In the Image

Life is fragile.
Handle with prayer.
Fascinating, doing fluency therapy with a religious young man who stutters. I always show a cross section of the respiratory system and vocal mechanism, with a column of light flowing from lungs through the bronchi to pass smoothly through the vocal folds, then to be molded and shaped by the pulsings of pharynx tongue and lips into the wonder that differentiates us from all other creations: talk. I want to convey the idea that speech flows, unobstructed. But suddenly, to see that we are, with every utterance, being in the image, saying "Let there be light", and then gently molding, shaping that pure light, into all the words in the world. This is a helpful image.

19 sleeps til Canada

Soon I will sing with my sisters.

All and Nothing

I thought my blog was inconsequential. Nothing. And suddenly I received a very worried email from my beautiful everfriend Jayda, who I now know reads me faithfully, and knows I'm fine when I write. I blog therefore I am.
I'm back, and humbled at knowing that I matter.
Perhaps the most important opposite is this one. I am Everything and I am Nothing. Keep a little note in each pocket, I think I quoted earlier. But again, because it matters. One note says, "I am dust". The other, "For me the world was made". Live in the space between these two, both being 100% true.
I love you Jayda. You are always with me. I love that you, my sunny friend, are the one who knows I am sad here.
When I sneeze in Netanya, I hear your gesundheit.
When I cry, you catch a tear and look through it,
seeing the beauty I see

The Truth and Its Opposite are True

Daddy tells me that for every aphorism there is an equal and opposite aphorism. Help me find the pairs:
"Necessity is the mother of invention" goes with "Invention is the mother of necessity" (I can't go anywhere without my cellphone now. Also, yesterday I was in a house with an elevator. The mom had already washed the stairs for Shabbat, so we had to take the elevator.)
"All's for the best in the best of all possible worlds" goes with "If anything can go wrong, it will"
"Spare the rod and spoil the child" goes with "If you baby a baby when he's a baby, you won't have to baby him when he's grown".
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it" goes with "Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today"
"Absence makes the heart grow fonder" - "When I'm not near the one I love, I love the one I'm near"
Please help me find more!

I'm here! I'm here! Adam's been home a couple of times, and is now returning, tfu tfu, to a less turbulent place. Beit Alfa relatives are joining the Netanya family for a Shabbaton at our house this weekend, and I'm counting the minutes til my first trip to Canada since Aliyah: Nov 7 07. Loving you

This World

If you approach this world expecting everything to be smooth and lovely, it punches you, again and again, and you're knocked down, windless.
Say, instead, it's a horrible place. Know this entirely. There's a calm, an immense relief, in accepting this: that the world is bad. Okay, you say. I know this, so each new badness is not a shock.
It's a bad place and it needs me. I'm useful here because it's a dark and horrible place and I have light in me. Let it be the good that surprises you, jolts your slumber.
Israel can gives you an illusion. You see pretty beaches, waves, fields and flowers, orange trees. It can look so lovely here, you expect to feel wonderful. You expect it to be easy. And over and over again it punches you and you are shocked.
Don't let the beauty blind you. It's a broken place, a needy place. You did not come here to bathe in its light. You came here to bring your light to it.

basic needs

Again, relief and joy washed through me this morning, as I saw "Adam" on the screen of my cellphone, and as I heard his voice, clear, strong, good. He sounds just fine, just regular. There is a steadiness that Adam has cultivated over his years.
I've been thinking about Maslow's hierarchy. My biggest observation, during this time when one's hand is always holding the cellphone, even during classes and movies and speech sessions, in case of a phone call, is that here, you do the top level activities, the SELF ACTUALIZATION, the art, the pleasures, the real living, even when the very basics of breathing, sleep, safety, and security are a question mark.