It’s Rosh Hashonah

The time of year when we take another look at our humanness.

They way we are.

The decisions we make and the ones that are made for us.

when our most human actions, especially the ones that seem to haunt us,

are placed  before us to pulse and resonate and ask us to engage with them.

Memory and reaction joining hands.

Battering us back to our imprints and judgments…

But this year, I offer the prospect of staying present,

Quite simply, I ask, is it possible for us to avoid assumptions based on our imprints and perhaps, more expansively, experience the life around us based on our ability to be still?

“Let Life happen to you.

Life is right in any case”

Rainer Maria Rilke’s words grow for me. I first encountered them years ago before much life had tossed me around. The words were a call to experience  but one I wasn’t ready to accept.

Just live, take the day and experience it? The good and the bad?

No blame either horizontal or vertical?

No judgment or triggers? Just clarity—?

Is that even possible for a stiff necked Jewish woman?

Gradually, however I have come to understand that tho we live in partnership with the universe, are actually an expression of God—or the Divine– on the planet, there are just some things that happen that we cannot fathom. There are some  things that are part of “experience” and that we are not meant to understand and analyze. We are meant to just be still and see what happens.

Our rush to judgment and certainty is an interesting exercise perhaps but often gets in our way.

Sure, a moral compass is important to use in our analysis of what transpires and who we think caused it

but once we have our moral tools down

we  spend and awful lot of  time judging and blaming,

shaking our heads in wonder,

“ He should have.. if you just would listen to me… how could you possibly??.. deflecting our own experience of life

by standing outside of it in an intellectual HAZMAT suit.

Yes, there is good inclination and bad

Yes, we are asked to make decisions along our way

But isn’t it interesting how things work out?

Find their balance

Even in the time of imbalance .

Things are often horrific or at least inconvenient,

they have a life of their own.

We can alter our decisions perhaps,

choose right action but in the end  what happens, happens.

People act responsibly and irresponsibly

Some say we create our own reality,

some say that’s hocus pocus thinking… but I tend to agree with Martin Buber .

“Rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way. Why rake muck when you can be stringing pearls for the delight of heaven?”

So, this Rosh Hashonah story. Sarah and Hagar.

Sarah threw the haughty slave girl with the smooth skin

and the quick child out.

Get outta here

Scram, hit the road jack and take that kid with you..

And Hagar, the slave woman, with her sloe eye and soft step threw her glance back at her lover, the man she shared with the old woman,

at the old woman’s behest and she began to shuffle off.

Oh, he protested, he cared about the woman, the child

But god told him to heed Sarah his wife…

And look what happened

Hagar and Ishmael hit the desert and at the last moment of despair

God spoke to Hagar (the first woman to receive that honor) and

Ishmael survived.

He  founded a great nation

Which even to this day is working out its response to

Sarah throwing Ishmael out—

Islam was created

A great nation

A full culture

And even today we are still figuring out who we are to each other –us descendants of Abraham—of Isaac and Ishmael.

Whether we need to hate or get revenge

for Sarah’s rash, pragmatic action.

Maybe that’s why Arabs and Jews are at each others throats,

have lost our balance  and seem desperate to even scores.

How about no answer?

How about just being with each other?

In the same world looking thru the same onion skin of this reality and getting inklings of the greater reality…..

All of us, engaged in really being in our total experience

the definable and indefinable. Hmmmm.. how would that be?

Why do we struggle to judge?

To even the score

Make sure tit gets tat and somebody wins and somebody loses

Perhaps this year we can see how it makes no difference

That from the worst expulsion

The most unequal business deal

The most grievous loss

From the greatest triumph there is really only experience…
If we look at our life

as a swirl of decisions, choices, energies

that exist for us within, say, a net of reality—we rattle and dance and the net keeps us present, we also have to notice that sometimes our rattle and dance is joined to something bigger. That bigger experience is All, Ultimate Spirit, God’s presence or whatever you’d like to call it. Seems to me the job is to consider the spaces between here and there-inside and outside– and realize it all may be the same– recognize that the difference between inside that net of reality and outside is not so far….

Isn’t that what prayer offers us, or meditation, or  observation—if we step back and quiet ourselves and be the world as it spins and offers us a great ride, don’t we experience moments that transcend the everyday inside this reality net?

I’d say so..

Maybe someone you love dies… and all of a sudden you realize that they are not gone, just changed. And you are too. You have been expanded—painfully perhaps—but expanded. You are both here in your reality net and through love, are part of the soul that is off to Angel School with larger fish to fry. We are in our world of judgment, yes—but we are also in a larger simpler and more complex reality.
I remember my mother telling me the story that when a child is conceived and is floating out in the heavens, ready to come down thru the birth canal, God touches the babe’s upper lip—making the cupid bow of the lip- and with that touch God takes away all memory of the ALL the ULTIMATE and our job on earth is to start again to understand that we exist both in the heavens and at the same time inside our daily, “concrete” human life.

We move from being all knowing elements of the ALL or God into humans who must define and learn and grow and grow and grow back to the understanding that we are part of something bigger… and that something bigger is exactly where our souls reside.

This stuff here on the planet is important work.. we are here after all as the divine expression of the ALL,  but our job is to remember that the ALL, the SPIriT is a place past judgment and we come thru our life imprints, our prejudices and human experiences to return to SPIRIT richer, fuller and more Godlike than when we were born. What a  trip.

.
Yes, we need to protect ourselves as best we can from grievous harm, but if rotten acts are undertaken

maybe it’s just the Universe doing its thing;

it’s quite a power trip to think we are alone in creating our own reality in the end.

Right and wrong? Good and bad.. yes. We know about that

But when we cannot control those events, rather than stay in the struggle of judgment and blame, perhaps we can  just “experience” the actions and the movement these actions cause and see what happens. We spend a lot of time worrying about the future… a time that if you think about it never comes… all we have is now… this moment.. and the way we experience it.

I am not saying complacency or outrage are out of style and unworthy—I am only saying that they have partners in observation and simple clear silent experience.

Life changes us and then we change our lives.
Sure Sarah threw Hagar out, but Islam arose because of that action.

Yes, we are still trying to figure out who we are to each other, Arabs and Jews . That sure takes up a lot of time. Maybe that activity would benefit from a release of the Blame Game. What if we didn’t name the devil but began to understand the dimensionality. We can still smite the foe. But perhaps we will realize the cost.

Maybe this year, we can step back from judgment.

From the nonsense of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, from the cult of celebrity and the mythical equation that money equals success. Maybe we can open our eyes and actually begin to get an inkling that life and experience are both inside the rules and outside in the larger float where experience just is and life is right in any case.

And so it is

Amen

I fly to NYC tomorrow.
I may rent an apartment.
I have the distinct and profound pleasure of being alive and able to flex my muscles.

There is such power in reclamation.
Singing over the noise and being heard.
I can’t wait for the views over the Hudson River, and a table with a cloth.
And memories of zabaglione when that was the thing to make for a dinner party
But simply now… a table, with a view,
and a cup of tea and
the ability to write
and crow.
My daughter not far.
My guts untwisted.

Oh my god, I am coming back.
Fresh and new.
Fresh and new.

For those of you who may read this and have no idea why that is significant, you didn’t know my husband, Tony. He’s gone now a year and a half. Hard to believe.

I have been sorting and moving on and in and back to myself in the last months.

I have re entered the world of relationships.

I have sent my daughter off to college.

I have repainted the bedroom furniture, had the floors scraped.

And I reupholstered the couches that spent a lot of time in the last twenty years holding various parts of our family. In sickness and in health, in fights big enough to demand a time of separation and long leisurely afternoons in front of the tv, the only piece of furniture wide enough and soft enough to hold the two of us and sometimes the three of us. Allow us to feel each others skin and fabric and the crumbs from an errant cookie.

The couch, actually couches, were made by Uncle Ben, the odd but crafted upholsterer, who stuffed the two twin bed size couches with the finest down that lasted from then until about a month ago when I decided it was time to recover the softest and most comforting piece of furniture we had owned together. Tony and I. Husband and wife. Hope-r and Hope-ee. Mother and Father, Friend and Lover.

The couches came back from the upholsterer today stiff as two boards.A punishment

.I deigned to try to improve Uncle Ben’s handiwork.

Not to worry, I will pay the extra money and get the foam gone and the feathers replaced.

But sometimes, I am learning, wear and tear, memory and complaint, joy and disappointment cannot be covered with new blue fabric and an alternate denim ticking.

But I was talking about the car. Or maybe not.

Another step back to myself. As I was, now am, dipped and coated with my life of twenty or so years.

Those sofas are just too hard to rest on these days.

….and her blue eyes scanned the cities  and the students,the memories I could barely hold back from the jumble of my own past, the bookstores and weather, the black faces, the white ones and the possible Beauty’s she might become..

I had the privilege of watching her compute the future in  her third eye,

….the feel of the weather, the intellect of the possible roommates, the laughter in the security guards versus the serious demeanor of the guys in the downtown bodega’s. Everything was in the hopper, the cab ride and the sunshine, the brilliance of the spring Sunday pouring thru the gate at Johns Hopkins and the way the smell of beer lingered over the burgers at the Turtle Cafe.

And i saw her measure herself against herself as the prospect of herself in the future started to take shape.

There is no greater privilege than that of witnessing a child become a woman.

Her eyes did not see the Common and the Garden full of Viet Nam protesters, or stoned boyfriends walking through snowflakes, or couples rolling in each others strange arms on the banks of the Charles River.

She did not smell the panic of the test I took in a Baltimore house full of radical lesbians when I realized I was pregnant for the first time and needed to feel a  man’s arms–her fathers arms– around me to cut the richness of all that estrogen.

She did not see me in those cities.

She saw herself and who she will become

and that is the way the world washes itself and gives us hope.

my god. how much more glorious can this journey be?

may 1 /09 marks the day that my new novel DREAMING IN DAYLIGHT from [blocpress] will be published. It hopefully will hit Amazon soon after. i hope that it will be linked to my other book YOUR NAME HERE; AN ACTOR WRITERS GUIDE TO SOLO PERFORMANCE.

it has been a year of change and chapters.

leaving the years of marriage and full time motherhood behind now and trying on the shifty jackets of new identity.. or maybe picking up where i left off so many years ago.  i spent the last year finding my balance, finding my new voice and honoring my marriage with the writing and workshopping of my new play STALKING YESTERDAY. it was read at EST/LA as part of WINTERFEST, and will be read April 19 in a “green” reading at Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga , CA. Then, again, 21 April, 7:30 PM at EST NY on the 6th floor. 

BOUNTY OF LACE has been honored with the 2008 Religion and Theatre Award thru ATHE this year and the HALCYON THEATRE (www.halcyontheatre.org) in Chicago will include it in their Alcyone Festival with some wonderful playwrights. I met Betty Shamieh, a strong young Palestinian American Playwright, at this past weekends STAGING THE MIDDLE EAST conference at UC Riverside. The group convened to talk about the issues of communication in this red hot part of the world. Particularly exciting was a reading of a collaborative work developed by Motti Lerner and a diverse group of theatre professionals including colleagues Roberta Levitow (Theatre Without Borders) and Torange Yeghezarian (Golden Thread Productions).

Oh, and  a short piece on Miss Burns, my beautiful second grade teacher, is being included in THE ULTIMATE TEACHER collection from HCI Publications coming out soon. You can find it on Amazon as well.

In this blog, I hope to keep you up to date about my work and also ruminate a bit about living on in joy and grace.

I hope we can share this adventure together.

Blessings.