Samain and the Choice Moon
Friday gratefuls: Good sleep. Laying around. Hanukah. Lighting my first candles as a Jew. Toba Spitzer. Mordecai Kaplan. Metaphor. God is Here. Mussar. Holimonth. Advent. Posada. The darkness. My inner Shadow Mountain. Tara’s cute new puppy. Kippur. Leo. Kepler of blessed memory. Rigel of blessed memory. Kate of blessed memory. A pinch of dysthymia. Oversleeping. Winds knocking over my trash can. Weather on the way. Cold and Snow. Rich. Diane. Tom. My son and Seoah and Murdoch.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Leo
One brief shining: The cloud as metaphor sitting in Evergreen, Colorado, talking to Rabbi Toba Spitzer in Newton, Massachusetts, while others dotted the screen from Lakewood, Georgetown, Conifer who was the live audience, us around the table in Beth Evergreen or the individuals in the cloud, or were we all simply in the Cloud alive to ourselves but bits and bytes elsewhere? The multiparity?
Not sure what’s going on with me right now, but I’ve slept in a lot this week. Over two hours this morning. Post-conversion dysthymia? That old melancholy coming up the chimney from its shack on my inner Shadow Mountain? Have felt slightly off for a few days. Negative thoughts showing up, not staying, not affecting my mood for long. Thanks to the how do I feel exercise Tal taught us. Yet they keep returning and oversleeping usually means a disturbance in the inner world.
When I drove back from p.t. yesterday though. Mary discharged me. Good work on the back and I now have the exercise tools to manage it, know when to ask for help if it flares again. Prior to seeing Mary we had the Zoom which included Rabbi Toba Spitzer answering questions about her book, God is Here. Loved her. A great mind working at the frontiers of religious thought.
Coming back up Brook Forest Drive I felt good. Reminded myself that people, people are good. I need people on line and in person regularly. Patted myself on the back for attending mussar, seeing Mary. Having meaningful connections in both places. Told Mary when she said something about her boyfriend that he was lucky, somebody out there needed her in their life, glad to know she’d found someone.
Janet and I had an interesting post-mussar conversation. She said the only way to find God is through meditation. She’s a Jewbu. A Jewish Buddhist. And a very bright lady.
Well, god is a universal idea so how can you be sure if the one you find in meditation is the One? Don’t we need each other for that sort of connection? She agreed we need the sangha, the synagogue.
I don’t think the only way to connect with the sacred is to go in. As most of you know. Though it’s a sound way. I find the sacred right out there on the surface of things. The Lodgepole. Janet. Black Mountain. Mary. Leo. Electricity. Computers. Darkness. Daytime.
Rich and I had a disagreement about this on Wednesday night. He wanted to preserve the particularity of Judaism, that its holy places in Israel, for example, were special. I asked him what Judaism points to.
I agree with his appreciation and love for the particularities of Judaism, its holy places, rituals, people. Otherwise I would not have converted. Yet. I also want to preserve the idea that we do not need the rock on which Abraham would have sacrificed Isaac, or the Western Wall, or Mt. Sinai, or even the Torah to find our way to the sacred, to recognize our inescapable linkage to and with it.
Here’s a poem that Tom offered this morning that says what I’m saying. By David Budbill
The Three Goals
The first goal is to see the thing in itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
No symbolism, please.
The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.
The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal in the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.
