could follow here, all of them like trails homeward, and so I’m just going to pick a single one.

Skipping the first two levels and entering in at the “Drash”/ ”Archetypal”/ ”Internal Organs” level:

It so happens that, in Chinese medicine, the tissue around the Heart, the Pericardium, which we also call the Heart Protector, is an important organ whose job is to choose what parts of the outside world will be allowed in through the Inner Gate, into the most private chambers of the Heart. In terms of our everyday lives, this is the energy of love & intimate relationship, and of our connection to what we allow to touch our Hearts.

In one school of thought of our medicine, we “diagnose” (or, “appreciate”) every human being as most strongly embodying the archetypal energy of one or two of the twelve main organs.
And in a play of cosmic resonance—one of those “serendipitous non-accidental accidents” that Margie spoke of—one of the organic energies I’ve been “diagnosed” with embodying most is this very one, the Heart Protector, that shows up in such an interesting way in my birth portion.
Because this is an energy given to me pay a lot of attention to, and to wrestle with, and to learn from, I can say from experience that one thing I'm pretty sure of is that there are many ways that the Heart Protector opens, allowing access to the Heart—“cutting” is maybe one way…Reb Nachman of Bratslav, whom Roger quoted, also said, “the most whole heart is the broken heart” (and btw, it’s not the Heart that breaks, it’s the Heart Protector). So, there’s breaking; and there’s also melting, and there’s softening. And maybe most pertinently for us, there’s choosing—just as the regular ritual circumcision doesn’t just happen all by itself, but is a tribal, and sometimes personal, choice.
“I Open My Heart to This Moment” (this is the song co-written by Rabbi Ted, which we opened the service with) is something we do on purpose, with intention.

To finish with just a glimpse into the level of Sod, the Secret and the Heart—which is probably more accessible in silence than in words, anyway—because this is the level we arrive to, when the Heart Protector is opened wide to the whole world, and the World can touch the deepest part of the One Heart, when we’ve gone all the way down, and all the way in, and we’ve come all the way Home, what we find in is that the whole manifest world is already in there with us. The One manifesting as the Many, and the Many remembering ourselves to be the One.

Like in this “secret teaching” my Zen friend Paul gave me the other day—because, you know what, all the Many secret teachings--of course--lead to this same One Heart:
That what we think of as the world outside of us…is really our own tender, sensitive, heart, born out from our own being, and into the world, and there it is, all over the world, disguised as the Many.

I Open My Heart to This Moment—and we’re all in there together.

Shabbat Shalom.

A big hug and deep bow to my dance partners Anya, Margie, Alan, Roger, Peter, Meli and Amy. I'm glad we did it, I'm glad it's done, and I'm so glad it was with you.

unpacking the treasures

Rabbi Ted asked us on our last evening together in Israel to consider what our intangible "relics" would be -- something that we would especially treasure from our journey, other than the material things we bought or found or received. 

Some of us chose particular realizations, or insights inspired by favorite teachings. Many of us selected special sense impressions, memories, feelings, from amongst the brimming-over possiblities.

Mine is a collection of sounds. 

Pausing in the courtyard before entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, suddenly the great noon bells rang the air and the stones, and us. 

Later that day, gathered on a rooftop overlooking the four quarters of the Old City (Christian, Jewish, Arab, Armenian), we were entranced by the Muslim call to afternoon prayer flowing from several towers, each muezzin beginning and ending at his own pace, overlaid by the murmuring voices of my fellow travelers, discussing in twos and threes King David's vision of Jerusalem as a city of peace and justice. 

Yad Vashem: The soft music you hear even before you enter the Children's Memorial at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial; and then the voices inside reading names and ages of some of the children, more than a million, who were murdered. 

Tsfat: The son of our host family in the holy city of Tsfat singing blessings like an angel, he and his friends, with their still-soprano voices, full-open-throated, completely unself-conscious.

Galili

At a nature reserve in the far north: the harsh squawking, like the sky rubbing squeakily against itself, of grey egrets rising by the dozens over swampy fields. 

Voices laughing, chanting, whispering, singing, raised in angry argument, insistence, confusion.

All calls to prayer.

journey of blessings

(thank you to Graham at Blogger support who found and deleted a single "div" code-thing that had completely changed the whole format of this blog--the basic template's been restored now, yay!)

This is one of the ways our visit to Israel feels to me: almost 30 of us passing slowly together (unexpectedly without our Rabbi for the first two days! more on that later) through a thick translucent membrane, mostly far from the face of the earth—a day and a night in the airport/ airplane/ airport/ airplane—we landed and emerged blinking into a different light, where sparks were thick in the air and deep on the ground.

Stirring up those microlights as we shuffled and danced through the streets and the hills and the desert, we breathed them in and out as we chanted and sang and laughed, ate them in our food, rinsed them through our hair. Marveled at their fierce/sweet dazzle in the eyes of the people we met. Then, now, out on the other side since yesterday afternoon, after an even thicker membrane, our own skin still glitters faintly even in the grey Seattle light.

Rabbi Ted describes the energy of blessing as "radical acceptance of the present moment," an embracing of just what is. In Jewish practice, there are special blessings, special words of appreciation, for every possible kind of event and experience, as well as an all-purpose blessing that is a big thank-you to the holy-one-of-being for the opportunity, the gift, of being alive in this moment right here. All meant to wake us us up to this amazing now.

there's a kind of hush

Rabbi Ted said tonight that there are many levels of silence, nesting within each other. And one of those levels is called "blessing."

I had time to come home for lunch today, and as I was rushing out the door to go back to work, it occurred to me that I hadn't caught a morning glimpse of the hummingbird that flits and zzzzes to the feeder outside our dining room window. As soon as I stood still and accidentally entered the unfamiliar silence of no-thought, the hummingbird's sturdy little "chp chp chp" sound popped out from its perch on a tiny twig of the dogwood, a bright note in the continuous wild music that makes this world.

(photo above is by Bryan Hanson on Unsplash)

lev shalom

Rabbi Ted suggested the other night, at a dinner meeting of our group that is going with him to Israel for 2 weeks, in 2 weeks, that it's time to begin clarifying and setting our kavannah (intention) for the trip. Our intentions always help to determine the kinds of energy that will be available to us, especially important in times or places of concentrated power.

My usual, automatic, responses to such suggestions are quick and without much thought--I pick the first thing that occurs to me and run with that. In this case, my first choice of intention is to be open, receptive, to connect and then let go. But in taking some time to go beyond my habitual response, and finding a comment from Ashley (note: yet another link that’s gone to heaven…) rolling and swimming in my mind, I think about the laser counterpoint to that wide-angle, let-it-all-in, swallow-the-ocean way of being...and that is, to really pay clear and focused attention, to notice and appreciate and remember details, one at a time. 

So, as I write this, a kavannah begins to form that is a sort of combination: to pay full and open bodymind attention to singular, particular, details; to move slowly enough that I can dive in a little more deeply past the surface of a place or thing or person.

From Chris W i'm reminded of a little quote by deena metzger that i have over my desk at work (i need to have it taped to the inside of my head):

there is time only to work slowly.

there is no time not to love.

And, this passage from a favorite book by philosophy professor and naturalist Kathleen Dean Moore, called Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

...the philosopher Zeno explained why it was a mistake to think of time as a straight line that can be divided. If a given distance is infinitely divisible, he said, then anyone who wants to travel that length will first have to traverse half its distance. Because you can't get anywhere without first getting halfway there, and because you can't get halfway there without going halfway to that point, and so on and so on, nobody can get anywhere at all. And--this is the good part--the same must be true of time: To pass from one time to the next time, you would have to pass through an infinitude of smaller and smaller pieces of time, and that would take forever.

My friend who is a philosopher says that what Zeno makes her think is, Who cares if you get somewhere? Try instead to go infinitely deep into any piece of the distance. If there is eternal life, she says, it will not be in the length of your life, but in its depth.

Our group will be visiting Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Tsfat, and then going to a retreat center/dude ranch in the northern Galilee. The theme of our journey is "the kabbalah of creation," with meditations and explorations steeped in the particular flavour of each of the days of creation.