The Biochemistry of Kisses

Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth Begins the Song of Song of Songs And today ends and begins A year and a year. Let me straddle the years briefly, A foot in each one. Let me straddle World Know that cognitive therapies Do address Chemical problems. A kiss suppresses cortisols, The chemicals of stress. A kiss is just a kiss. A kiss boosts oxytcin, The molecular configuration Of Love. You must remember this. A kiss is just a kiss. Purpose solves headaches, Caring for someone else Reduces our own bellyaches, Mommys don't get colds They don't have time. Falling I. Love is chemical, A craziness, a cure. Kissing is Nice.

Fool

A pure synchronicity with yesterday's post is the bread the Gimpel the Fool bakes, in the play we saw last night. The bread, and everything else in this material, here and now world, are imaginary, and the truth is right under that imaginary crust. It was a fitting way to celebrate Christmas Eve in the Holy Land, and it was also an invitation to reread Crazy Wisdom, a book that always sets me right. "Accepting uncertainty as our philosophy might allow us to honor each other's stories more, delighting in all the bizarre and wondrous interpretations of the mystery. We might also show more tolerance for those who appear to be fools, and for those who speak truths we don't want to hear".

Proofing the Bread

I am reading Letters from Murray Enkin over the years, handwritten letters written in airports, quick notes scrawled with wet hands after long thoughtful baths, letters that the biographers have not seen, letters that exist in one copy, letters that I have saved, even though ostensibly many of them were just written to help me with a decision or dilemma that has long long been resolved. The content has ceased to matter, but the philosophy of how stays with me in Daddy's words all these years. Messages? That the things that count can't be counted, that a decision has so many many factors, each factor entangling the others, changing the other's shape and colour until the big picture is not at all what the parts would suggest. Like the flour and the little granules of yeast that somehow danced with the gods of complexity and became croissants when we baked together for a brief but intense kick. In a study, the numbers are not each one unit, as each subject carries a different weight, and sometimes factors laugh: "We had a democratic vote. Daddy and Susie voted for Trocadero, Mommy and Janie for Pagoda, and Randy for Steak and Burger. And so we dined at Steak and Burger and wonderful time was had by all." The pleasure of little Randy happy and sitting through a meal without climbing carried a larger weight than the promise of delicate spicing in the fettucini. Evidence based research could be valid if we were able to weight the myriad factors and the way they shape and alter each other, if we we're able to step out of rational-mind, monkey-mind, linear mind, one equals one mind, for a moment and think with our complexity mind, our big sky mind, our multifactorial, sparking radiant mind. Should Randy and Janie get a Eurail pass and take efficient, cheap trains directly to all the places on their list, while visiting Mommy and Daddy in Oxford at the peak of Daddy's quantifiable years? More efficient, more reliable, quicker and cheaper may be the dependent variable you can isolate. But in real life the pleasures will come from the getting lost, from the unexpected little Newton Popplefords you'll happen upon when you're rained upon and shivering, from the friends you'll make when asking for directions you wouldn't have needed if you had followed a preplanned and efficient itinerary. Daddy's letters teach me that we can use the evidence and the available information to make our decisions, as long as we acknowledge that many of the factors can only be accessed by our wise, intuitive, nonrational, superrational, clever, dancing mind that naturally takes into account the differential weightings of factors and the way they intertwine, little beads of yeast and cups of dry white flour not lining up linearly but interacting according not to the arithmetician's rules, but according to the baker's rule, that the outcome will follow a logic of rising and surprising.

The mind as a flame

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, But a fire to be kindled. Plutarch I needed a bright yellow card for an art project to do with the kids, and all I could find was a bright yellow index card from my 50th birthday cardfile, written on on one side. One side good. This is the message on the card, and this is my message and the "ani maamin", the "this I believe", of my therapy. I need to be daring enough with the group, the way I always am in individual sessions,to let surprise startle us, to let creativity emerge from the kids. Hee hee, the project is a chanukiah and the time is the festival of light. What happy synchronicity! What angels guide me in planning the group session, reminding me that flame, even the contained and controlled flame of a chanuka candle, has an element of the wild. These sparking, radiant kids who are so hard to contain, flourish when the containing channels their energies so they can bring a thought to completion. That's where teaching, a gentle fanning, comes in.

Approaching 60

I have a little writing nook in this new apartment. It's the safe room, the sealed room, but I swing open the big iron window and write the sunrise. I am approaching the age of 60.
Daddy once told me that at the age of 20, he threw out his childish diary. And then he regretted having done this. And so, I have kept my diaries and notebooks and jottings and articles and music reviews and scraps of thought and worry and dream and poem since 1964. Plus one poem about snowflakes from 1958. Letters from Camp White Pine, five on the first day to Daddy who was studying in London, and three the rest of the summer. When do we write? When there is a longing. Martin Buber wrote, "god created Man because he loved stories". Cc created the world imperfect because he loves to see us sculpt and sing and build and dream and write the world towards wholeness.
I am approaching the age of 60. Part of me says the project over the next few months until March 10 will be to sift through and collate a slim volume of writings from the scraggly stacks of notebooks. But it's not time yet. That project is for 80. These four months til march 10 are for a fresh haiku each morning, for singing a new song to the world. Aha! These four months I will pull one scrap, one line, one scribbled notion from an old notebook each morning, and use it to inform a new thought.
Hanging from the sturdy lever that opens the heavy iron saferoom writingroom window to let the sunrise in, is a tinkling wind chime I never had a chance to give to Malca. And the scrap of paper that sings to me this sunny morning after the first rains is in Malca's generous pen stroke, the corner of an envelope I've saved through all the moves: "Let's write often this year"

The mood of Rosh Hashana traditionally sets the tone for the year. Apples and honey dip the year in sweetness, the round challah sets a circularity, a symmetry, a continuing awareness that midst change and growth and upheaval and pleasure there is a rounding of the edges of time and a circling back to beginnings, that in a realer sense there are no beginnings, only perceived or designated points around the circle. A reminder that each individual's course is not the only measure, because clearly an individual's life does seem to have some clear demarcations: the moment before you take your first walking step, the first step, and so on. First tooth, though like the first step, this is simply a tipping point in a continuum, and the tooth was there from the start. Like new thought, like innovation, like discovery. There from the beginning, just waiting for the right brave, sometimes painful, moment to break through. Even birth itself is a somewhat artificial date, the life before it containing so much musical learning, the rhythms of another's heartbeat, interdependence, protocommunication, (is there any other communication yet?), maybe pleasure. We celebrate the moment of breaking through. And we celebrate the other moments too. Rosh Hashana sets the circular tone of the year, and the paradoxical tone of the year, for it is clearly a beginning.
The mood of Rosh Hashana traditionally sets the tone for the year. Our Rosh Hashana was warm with a certain kind of hug central to Yad Mordecai life, a full, symmetrical hug that lingers a moment longer than hello and welcome, a hug that solidifies family connection and delight in the togetherness. One long table in the big dining hall was all filled with Golda and Moshe's progeny and spice, plus three of Zaidie's clan, Adam, Beno and me. A laughing, tradition-starts-here, warm, somewhat irreverant yet loving welcome to the sweet new year, in a style that was set by Golda and Moshe and their young shtetl friends when they first left Poland and religious dictum and started the kibbutz. Real photoes of Golda and Moshe smile from the dining hall walls. And the presence of so many of our family who have visited that dining hall, with Golda's mosaics on the walls. Also my own 20 year old presence, from the young time I spent in the kibbutz while Beno was in the Sinai just after the Yom Kippur War.
The same synchronicity tales, which seem to one-up one another over the years. Can we ever top Dani and Shlomit's son Lavi, sitting in a restaurant somewhere in India, when his friend commented on the beauty of two young women who walked in, garbed in colourful saris. Lavi looked up, and said, "Those are my cousins, Nadia and Talia". In India.
A fun, lighthearted, delicious, sweet Erev Rosh Hashana, that delights in synchronicity and in circularity, for a fun, lighthearted, delicious, sweet New Year, same as the others only different.
Then on the day of Rosh Hashana I stood by the sea in a windy white sundress with a stone into which I placed everything from the old year that I was ready to bid farewell. Done with ya. Gone. And I tossed it far into the waves. Watched it splash, ripple, and join the sea's bed. And then I picked up the sweetest, pure white scalloped shell, its hite not a white of newness or blankness, its white a white of sun and time and sand and sea and experience. Into the palm of that little open white shell I placed my hopes for the coming year, my promise to myself to accept the pleasure and the surprises with grace and delight and perspective, my awareness that we don't change shape with the wearing away of sea and sun and experience, we just grow more willing to accept and work and produce with what we are. Kept that little white shell, and we went to Jerusalem, where right the moment when I was mentioning our trip to Jerusalem with Mommy and Daddy, my little Smartphone bleeped, and there were Mommy and Daddy on Skype. Oh funny, synchronous world! Oh new, blank, delighting year!

A Quiet Friday night

I want to return to the Janie visit. I want to touch it. I want to save treasure moments from that visit, though today, too, without Janie here, was also a day of experiencing beauty, the taste of guavas from our tree, pomegranates hanging red over a wall. I want to feel, now, a late night moment when Janie came down to the kitchen, glowing such a beauty and we hugged and I can, I can feel it now. I don't want her to be far from me she is not far from me.

A walk to the beach to watch the sun go down over the waves and Shabbat descend over Netanya.

Sunny lit the candles, colourful candles from Tzfat, not saved to take home, but lit right here in Israel, in Sunny's special Jerusalem candlesticks.

I want to find form for the silkenwine visit, make a story. It fragments, like dreams not remembered. I will take, picture by picture, time to refeel that time, that luscious time. But first, these calaniot from the spring. Click on the picture, let it fill the screen. Let me be simultaneous. Let all of my Friday nights be this one, jolly harmonies with Randy and Eva, Daniel and Simon and Hannah, and there will be so many more, because that bunch will not disperse and leave an empty nest at all. They'll gather here and there around the world, and sing together always. Justin at our Netanya Shabbes table sharing the drash from shul, sunflowers Sunny and Shlomo chose at the Friday flower market. A Friday at Kat*47, so many Fridays at 47 Bowman Street. This quiet Friday right now. I am simultaneous. I carry the candlelight the challah the songs. The song. It's one song, with pauses.

Ceaseless Picasso

This is the fish I look for each day, in the blue blue ultramarine blue waters near the shores of the Red Sea. This order of psychic events may be the same for other extended activities also: for the first few snorkeling days, I went for the thrills, new fish that I never could have imagined, the paintbrush of Ceaseless Creativity splashing me moment by bubbled silky water moment with firework surprises, ooooooos, ahhhhhhhs, screams of delight burbling through my snorkel like prayers. Here a perfect scene of frilled corals in lime green and pink with the long black spines of an urchin reaching towards me from the blue depths, a thousand tiny neon tetras swimming as one organism (maybe that's what an organism is. Maybe that's what I am) and two sudden yellow and black striped butterfly fish swishing through. And there, the fingers, a balletic anemone swaying to the sea's adagio, and always slowmotioning through the fingers, the clownfish in their orange, black and white stripes. The light aquamarine blue of the shallow water, the sudden neon brilliance where the sea's bottom drops sharp cliffs to a depth miles down. I have followed a big purple and green fish deep into the dark blue sea until it swished its last tail of colour and disappeared from me. By the third day of snorkeling, I am not looking for thrills. I am the rhythm of the reef. I breathe underwater, forgetting that my mask, my snorkel, are separate from me. I swim lonely but trusting until I find the Arabian Picasso Triggerfish (I looked up the name others have given him, but still believe he appeared to me alone). And then I swim with the fish, my bright coloured bathing suit and mask, and his Picasso painted blue and yellow mask, shimmering waverippled in the waterspace between us. I swim for hours with him, meet his friends, dart between corals and out to sea. Surprises continue, today a brilliant purple fish with turquoise dots, yesterday a bright neon blue partydress of fins swishing frills in all directions. But I am not looking for change. I am swimming with the fish. One-ing.

For Sara, as we enter our 60th year

To age gracefully. That's what she's thinking about today, on her 59th birthday. Gracefully? Are we such ballerinas? Did we do the first 59 gracefully? Boisterously, impulsively, trustingly, foolishly, forgivingly, deliciously, extravagantly, wonderingly, amazedly. I called Sara from the sunsoaked beach in Eilat, between dives through boisterously coloured fish, all of us swimming, yes, gracefully amongst the corals. Let us enter gracefully into this next phase. Gracefully means balanced. Balancing acceptance with triumph.
I accept the changes.
I will triumph over the changes, fight them, hold them off. I will eat whole grains.
I will balance gracefully between accepting myself as I am, and triumphing over the tempting pull of gravity, laziness, apathy, fear, hesitation, age. Moment by moment I'll find my right balance.
Over the phone as she baked apple pie with a whole grain crust, and I breathed unsnorkled air before my next plunge into that mysterious undersea world, Sara told me that she always sees shooting stars on the night of her birthday. And now, I see a note that there will be meteor showers tonight, the annual perseids. For a world where exciting changes happen, meteors topple out of their orbits, and we grow older, however we grow older. For Sara on your birthday: may we age fabulously.

The Moving Finger Writes

"The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Marshall McLuhan referred to our technologies as "extensions of the self". Let's go back and read our worn paperback copy of Understanding Media, or perhaps, download it on our new Android Smartphones.
Let me tour the Self I have created, in the short three days since I acquired this alterEgo, this tiny black box that functions as my telephone, my secretary, my memory, my piano, my photo albums, my navigator, my computer, my ever-renewing newspaper, and, oh yes, my Zen Guru.
Zen tells me today,
"If you understand,
things are just as they are;
if you do not understand,
things are just as they are."
Let me open it, and present the Self I find here:
*Press "On", and the screen is an orchard of ruby pomegranates, a glorious grove of pomegranate trees I stopped by on my way to work.
*The moving finger writes.......Already this machine and my moving finger are so synched, that I can sweep my index finger over the first two letters of a word and Word Prediction knows what I meant to say and types it. In Swype mode, you don't lift your finger and touch each key on the touch screen. You just sweep through the letters, so the fingers in a very short time simply know the motor pattern. Like talking. Like dreaming.
Next blog, I'll tell you about my piano, about my sign language tutor with videos of each sign, of the gallery that magically, without my input, contains my dearest photoes of all the years (I must have had them stored in Picasa all this time. There is always a realworld explanation for the mystical. And the bits and bytes of the realworld explanation make it all the more wondrous). Press "Latitude" and there appears a detailed map of my exact location. Where am I? Who am I? One more app: Eliza, the therapist. Type in comments and this little phone interacts with you lke a psychiatrist.
All this, and I bring you a small promise to myself: Each morning at 6, except Shabbat, the little black selfmachine will sing me sweet wakeup music. Before I read the Globe and Mail or the Jerusalem Post or my Facebook breakfast conversations or my email or my Zen message or my to-do memos, I will pick up a simple ball point pen, and write one small note on that previous, wondrous technological miracle, paper. Before I ask the world, I will consult the closest I can come to the pure self that I was, before the world began. Good morning, uncluttered one. You are here. Right here on the page.

"All is written". And "We choose our path".

How do you count these things?
We figure he could have lived another 15 years,
if he had just behaved.

If he had just quit smoking,
stayed put,
not wandered off into the hot sun
alone.

If he had had devoted children
waiting on him at all times
making sure he didn't fall.

If we encircled him constantly
as on that Tu B'Shvat night
When all of us surrounded him
and sang.

But if he were someone
who just behaved,
would he have,
at age 16 in 1941,
like our ancestor Abraham,
left his father's house,
his home,
his land,
and walked on foot
to a place he did not know,
a place where some voice told him
he would be a blessing?

If he were someone
who stayed put
would our people
have a modern day home
in Israel?

Arriving secretly in Israel
years before the state was declared ours,
he worked long hot hot hours
under sweltering sun
to build up this land.
And he, with other tireless youth,
after the working
would not go to sleep.
After the day's hot work,
late into the night
they would sing,
dance.

Yosef fought
to liberate Eilat,
the south of Israel.
He defended
the Galil,
served in the Golan.

If Yosef stayed put,
let hot sun keep him down,
who would he be?

Being alive, for Yosef
involved making strong sweet Turkish coffee
for other people,
not waiting to be served coffee
without sugar because it's no good for his health.

We offered him coffee
in the nursing home.
"No thanks. I can't drink coffee
without a cigarette".

Give me one cigarette.
What's the worst that could happen?
Come on,
one cigarette.
Whatever will happen will happen.
Give me a cigarette.
The hell with it.
This is living, for me.
Ah!

Rachel told me once
that all that we will become
is written at or birth
on the inside of our skull
in small writing
that we cannot read:
the squiggle of synapses,
the imprint of convolutions,
veins,
neural connections,
the configuration of cells,
the mapwork of thought patterns.

If they had not simply wrapped
Yosef's whole body in a white tallit,
and buried him gently beside Rachel,
if they had looked,
what would they have found written
on the inside of his skull?

He died as he lived,
did his last walk
as he did his 1941 walk to Israel,
defying hot sun,
choosing freedom.

The Direction of the Gift

A little girl was losing her motivation for the hugely arduous task of working on her speech. Of course I always try to make it fun with games and rewards, and by keeping the focus on her news, her interests, her specialness, her self esteem. Etcetera etcetera etcetera. Suddenly a few weeks ago, she started drawing a chart. She was making a daily schedule sheet for me, so I could see in colour all of my therapy sessions. What generous, focused, eager work she was doing, asking questions as clearly as she possibly could, repeating and rephrasing, working on her sounds with conviction so she get this gift right and useful for me. At the next session I told her I was packing for a trip to the Kibbutz, and needed to decide what to wear for swimming at the Sachneh, for supper, for the special Shavuot ceremony, for the drive. Well, she worked and she gave and she helped me decide on the yellow bathing suit with the turquoise and yellow coverup and flipflops, all the while practicing her speech sounds with vigour. And of course, this week, she helped me plan a trip to Israel for a niece of mine, complete with a two night stay at Herod's, the most expensive hotel in Eilat. I found out what I've often found out, that high motivation comes from the drive to be helpful and giving. That, as Rabbi Greiniman once said, the direction of the gift is not always the direction that the object passes. That the giver receives something priceless.

A Biography of Murray Enkin

That in high school or university, I could write a paper with the professor's eyes in mind, and bring it to a certain level. Or I could write it with the notion that I would let Daddy read it. Just that thought made me write more thoughtfully, follow a train of logic, go deeper, question the givens. This last was the main one: question the givens.
Every teaching from Daddy always has the J stroke. You know what I mean: when you paddle a canoe, any large sweeping paddlestroke is followed by a little switchback stroke to correct for oversteering in a certain direction, to keep the canoe on a straight course, to say, "Maybe there's truth in what I said, but take it with a grain of salt, because at one level it's real and at another level, like all teachings, it's nonsense. Question the givens."
I remember in the elevator after a prenatal class where Daddy was the priest of a new religion, psychoprophylaxis, prepared childbirth, I talked about his mention of effleurage, the stroking of the outside of the tummy, to comfort the inside. The idea that we can keep nerve endings busy on the skin, and take away receptor activity internally, where the discomfort is happening. "Don't take it too seriously", Daddy said.
Once a boy asked me to travel. Daddy said no. But then he said, "You're allowed to question me. You're allowed to give me your point of view". Oh. He's not going to do the deciding for me in this life..
Later, when he entitled a talk, "From Cradle to Credo", I wrote, "What Cradle? What Credo?" I had a laundry basket, not a cradle. And no credo was clear. My response to the writing pro mpt, "I grew up in a house filled with......", was "I grew up in a house filled with love and contradictions".
"You are what you pretend to be", Daddy reminds me. Expect inconsistency. Embrace uncertainty. Stand, at once, inside, and outside, seeing the absurdity of all things. All things except canoe trips, where motivations are real and the looncalls over the morning lake are what living is really about, where a J stroke really does keep the canoe steady on its course, keeps you from veering too far in any direction.
A biography of Murray Enkin. We paddled a canoe, my Mommy in the bow, calling out the rocks and the clear passage through the rapids, me in the middle, feeling loved, and my Daddy in the stern, paddling J strokes.

The Family Kipa

There is a quality of light called, "The Wolbromski beauty". You see it shine in eyes and cheeks, a calm, laughing reverence for togetherness and life. Last night saw it surrounding the chupa made of grapevines in the Judean Hills, a weddingplace steeped in biblical tradition and historical longing. The laughing reverence sparkled lovingly from under the chupa, as Lavi, a young grandson of Mommy's sweet uncle Abchu stood, his cheeks, his eyes, glowing the Wolbromski beauty with a special chen, with his bride Yael, the two surrounded by delighted family. The rabbi instructed all the guests, gathered in the grass around the chupa, that our biggest wedding gift to the new couple is our hearty "Amen" to all the traditional blessings, to launch them into a life of gila, rina, ditza, chedva, ahava, achva, shalom v'reut. Love in all of its forms, joylove, delightlove, respectlove, lovelove, friendlove, peacelove, lovelovelove. Amen. Amen. Each blessing was given by a different uncle, (with of course Mommy's Chagall forms floating above the chupa, Zaidie's mother Aidl, may her memory shower blessings on these sparkling children who carry forward the Wolbromski beauty, Zaidie's sisters and brothers, Golda, Ruchele, Abchu and Shimon, all of whom had children and grandchildren present at the wedding, and Zaidie's other sisters and brothers, who didn't live to see children and grandchildren.) When it was the turn of Yossi Bar to make a blessing, a quick scurried search for a kipa led him to borrow the kipa of his brother Dani, father of the chatan. Yossi made the blessing, then smilingly placed Dani's kipa back on his head, all with the Wolbromski beauty, the laughing reverence for family togetherness and Israel and life. Mazal Tov to beautiful Lavi and Yael. June 2 is a good day to be married.

Not with a bang but a giggle

I don't imagine the world is going to end today. Though I saw it in all the papers. You can't believe everything you read, I suppose. Tempting as it may be. The believing I mean. Daddy and I used to shout over Niagara Falls from above, watching that changing, constant scape of frightening volumes of water falling over the edge, our glasses dotted with spray, our voices a whisper over the water's furor, a heady, tempting pull to be two of the water droplets, joining the many in the heady, headless adventure. To be pulled in. Bernouilli's principle pulls you in. The herd instinct. The sound of two hands clapping. Your own two hands in a vast concerthall audience, though you didn't cortically will the clapping. Your hands resonated with the crowd's rhythm, and clapped without you. No, I don't imagine the world will end on May 21, even if enough people believe it. But they say we should live our life as if this day is the last, and also live our life as if this day is the first. Look in awe and wonder at sun over waves (I do! I do! Arriving at the sea's edge is everyday a first, an awe, an awakening for these surprised eyes). That sun disappears, that darkness comes, actually surprises me, each time we stay down at the beach too long, jump the nighttime waves by ear, and fall, our ear confused by the complexity of waverhythms in the roaring black darkness. Let me live each moment as if it's the first. And savour each precious day as if, as if, as if this dear, tumultuous, beautiful physical world of ours is just one of those tiny droplets of Niagara's River, ready for the escarpment of a lifetime.

To Jayda on May 14

That she would travel all the way to Victoria just for my 50th birthday party, do my toes and my fingernails and dress in minis with me, photographing the whole thing at angles that made us look good..... That's a friend.
That she would travel all the way to Netanya when she detected a small note of sadness amongst all my happy words.....That's a true friend. (How we dance the waves, wear each other's dresses and each love it when the other looks even better than she does in this or that outfit. How we match at times, contrast at others, always bringing out the best in each other.)
That the very friend who arranges nature so that every photo is picture perfect and happy, would be the one who sees all the facets of me, reads me between the lines, knows when my smile is mixed, my happiness complicated, my questions unformed and unaskable. And that she would ask the sensible questions that untangle my tangles, dance me towards clarity.....That's a soulfriend.
Happy Birthday Jayda. You are so very beautiful. Love Nomi

We Find Each Other

A poignant melody line in Anne Michaels' "Fugitive Pieces" weeps through the novel, appearing again and again like a strain from the Moonlight Sonata. The young protagonist lives his life with a recurring tender memory, his sister Bella's fingers as she played the Moonlight Sonata. As a child, he had hidden in a closet and watched the Nazi's kill his parents and carry off his sister Bella. Did she survive? Would he ever find her again? He lives this question into his adulthood. The novel ends and we never find out. The game of Jewish Geography, that enchants and compels us all, is our search for Bella: the sister that may or may not have survived, the relatives we never reconnected with, when one branch of the family went to Toronto, one branch to Uruguay, one to Israel, and the rest hid in forests or were sheltered by The Righteous of the Nations. (We say Righteous Gentiles in English, but the Hebrew expression is this, Chassiday Umot HaOlam, the righteous of the nations. We are now on facebook with the family that sheltered our relatives during the war.) This past Sunday we had a delightful visit with the always inspiring Frania Goldhar, who survived Auschwitz and and then raised lambs in Yokneam, Israel. She still lives today on the same land where she first settled in 1948. We were having one of those familiar conversations about all the crazy coincidental meetings of people who turn out to be long lost relatives. In our family we have an incredible talent for finding each other, or a recurrent streak of improbable luck, or a heaping spoonful of morphic resonance. I commented that I think we have a sense that detects relatives. "A nose", my cousin Yossi clarified. Much later, over dessert, lovely 88 year old Frania was talking about the 300 sheep they were raising. All of the ewes gave birth at the same time, and when they would come back from pasture to their baby lambs, each mother found her own baby. Frania remembered marvelling at the mothers' ability to find their own babies. Suddenly we all saw the connection. We do find family. It is a sense, like so many, that we cover over with intellect, but never lose. *************************************************************************************

Tzimtzum AND Expanding Our View

Aha! A phonecall from the mom of a child I work with, helped me understand matza balls. Tzimtzum (reduction) to the flatness of a matza, and then expanding big. Working in a language that is not my own, I have well learned to listen sharply, listen way more than I speak, ask and ask and ask until people are forced to clarify their own thoughts and distill their concerns into the clear elixir that is, in the end, their own cure. This family comes to me from faraway Zichron Yaacov, to work with their two lovely, quirky, different children. The mom, this morning, told me that I am more open, and more able to see big picture, than anyone she knows. More on this soon, I am busy cleaning into the tiniest corners of my drawers and cupboards. As above, so below, as below, so above. As we clean the details of our house, we clarify the details of our soul's storage areas. What will I keep, shine it up and display now? What will I keep, and put back into the drawer? What am I ready to kiss, honour, and let go of? How can I open feng shui spaces in my home and in my psyche? Get tiny, listen big. Do you wonder how on earth that is like matza balls? So it's not like matza balls.

Tzimtzum

Tzimtzum is a fundamental idea in Kabbala. It's an attempt at answering this big problem: If Ceaseless Creativity, (or whatever you call that which created all this physical world) is a oneness that fills all the given space, how was there room for anything else? A good problem. Tzimtzum suggests that the oneness contracted and made room for a physical world. Anyway, tzimtzum is what I'm trying to do until Pesach: contract my footprint by sorting through all my clothes and papers. But I just arrived at Matzah Ball's Law. You see, Pesach is the time when we unleaven ourselves, theoretically. Make ourselves flatter, like matzah compared to bread, reduce our egoprint on the world. But wouldn't we fill the space with matza balls and bubelah. And here's me, instead of throwing anything out, I'm prancing around in clothes I had forgotten, and delighting in poems scribbled on napkin corners. Tzimtzum? Maybe someday.

Turning Purim Upside Down

Since I entered my sixtieth year, I have grown more in touch with the many maps of this body of mine. I picture a circulatory system, busy highways of red and blue. Main arteries are flowing smoothly, reads the traffic report. I will them to stay untangled, patent, as in the prayer. I map onto this body the bone structure, firm but with just enough bounce. Backbone is a flexing, giving multiplicity, never rigid. I map the kabbalah spheres, a Calder mobile of balancing forces, always rejuggling their weights, balancing big picture with detail, firmness with give, determination with acceptance, as above, so below, as in head's theory, so in body's practice. The first sixty years, I thought all of those were just schematic cartoons, the skeleton a Hallowe'en costume and the circulatory system a transparency in a children's book. I am ready to become transparent to myself, picture a food I eat becoming part of me. I wash the Purim masquerade off my face, put away the mask and the costume. And here I am, me: a persona, another mask paper- macheed out of old newspapers, memories, beliefs about what I should decide to be. Keep washing off the masks, the mappings. This world of our lives is a Purim, a masquerade, a cloak over the circulation of real essences. Main arteries are flowing smoothly. I will them to stay untangled, patent, as in the prayer.

You Answer Them with.....Spring

Driving to the Sea of Galilee today in sunshine, after the rains we have all been hoping for, we passed hills and fields of green green green, a flourishing Eretz Yisrael of wildflowers. And on the way home, as the sun was beginning to set, each flower glowed its own luminous red miracle. Or equation. Or chancy wierd random chaotic serendipitous splash. Or blossoming expression of an angel's gentle, "Grow! Grow!". Or evolutionarily adapted pigmentation sample refined by generations of victorious bee-attracting championship, let the fittest flower survive to reproduce into dazzling fields of sunlit delight. A field of pretty flowers proves each person's point of view: "And here is an example of evolution at its finest". Or, "proof exquisite of a divine designer". Or, "fractal geometry blossoms again". "Just look at this field of wildflowers. They prove my point."

And the flowers just smile wisely, knowing beyond knowing.

Or, more clearly, not needing to know.

The Geometry of Irises

Your sensuous symmetry!

The outrageous miracle of one huge purple black iris amongst the grasses would be aweinspiring, would bring hikers from afar to gaze at you. But cloned, you pop up here! here! and there's one over there! Look! I see a clump of them, over further!

Each wild iris is a work of delicate and flouncy imagination, a designer's flight of fancy, a spilling of the palette, a living breathing Mandelbrot equation flowering into purple mystery. And to spot them here and there in the fields is a delight to the irises of my eye.

Irises from Afar

Click on this photo to glimpse up close the feel of spotting wild irises amongst the grasses and wildflowers. Each one is its own treasure.

2009_1001

Click on this and you'll see a whole bouquet of pictures. Also click on the iris closeup and examine its geometry up close. Israel this week is only wildflowers. The headlines should read:
Rubyred Anemones in the Galil! Wild Irises in Netanya! Come to Yad Mordecai, the poppies are blooming. Ask me. I'll write the real newspapers.

Central Coherence

A concept I learned at yesterday's Speech and Language conference resonates glorious clanging symbols with a delightful visit in the midst of the conference. Yes, my dear and deep friends Molly Ann and Henry (scroll through older posts and olderer posts here on the blog, and you'll see two stories and pictures of these treasurefriends of mine) came all the way to the luxurious hotel where the conference took place, just to sit cozily in the lovely hotel lobby's easy chairs, and visit ...........me! Their very presence lent continuity to my self-image. The Nomi they were visiting is the Nomi of Hamilton and of childhood and of wonder and of enthusiasm and of creative, trusting youth. I am a lucky "Oleh", newcomer to Israel. I am connected to wonderful family, even happened upon a grandnephew of my Zaidie on the train. (This often happens. This time it was Yoav, Zaidie's brother Shimon's grandson, Yossi Wolbromski's redheaded son). I am connected in ancient mythic ways with this land, and also in recent historic ways with cousins of Mommy, grandchildren of Daddy's father's halfbrothers (yes, two new Enkin babies were recently born in Israel). And still, there is a disconnect, as people meet me at almost-sixty, with a Canadian accent and too much please and thankyou, not enough directness, not enough hot pepper. They see me now, and have no child to connect me to, no continuity. Thank goodness for Molly Ann and Henry, who know who I can be, and who I will be, who believe in me and remind me, over and over again, that deep down and entirely, I believe in myself.

Holy

Loved receiving this comment:
Nomi, continue to concentrate on the whole in the rock that opens to a smile that opens to the waves.the holy wholly hole that lets you see the whole hole, whole.
And now, a little note I just found amongst my todo lists:
Here's to the sunrises we don't see,
Skies pink cottoncandy miracles,
A luminous peach arising,
And we sleep through the wonder,
or sing in the shower
that has no window.
If I hadn't been up at 6 today,
hadn't passed by the one small window
that peeks to sky's hopeful east
the pink would have miracled over to blue
(blue being, itself, an ordinary, profound, dazzling wonder)
Here's to the sunrises we don't see,
and here's to trusting deep
that miracles are popping
moment by ordinary moment.

In the Details

My sister Janie reminds me to see the tiny intricate design on one orangeblossom petal. The changing turquoise colour of the sea as it deepens. Picturing Janie beside me, as she so soon will be, I walked the details this Shabbat seaside morning. Up on the cliff over the sea, I saw the face of each rock formation, even noticed the change in the sandstone's holey configurations since my arrival three years ago. I have sketched the circular rock formation with a round hole view to the sea, and now it is a new moon, smile open to the waves. Even rocks live and change, if you slow down your breathing, and observe. How many different winter wildflowers peek tiny from amongst the rocks. One small leaf, Janie teaches me, is where you can see the forest, understand it. Dogen, and we'll look up the ancient Eastern source, tells us, "The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass. And Woody Allen is "astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." Maybe if we study the tealeaves in one cup at one dimsum table on one Sunday morning, that's where we'll find the universe we're looking to understand. Tom Robbins describes Ellen Cherry rummaging through her purse to find her lipstick. "If a woman doesn't know what's in her purse, how can she know what's in her heart?" It is true, that with the sorting of our purse and our junkdrawer come a sense of order in the universe.
The truth and its opposite. seven blind men went to learn what an elephant was. One, feeling the tusk, said, "An elephant is hard and shiny and pointed". Stand back for a moment. Just a couple more steps back. There. Now look. Daddy talks about reaching an age where you're not limited to seeing this wave, this one, this one. You have been around long enough to see the slow movement of the tides, the big picture.
So there we have it. To see the universe in one dewdrop. And not to be fooled, for this one dewdrop may be just reflecting the red of my Canada hoodie as I lean to see it close in. The sea is many colours today, clear transparent water over the beach sand, turquoise as it deepens, and wondrous indigo black over the reefs. A dewdrop is one dewdrop, and I want to stand afar, open my eyes in amazement and empty readiness to take in the whole palette of wonder.

Simple

A plain Shabbat. Sweet Friday morning at the school, preparing for Tu B'Shevat, and then seeing the modern day manifestation of two portions of manna before Shabbat: all of the children of Israel in crazily crowded grocery checkout lines, their carts spilling over with fruits and vegetables and challahs and treats for Shabbat. Everyone calling out to friends, loudly discussing every issue in the news, making sure their voices are heard. Shabbat dinner was all about the crossing of the Red Sea, that definitive moment when our people had two options: swim or turn back and fight the huge Egyptian army. Options? Both were useless. When option a and option b are both pointless, just take a moment and listen. From the waves, a whole new possibility will open. Survival is in that moment of possibility.

And then today we were in the Arab village of Tira. Arab, Muslim, and part of Israel. A plain and simple hello and we helped in the shaping and baking of these big flat pitas, with mounds of fresh fresh oregano leaves and green onions folded into the dough before it is patted and baked in the windy woodfire oven, out near the lemon trees. Here it's not some significant event when Muslim families and Jewish Israeli families spend an afternoon together. It's plain and fine and ordinary, and the warmth is a sharing.

Kilkelly and Skype

In Israel there are no doors between houses. My neighbour Rachel dashed in to use our Skype tonight, as hers was not working, and she Needed to talk with her daughter Meshi who is vacationing in Thailand. Rachel showed me all the photoes on her cell phone, and even called Meshi a couple of times in Thailand while we were getting the Skype video connection organized.
I was remembering my year in Neuchatel, during which there were zero phone calls, one telegraph, and many letters. And then I remembered, and looked up this song that dear John Leeder used to sing:
Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 60,
my dear and loving son John
Your good friend the schoolmaster
Pat McNamara's so good
As to write these words down.
Your brothers have all gone
to find work in England,
The house is so empty and sad
The crop of potatoes is sorely infected,
A third to a half of them bad.
And your sister Brigid and Patrick O'Donnell
Are going to be married in June.
Your mother says not to work on the railroad
And be sure to come on home soon.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 70,
dear and loving son John
Hello to your Mrs and to your 4 children,
May they grow healthy and strong.
Michael has got in a wee bit of trouble,
I guess that he never will learn.
Because of the dampness
there's no turf to speak of
And now we have nothing to burn.
And Brigid is happy,
you named a child for her
And now she's got six of her own.
You say you found work,
but you don't say What kind
or when you will be coming home.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 80,
dear Michael and John,
my sons I'm sorry to give you
the very sad news
That your dear old mother has gone.
We buried her down at the church in Kilkelly,
Your brothers and Brigid were there.
You don't have to worry,
she died very quickly,
Remember her in your prayers.
And it's so good to hear that Michael's returning,
With money he's sure to buy land
For the crop has been poor
and the people Are selling
at any price that they can.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 90,
my dear and loving son John
I guess that I must be close on to eighty,
It's thirty years since you're gone.
Because of all of the money you send me,
I'm still living out on my own.
Michael has built himself a fine house
And Brigid's daughters have grown.
Thank you for sending your family picture,
They're lovely young women and men. Y
you say that you might even come for a visit,
What joy to see you again.

Kilkelly, Ireland, 18 and 92,
my dear brother John
I'm sorry that I didn't write sooner
to tell you that father passed on.
He was living with Brigid,
she says he was cheerful
And healthy right down to the end.
Ah, you should have seen him
play with The grandchildren
of Pat McNamara, your friend.
And we buried him alongside of mother,
Down at the Kilkelly churchyard.
He was a strong and a feisty old man,
Considering his life was so hard.
And it's funny the way he kept talking about you,
He called for you in the end.
Oh, why don't you think about coming to visit,
We'd all love to see you again.
..........and if you Skype me, I'll even sing it to you.

Emailing Buby

Such an impulse to email Buby this evening, as I ate my yummies and flumveisch and felt so good. Wondered what her email address was, and then laughed and laughed at my silliness. She was standing right there at my elbow!

And You Shall be a Blessing

My cousin Jeremy learned a lilting melody to L'cha Dodi at summer camp, back in 1968 or so. I was so captivated by the joyful tears in this little tune, I played it for years as a sort of signature nign on my guitar.
Then in 2000 I sat in a crosslegged circle with my sister Janie's friends, in a grassy Toronto park, just after my mom's breast cancer surgery. One of the friends suggested we sing Mi Sheberach for Janie's and my mother. I was lifted, carried, by the healthy words to this song. It didn't say, "Make her all better". It said, "Help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing".
Mi sheberach avotenu
M'kor habracha l'imotenu
May the Source of Strength
Who blessed the ones before us
Help us find the courage
to make our lives a blessing
and let us say
Amen

Mi sheberach imotenu
mkor habracha laavotenu
Bless those in need of healing
with refua shlema
the renew al of body
the renewal of spirit
and let us say
Amen.

The pure, healing melody of that prayer sang me through Mommy's surgery and into that first visit when I saw Mommy so tiny in the hospital bed with a tube coming from her nose and wondered if she would wake up again. And soon the hospital room door opened and there was Susie, and the next knock brought flowers from Randy and Eva, and Mommy woke up to a happy party there in her recovery room.
And we sang Debbie Friedman's Mi Sheberach. (as I type, this faraway Monday morning, me so sick with a flu, the memorial service for Debbie is just beginning. What beautiful beautiful healing harmonies. What an outpouring of sweet, accepting love. Debbie's melodies each walk that tender line between comforting, familiar singability and heartopening brilliance, so that we're singing along the first time we hear the song, yet lifted to a certain windowmoment of clarity, through which we begin to understand what prayer can be.)
And then, when we were new to Victoria, and living in the Regent Hotel, I walked the rainy block to the the downtown shul to find out what a healing service was. Maybe I'd meet some nice people in this new town of mine. It takes such an energy to start fresh in a new town. I opened the heavy door to the shul, and heard three women's voices in the most otherworldly, exquisite harmonies, Shma Kolenu, with a long and everchanging lalalalalala la la so touching, so releasing, so healing. I thought, I want to celebrate my 50th birthday with the sounds of these voices. The melodies were Debbie Friedman's. The voices were Josie Davidson, still my soul's inspiration and the opener to wider thought and feeling. Also Helena and Nehama. Josie sang gloriously at my 50th birthday, and continues to sing to me. She and I sang together at monthly healing services throughout my dear time in Victoria, and Debbie Friedman's songs opened us to new thought each time. We explored the notion of a pure, totally pure core soul in each of us, no matter how muddied we can get at times.
Elohai
neshama
shenatata bi
tehora hi.
So many times, so many many times have Debbie Friedman in them. My first Yom Kippur fast in the Kolot Mayim choir, singing out Shma Kolenu over a room of loving people. Debbie's melody. My soul soaring in such entire love.
The day Janie first heard Debbie's Ahavat Olam, and added to it such rich velvet harmonies, with Eva and me. I can hear this right this moment, and feel Mommy's listening smile. Sunny was a baby.
We should not have left Victoria. I was dumb to leave Victoria. I dashed into the shul on our way out to the ferry, to buy a gift to bring to Tala on our way across the country. I hadn't realized the shop would be closed and a service would be going on, for the second day of sukkot. Well, they wafted me up onto the bima, and the Rabbi said to me, "Be Solid, in Israel. Be solid". And everybody sang to me, Debbie Friedman's song,
L'chi lach
to a land that I will show you
Lech l'cha to a place you do not know
l'chi lach on your journey I will bless you
and you will be a blessing
you will be a blessing
you will be a blessing
l'chi lach.

Rain

What a rain.
When the downpour began, I said thank you. Israel so very much needs rain, and the sound of the rain on the roof is so comforting, the very presence of a roof for it to rain on, so reassuring.
Ceaseless Creativity, thank you for rain.
And then when the sun came through for a brief dazzling moment, I said thank you.
And that reminded me of Mussi, a tiny girl in Calgary when I taught her, now a wise young woman on facebook. Mussi reminded everyone at the turning of the year that we don't need to hope for good. Good will always pour down on us in different forms.
It is we who need to cup our hands in different ways, orchestrate the shape of our vessels so the good pouring down upon us at this moment is channeled to nourish us right. Good is always coming our way.
Are we shaping ourselves right, to be able to receive it?