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.