Category Archives: Spirituality

Homing In: Everyday Magic, Day 680

Posted on February 25, 2013 | 1 Comment

downsized_0224131357aHoning and homing in are easily confused, but I recently learned that knives are honed and birds home in on where they’re heading. Definitely not the sharpest knife in or out of the drawer today, I homed in on my travel becoming a farce because farces, despite and because of everything that goes wrong, end well with marriage, homecoming and great joy in the land.

The world of travel farce is narrow and treacherous. What wouldn’t shake me much in ordinary life level me here. My burrowing animal keeps ramming itself against the rock, convinced more effort will open the rabbit hole to home. Last night, a dropped call to United, after 45 minutes of waiting for a representative and another 20 of trying to sort out the tangle of getting my Delta ticket, originally a United ticket, back to United, tipped off a long crying jag (which led to me calling Ken and asking him to take off calling the airlines to arrange for my two flights, starting at 6 a.m.). Two hours later, when Ken called on one phone while talking with Delta on the other to make sure I was cool with a direct, non-stop flight at the reasonable hour of 11 a.m., I started crying so hard I could barely say, “Yes!” as in “Yes, Fredrico, a million times yes. I will marry you!”downsized_0224131444a

Back home this afternoon, I told Ken how I tried to think of the travel challenges as akin to an intensive spiritual retreat focused on letting go. “How did you do with that?” Ken asked. “Not very well,” I told him.

Yet there were moments of almost grace when I relinquished control, particularly when parked on the tarmac in Hartford, CT in a very small plane, completely full, for three and a half hours. I was on the phone for an hour with the airline, the aisles full with a snaking line of people waiting for the bathroom. People’s butts occasionally hit my head as I said to the United rep, “Could you say that again? I couldn’t hear you.” When I hung up, I surrendered to what the women around me were saying, which included repetitions and variations of:

  • There’s nothing we do, so why worry about it?
  • It is what it is.
  • It’s better to be sitting here alive than dead.
  • Yeah, this is challenging, but we’ve got it better than a lot of people in this world.
  • And you know, if I miss my connection, it’s not the end of the world.
  • I just missed my connection, but what you gonna do?

In communal travel mishaps, people tend to take turns being the cheerful one and the freaking out one. As soon as I told people my story (up until that point), the main cheerleader among us got a little depressed, and I repeated to her some of what she said to us earlier.

Soon the pilot announced that we were ready for take-off, back for a third try to land at La Guardia, but now we had to wait until someone could drain the overflowing toilet to prevent its contents from rushing down the aisles. The whole plane laughed together, and laughed some more when we needed to get de-iced again. Right before take-off for real, the pilot said, “Ladies and Gentlement, federal regulations stipulate that we inform you that if anyone wants to get off the plane at this airport, we can let you off.” The whole plane laughed harder, then we all looked around, as if to say, “No one is leaving this plane, sucker, so stay put.”

We were homing in together, and although I did start crying so hard at La Guardia at the information desk that a young Indian man came up to ask if he could help, I was grateful for help whenever I needed it.

Travel farce turns on plans dissolving, missed connections, the kindness of strangers, taking walks down streets in cities you never expected to visit, shuttle downsized_0224131446bdrivers talking about the last big snow, tiny bags of mini-pretzels that taste remarkably good when you miss a meal, and letting go of expectations right at the point of them being met (or not). When the plane I boarded today, the seventh plane I was booked on (and only the second flight I made), the pilot announced there was a small issue to resolve before take-off. I asked the flight attendant if she thought we going to actually go, and then told her my story. Although I wished I carried around some Valium, I was glad I at least had a story.

Then of course the story took off, and from the air, the world shone with snow, roads and rivers all the way to Kansas.

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Posted in Spirituality, Travel

Needle in the Bone Book Launch: Everyday Magic, Day 660

Posted on December 16, 2012 | 3 Comments

44700_4069537058430_72832791_n“Is this the High Holy Days?” a friend asked me as the crowd swarmed into the Lawrence Jewish Community Congregation for the Needle in the Bone launch party. With over 150 people finding seats around tables, against the walls, in the lobby outside the social hall, or simply standing in corners, it looked a little like we might launch into “Kol Nidre” instead of a presentation on this book about the survival and friendship of two local men, one a Holocaust survivor and one a Polish resistance fighter.

All day leading up to the event was a combination of all-okay and all-not-okay because, as Jarek said during the launch, “This is also very sad day because two people aren’t here.” When I started this book, it was about four people — Lou and Jane Frydman, and Jarek and Maura Piekalkiewicz. With both Maura and Lou dying in recent years, and on the same date (January 24 – 2011 for Maura and 2012 for Lou), it’s both tender and heartbreaking to share their stories with the community without them here.

Community came in abundance: well over 150 people showed up, the books sold out in a flash with many orders for more, and people listened intently to the presentation. Ken told me that the power point slide show about Lou and Jarek’s lives revealed just how important family was to each, starting with the family they lost and ending with the family they made in a new land.

Jarek spoke about he had a choice as to whether to risk his life against the Nazis, but Lou and other Jews didn’t have such a choice. He pointed out that Lou’s survival aimed Lou toward a life of family and service, reforming mental health laws that were damaging to children. He also said that even if Jews didn’t have saints, Lou was a saint to him as well as to many of us because of Lou’s heart and humor.

Jane told of how Lou survived, partially because of how smart his parents, brother and he was in thinking on their feet at crucial moments, and mostly because of “dumb luck,” such as the train out of the Warsaw Ghetto not going to Treblinka, which barely anyone survived an hour, but in saving grace, going to Majdanek instead. The near misses — while hiding in Warsaw on the Aryan side, in the camps, and even on the death march — kept Lou alive, but it was also his parents’ legacy that he could think so quickly and clearly on a dime of what to do or say to save his life.

I told about the four themes of the book, which I grappled with when writing it and will always grapple with: 1) What it means to survive such trauma, and how we carry such trauma within us; 2) The relationship of Poles to Jews when it comes to both anti-Semitism and how so many Polish families risked everything to save Jews; 3) The nature of good and evil, and how such a thing could happen; and 4) How we stand or could stand in relation to atrocities such as the Holocaust. Here is an excerpt of what I read:

Both Lou and Jarek bear an obligation, based on the holocausts they each went through, to create, educate, and make a difference. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing, a need to draw nourishment from the painful memory of near-annihilation: “The ultimately Jewish statement is the Messianic statement. We say this world will be redeemed; we say that human life will ultimately be worth everything. Anne Frank wrote in her diary that if she survived the war, she understood that she would have to make something of her life. The rabbis told us that the Messianic act is achieved when, in the face of total destruction, people choose to take on the grubbiness, the difficulties, the complexities of recreating life at all costs,” writes Eli Wiesel. Or maybe this is even more a human thing.

Surely, the weight of an experience such as the Holocaust is made bearable only by what we can make out of the wreckage.

In the end, there were lines of people hugging us and having us sign books, laktes, Kelley’s cookies, Terry’s vegetarian meatballs and lots of treats to eat, lingering visits while cleaning and packing up.

As Lou was dying, I knew he didn’t believe anything happened to us after death but that we simply and completely were no more. I believe quite the opposite, that the soul lives on (and not just in the hearts of loved ones). I told Lou that if I was right and he was wrong, he should send me a sign. This morning, I woke up to realize last night was a sign as well as a high holy day of its own.

Thank you to all who helped: the Lawrence Jewish Community for passing on all the food, drinks and wine left over from the Hanukkah celebration and hosting us, the Raven Bookstore, my husband Ken who worked with me for hours to prepare for and clean up from the event (as well as set up the AV), and many who helped: Sandy Snook, Kelley Hunt and Al Berman, Eve Levin, Forest Lassman and others. Special thanks to Jane and Jarek.

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Back to the Source in New Jersey: Everyday Magic, Day 639

Posted on October 24, 2012 | 1 Comment

Reunited after 30 years with Phil Brater, my mentor and dear friend who modeled for me what true witnessing, support and daring to love and create really look like

Today I gave readings at Brookdale Community College, my first and best college, and Temple Shaari Emeth, the synagogue that saved my life when I was a teenager. Although I’m tempted to say I was back at the scene of the crime, it was really back in the scenes of the anti-crime. At Shaari Emeth, I found a youth group that gave me community, meaning, and extensive nurturing of my talents and strengths while I was living through the hardest time in my life. At Brookdale, I found my legs and ability to move forward toward my life as a writer and people of community.

So here I am, 33 years later visiting the college where I began as a deeply

Reading at Brookdale Community College, one of the best colleges I know

insecure 17-year-old and the synagogue where I found a refuge as a freaking-out 14-year-old. Not only am I back, but I’m reading from my love song to New Jersey, The Divorce Girl, which traces my main characters journey from fragmentation, isolation, fear and grief to art, community and beauty. As if this isn’t enough, the blessings pile upon blessings: my family is with me — my mother at all the readings, and at the Shaari Emeth one, my aunts and uncles

Cantor Wayne, and we look EXACTLY the same we did back in ’77

and brother too; my main mentor and lifeline as a teen, old friend and guide Phil Brater, who I haven’t seen in over 30 years; and even Cantor Wayne, who led me and my peers in singing our hearts out.

Life has a way of returning to itself full-circle, going back to the roots of breakdowns and breakthroughs to spiral into what matters and why before taking us to the

Mom at Manalapan Dinner, another source for a different kind of nourishment

next discovery. I love the places that showed me love and possibility, and although everything was different, everything was still familiar and welcoming. But mostly, I’m grateful for the people who helped me through the dark: Cantor Wayne, who kissed me and called out, “Welcome Home”; my mom, aunt and uncle who talked fast and vibrantly with me in the car of what survived and how we love each other; my old friend Phil who sounds exactly the same — reassuring and like he truly sees me for who I am — as always. These voices and faces travel my heart and soul, returning me to the source that always is.

 

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Posted in change, Community, family, Spirituality, Writing Life

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A Wedding Shower, a Funeral, a Newborn, a Dying Friend & a Little Cold: Everyday Magic, Day 628

Posted on September 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

The Days of Awe have been more than awe-inspiring this year, thanks to a confluence of life’s essence. In the last week, we’ve poured our attention into rites of passage and signs of life.

Several days, we’ve been with an old friend facing a sudden diagnosis of late stage cancer, her daughter, and her spanking new grand daughter, who I got to hold and rock while Ken transported our friend’s wheelchair to the hospital room. Pacing with the baby, just six or so weeks old, in the hospital waiting room and outside by the fountain, I found myself slipping seamlessly into sway-walking and singing, the only diversion up my sleeve to distract her from turning her head to nurse. She watched me with bright eyes, and a few times, smiled and squinted as if she were trying to laugh. I kept singing her name to her, remembering how much I love holding newborns.

Within a few days, I was wearing what I’ve come to know as a “fascinator,” an

The bride, Rachel, front row, wears a white fascinator beside her mother in a cream-colored one.

elegant hat, at a high tea wedding shower. Snacking on little sandwiches with the edges cut off, I visited with the bride-to-be and her mother, both friends, and shared praise with others there for how good we all looked in our fascinators. We gushes over the plushness of the towels someone gave as a gift, laughed during a memory game, and drank something called a “blushing bride.” Afterwards, I kept my fascinator on while picking up bananas at Target and then something at an auto parts store. I think I may have to don such hats regularly.

The next day, Ken and I went to the funeral of a dear man who is part of our Jewish community. The funeral was packed, the stories family and friends shared immensely beautiful, funny and tender. Off to Bani Israel, the Jewish cemetery (founded in the 1850s), we first wandered with others in the community to place small stones on the tombstones of old friends long gone, and then gathered for the short service and burial. As per our tradition, we all took a turn dropping a shovel-full of dirt onto the casket, the sound of which always breaks my heart open (others tell me it does the same for them). I was moved by the love of the family and the community, and by the time afterwards, sharing stories of friends buried there as well as the graves of children and adults from the 1800s.

Today, I sit in my chair and watch Cottonwood Mel move slightly in the breeze. Bees buzz around the hummingbird feeders hanging from the trees, and the animals sleep all around me while I entertain a cold. Yet given all the perspective the Days of Awe have shown me, what does it matter to be under the weather when the tender and curious weather of community fills my life?

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Posted in change, Community, Friends, Health, Spirituality

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Malchuyot: A Rosh Hashana Reflection on Surrender, Life’s Imagination and Who’s In Charge: Everyday Magic, Day 627

Posted on September 17, 2012 | 1 Comment

I was asked to speak to one of three themes central to Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year). The themes basically are sovereignty, memory and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). I gave this talk this morning at the Lawrence Jewish Community Congregation on Malchuyot (sovereignty), my little exploration in four parts.

1. King of Kings, or the Fire That Makes the Circle

In traditional scripture about Malchuyot, we revisit God’s sovereignty in the metaphor of king of kings, which portrays God as made in our image, or at least in our medieval, male, hierarchal image. I turn to another metaphor: God as the fire we circle around. You can’t stand in the center of the fire and understand fully what the fire is without causing yourself great harm. But you can stand beside it, feel the warmth, see the light, witness the nature of fire: powerful, ever-changing, a wisp of the smallest flame or a blazing roar.

Whether we talk of the king of kings or the fire, we draw on metaphor. “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson writes of both poetry and the holy. We cozy up to what’s beyond our grasp, largely invisible, diverse and infinite by telling this truth slant, which in Judaism manifests in many names for God: Lord, Holy One, Hashem, Adonai, El, Avinu, Yaway, Shekinah, Elokim, Creator of the Universe, I-am-that-I-am. God is “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” as Dylan Thomas writes: the sudden wind that shakes the cedar, the red sky backlighting my husband in the field, the rain in the middle of the night, the lightning strike from cloud in the diagonal distance to pond before us, the laughter on the phone that snaps me out of my mind’s trap, the rolling surface of ocean holding up the boat, the sky, the unfolding weather. God is the fire in the breath within and around us.

Whoever or whatever God is — and even whether we believe in God, any variations of the holy one, or not — this fire makes a circle of us, right now, right here.

2. Who’s in Charge?

We Jews excel at making things happen. If we’re going to be control freaks, we’re going to be effective control freaks, which makes it harder to surrender, and see how the curtain between us and the actual world is often our thoughts and our thinking. I confess to be a control freak (at least in my crunchy exterior), yet I also know, increasingly as I get older, how little control I have, how even my best thinking, at its more expansive, only catches a microscopic sliver of good and bad, and to quote Sufi poem Rumi, what lies in the field beyond good and bad.

“Life has more imagination than we do,” my friend Shelley told me 15 years ago when she and her then-partner, two very white women in central Vermont and their adopted one-year-old African-American daughter, came home to a voice on their answering machine that asked, “Do you want the brother?” Their daughter’s biological parents had another baby. While Shelley’s partner balked, saying, “We’re too old, too tired, and we don’t know anything about boys,” Shelley just took her partner’s face between her hands and said, “Don’t you think we have enough room in our hearts?” Flash forward to now: Shelley’s daughter and son are now teens.

Life did and does have so much more imagination than we do, so why wouldn’t we want to surrender to a wiser, more creative force?

3. Surrender, Dorothy!

That’s what the witch sky-wrote on the big, open sky, and Dorothy did eventually surrender, not to the witch, but, after the last balloon of hope vanished over the horizon, to having no control. She had to break her heart open to discover what power she did have: the power to go home. Pema Chodron, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, writes:

The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening.

Chodron adds that human beings are wired to want ground under our feet, but life is groundless: unpredictable, chaotic, mysterious, as hard to catch as wind.

Surrender on the High Holidays is both an individual and collective act of faith: we pray, chant, sing, dwell and eat at the same convergence of time and geography. We use this space to cultivate awareness of life beyond our plans or hardened hearts. We let ourselves break, a little or a lot, open to not knowing. Someone or something else is driving the bus, and the sky unfolding us across our lives is vast, beautiful, changing. Surrender.

4. “Please Let the Power of Hashem Increase”

Malchuyot, at its heart, asks, please, to let the power of Hashem increase, explains Reb Zalman, who adds that only through awe and love do we give our prayers wings. He says, “It’s not enough that we pray in our prayers, ‘Write us into this or that book,’ if we are not writing our own qvittel/note for ourselves,” evaluating our year and turning our lives toward holiness and uprightness. Rabbi Nachman of Bretzletalks about the mutuality of longing: us for God and visa-versa, and how Malchuyot calls on us to acknowledge this longing at the core of life.

I do a lot of writing workshops with people living with serious illness: chronic, overwhelming pain they can only escape for small stretches; late cancer diagnoses that leave them only a season or two left without knowing for sure; and progressive neurological diseases that vanish their ability to walk, write, speak. I love facilitating these workshops because the veil is gone. What matters most is what remains: the yearning to live, the love that survives us, and the the courage to go on. To me, this is what it means to let the power of Hashem increase.

Whatever or whoever is in charge, we’ve always had the power within us to surrender, and return home. Now that we’re gathered around the fire together, don’t you think we have enough room in our hearts?

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Entering the Days of Awe: A Rosh Hashana Poem: Everyday Magic, Day 626

Posted on September 16, 2012 | Comments Off

Here is a poem I wrote last year to welcome us to Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and the ten days between this holiday and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. During the days of awe, it is our responsibility to make right any wrongs we sparks or participated in with others on the basis that praying to God only makes things right (at best) with God.

Entering the Days of Awe

Let us walk unfettered into these days

unfurling in the sun, wide fields of old grasses

bracketed by sunflowers and pebbles.

Let us step into the lapis sky that fastens itself

to the driveway, the sidewalk, the worn leaves

of dying summer under new leaf fall.

 

Let us give up the wasteful thinking,

the 2 a.m. anxieties over what cannot be changed,

the waking with a gasp. Let us stand in the morning,

the new chill of the air clearing the disgards of time,

fear, reaching too hard or not enough.

 

Let the wrongs be made right. Let forgiveness

overtake the words we hear and pray, the stories

we’ve made and tilted. Let us remember this dreaming song

from all our beloveds long gone or just over the bend,

each note engraved with lost lands, singing

of how good it is when we dwell together.

 

Let the peripheral vision in the days of awe show us

the world, the first seeing of the heart, the last pulse

of those we love who travel with us. Let the wind shake

the trees, the tattered leaves shine, the last butterflies

flash their orange, the first dark blue of night

open into a panorama of past and present light

on its way to us all.

 

Let the next breath we take inscribe us in the book of life.

Let the next breath you give welcome us home.

– Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

 

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Golden Lions, Ghosts of Love and Other Adventures of the Book Tour: Everyday Magic, Day 624

Posted on September 11, 2012 | 1 Comment

Yesterday I arrived in one of my favorite Kansas town, Marysville, near the Nebraska border in central Kansas to read from The Divorce Girl at the Koester House and stay overnight in nearby Waterville’s Weaver Hotel. If someone told me while growing up in New Jersey that I would be sharing this coming-of-age, love song to New Jersey in some haunted places in Kansas (let alone that I would adopt Kansas as my home), I would have been beyond dubious. For one thing, I’ve always been jumpy in the dark, easily startled, and as a girl, terrified for years whenever I took out the trash in the dark, probably by seeing too many episodes of Dark Shadows.

Yet my life, this book, Kansas, and haunted houses are nothing I could have

I read in front of this bookcase

imagined. The Koester House, a beautiful home in downtown Marysville, now a historic museum, was built for Charles and Sylvia Koester, completed in 1876, and inspired by the couple’s travels, desires and eye for Greek goddess statues as well as statues of deer, dogs, lions and other critters. Sylvia, who had grown up as an orphan in Illinois, living for years with an abusive relative, found her heart’s greatest and perhaps first real joy in marrying Charles and starting a family. Yet only five years after they married, she died at age 35 of consumption, leaving behind Charles and three young children. Charles stayed in the house his whole life, making it a shrine to his lost beloved. I don’t know for sure that the house is haunted, but the first time I came here three years, I sensed it was occupied, and I love stepping over the threshold to dwell in the beauty, history and story of this place.

 

My room

The Weaver Hotel is said by many to have a resident ghost, a woman who was married to the owner of the hotel but, due to what the hotel’s information portrayed as a misunderstanding (her husband believed she returned the affections of a workman who pined for her before he fell to his death while working on the hotel), love was lost many directions at once. Her husband left her, never to return despite her yearning for him, and it’s said that her spirit roams the hotel although I kind of wonder if the workman with the broken life and heart might be around also.

The wonderful audience at the Koester House

There was nothing scary about being in places where beloved mourned losses that broke their hearts. Instead, I felt great warmth in both places, in great part because of how Waterville and Marysville reclaimed these places, making them centers of the community. I read in the Koester House’s library, the audience spilling out to the parlor, and then enjoyed outrageously good cookies (lavender shortbread!) in the kitchen with some fascinating Marshall County people. I slept well in the Weaver Hotel, and would recommend this beautiful, hospital place to everyone. They even made me a fresh Belgium waffle in the morning.

These cookies alone were worth the drive. Thank you, Marshall County Arts Cooperative!

I also patted the head of the golden lion at the front gate of the Koester House, and wished whatever spirits roamed whatever places peace and homecoming.

Special thanks to Sharon Kessinger for organizing the luscious refreshments, and to Wayne Kruse for making it all (and a whole lot more of the arts) happen here. Marshall County is a model for rural communities of how vibrant arts programs can enhance and uplift communities. Thanks to Lori & Tom Parker too.

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Posted in arts, Spirituality, Travel, Writing Life

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I Listen to the Wind of My Soul: Everyday Magic, Day 622

Posted on September 5, 2012 | Comments Off

Sitting on the back deck, the sun to my right and cottonwood to my left, I listen to the wind. I love this sound so much that I could not help but to open the back door and step into it. The wind always means home, life and soul to me so it’s no wonder that I heard Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) singing “I listen to the wind of my soul” in my mind. I followed, and went to the internet, where I found him recently singing this song on some kind of British panel where the host assured him, “We still know the text. We can help.” I could also help after hearing this song thousands of times over the years.

In looking more closely at the lyrics, I discovered some things that had eluded me in the past. First, the song wasn’t written by Cat Stevens, but by Lenny Wolf, Danny Stag, Martin Wolff, and John Burt Frank, so thank you to these guys. Then the lyrics, which I’d never thought about much before, are crazy like a fox (deceptively simple but more like what Emily Dickinson might sing if she was a 1970′s folksinger). I was especially moved by the second verse:
I listen to my words but
They fall far below
I let my music take me where
My heart wants to go
I swam upon the devil’s lake
But never, never never never
I’ll never make the same mistake
No, never, never, neverI wonder what it means to never make the same mistake, and if it’s like never stepping into the same river twice. Also, who among us hasn’t swam in the devil’s lake on occasion? In a performance in Naples in 2007, Yusuf Islam says this song talks about the journey, and I think about how our words always fall far below actually naming the unnameable, touching the center of the mystery. So maybe it’s not the wind so much of my soul but of the soul of life we witness on this journey.
As I play various versions of this song sung by Cat or Yusuf (depending on the time it was recorded), a hummingbird tries to fill up at the feeder inconspicuously, the dog runs after a squirrel, and the wind makes its presence heard and seen all direction. Where it all ends up, only god really knows.
For a version of the song from the 1970s that features, strangely enough, a girl playing with a squirrel, check this out.

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“No Way of Dividing What’s Yours & Mine When Everything is Shining” & My Political Beliefs: Everyday Magic, Day 619

Posted on August 28, 2012 | Comments Off

Leaving the parking lot from walking a friend to her car yesterday, I found red rose petals leading to the sidewalk. I followed. The rose petals got thicker and soon led me to cement stairs that rose to a porch. Here I found this sign: “No way of dividing what’s yours and mine when everything is shining.”

Juxtaposed with the news reports in my head of the Republican National Convention, recent polling on the election, the impossibility of getting even the smallest piece of good legislation through in Congress (not to mention my worries and woes about the divisions in Kansas lately), this sign startled me.

Last night, while trying to sleep, I thought about how how I tend to categorize all the news flashes that come my way (from radio, friends, observations) into what I agree with, what I don’t agree with, and consequently, who I agree or don’t agree with, and how much I want the ones I agree with to prevail. While I have no intention of abandoning my beliefs and outrage, I’m trying to remember, that even in such polarized moments (in my mind and in this world), when the light touches down, divisions dissolve.

In other words, I may feel a little sick to my stomach when I hear on the radio about the new film asserting Obama has a secret plan to take this country down (because of how warped I believe that film is), or I may be positive that the libertarians in this country are very wrong about their platform, but there’s another angle to consider. I think of joking around with Evangelical ministers at a local coffee shop, or trying to find some common ground with a New Hampshire libertarian in a fierce rain storm while driving up and down mountains. In all cases, we disagreed on all we discussed about the social contract, religion’s role, taxes and Obama, and we would disagree on more with more time to talk.

Yet there is something else too: the simple light of being alive, and how, in that light, we aren’t just made from the same ingredients, but one. At the same time, I can’t fathom being one with Rush Limbaugh or Adolf Hitler or anyone I deem truly evil. But maybe holding opposing beliefs, even within one person’s mind, is human; seeing how it all makes sense may be beyond human. In any case, I will keep my eyes open for when everything shines while holding fast to what I believe I must say or do for a better world.

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Posted in Activism, change, Spirituality

A Little Sadness on a Quiet Morning: Everyday Magic, Day 556

Posted on May 28, 2012 | Comments Off

I sit on the eastern edge of the porch, woods cornering around me while the wind shakes up everything then settles it down. While it’s a lovely day with wavering sun streaming diagonally across part of the screen of this screened-in porch, I feel quietly sad. I could say it’s the news of the day — hearing that an acquaintance died, or thinking of a memorial service coming up this weekend for someone I love — but I woke up this way.

One of my friends says the innate state of humans, when they feel connected to life itself, is to be a little sad because of all the impermanence churning through. Things come, things go, and people too. He says you see this kind of sadness in the eyes of animals too. But I’ve wondered more about the opposite innate state — a kind of quiet happiness because of all the life that keeps coming, such as the wind at this moment, shaking the osage orange tree then stopping on a dime. Or the dog, suddenly looking out in excitement at the butterflies criss-crossing each other’s paths.

I remind myself that feelings, the great prima donna performers of our lives, need no reason to loom small and large, and whatever their spiel, they’ll leave the stage eventually for whatever comes on next. I also remind myself that there’s this: the surprise, strength and vibrancy of life at any given moment.

Like just now when the kitty cat, who I didn’t even know was outside (and isn’t supposed to be outside because of the coyotes in the area), comes strolling through the thick overgrown of the woods until she’s rolling on her back on the driveway. I go and get her, carrying her home, both us purring in our own ways to be together and even a little happy.

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Posted in Animal, Spirituality