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.