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.