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.