Shabbat, February 28, Adar 9… 5 years.

Shabbat, February 28, Adar 9… 5 years.

Beautiful humans,

I have been torn open again today. It sort of feels like, “Fiiiinally.” This Keats poem from the lovely “Poem-A-Day” emails was one of the tipping points… I think it was the first line that did me in – the recognition of infinite.

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

BY JOHN KEATS

The poetry of earth is never dead:    

  When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,    

  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run    

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;    

That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead      

  In summer luxury,—he has never done    

  With his delights; for when tired out with fun    

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.    

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:    

  On a lone winter evening, when the frost     

    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills    

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,    

  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,    

    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Thank you for being here to bear witness and see me in my smiles and tears.

I have many words to share, but I’m not sure that they will come to me so clearly.

I want to say … thank you. Thank you for everything. I feel most held in this community than I have anywhere else this month.

It’s interesting to be away from home during this period. I don’t have you all right here, and I don’t feel like I have a Jewish base, and I certainly don’t have a way of going to the cemetery to sit with my mom. And yet, in my work on building a relationship with myself, I have created a sanctuary for my tender soul. The part of Allie’s post that most struck me was how many of you on this list are my home. 

I guess the main factual things I want to share are…

- Today is Shabbat, the last day of February, the 9^th of Adar, the 5^th yahrtzeit (anniversary) of my mother’s death.

- Last night, at the beginning of the yahtzreit, I cried with a friend who many of you probably know about our parents being dead and what it means to be going through our twenties without them. I said something that I really mean. My relationship with my mom continues to inform every part of my life, and in that way, she gave me every thing I needed in 23 years.

- Then, around 1am Tel Aviv time, I got a text message from my dad, “Last views from 140.” You see, yesterday, we said goodbye to the apartment where I have the most recent memories with my mother, the apartment where she died, but more importantly, the apartment where Ima and I most recently cuddled while watching Gilmore Girls, where her dissertation materials were beautifully displaced, where every corner had a little bit of Ima in it, from the chamsot at the entrance to the early Zionist coasters on the coffee table. The pictures my dad sent are here…  End of a beautiful time, and also, it is time.

It got me thinking about how I have written about this view before. To many of you, in July 2010. 

“the fourth of july has not ever held much meaning for me, but tonight it did, so i thought i'd come to my kehilah-sangha (community of loved ones) to share. tonight, we were at my apartment on the fourth of july for the first time since we've lived here. the day was crazy because our entire street was closed, the west side highway was completely blocked off (pedestrians had a great view from up there), so we were basically on lockdown, an enforced shabbat, if you will. even though i had multiple dilemmas with facing my own privilege today, i mostly enjoyed the atmosphere brought about by a car-less neighborhood. even more, it was one of the first joyful occasions we've had at this apartment in almost a year. with family, we relaxed and brought life back into the apartment; we brought my mom's energy back into this space.

my mom cherished the view from our apartment in ways that i didn't really understand. she liked most the moments when the river was quiet. she'd wake up at 5am, sometimes before, watch the sunrise, see the buildings cast shadows over the river, stare patiently at the slow movements of the huge cruise ships pulling into their docks. she always noticed the underdogs too -- she loved those charming little tugboats. and she loved sunset, and i feel it's a time when i can most seamlessly connect with her. i included a glimpse of today's. (sidebar: akriti and i have spoken often of how we might live if we believed that we were each sunsets. "you can live your life believing you are a sunset, loving yourself, being in awe of yourself; it is a reason to be alive," akriti once said to me.)

… it was a night when she, just like me, would have been smitten with new york, with its romantic summers that remind you you're living. a night when it's not even a stretch to start talking kabbalistically about shattered vessels, emanations of holy light, shards that we're piecing together. 

i felt you all with me tonight, holding me. thank you for the magic you bring to my life daily.”

So, on this last day of the shortest and longest month of the year, I want to recognize our community – sangha – brothers and sisters – chevre – spiritual seeings of one another. I want to bless us with many more Februarys together, many more everythings together, with many more moments of bringing magic sparks into the darkness. Because really, that’s what we do, we live and we are awake and we see each other so that no one feels alone.

Thank you, Ruthie, for connecting us and keeping us together and giving us rays of sunshine and moonlight in the moments when we need them. You are a gift.

I cherish you all. May your last day of February be what ever you need. May it be Shabbat and holding and caring and may you feel the comfort and care of this community, hugging you, sitting on your shoulder, witnessing you in your full rawness and beauty. See you next year, and also, see you tomorrow, you know?

Always yours, with love, gentleness, love, 

einat

Some more sharing…

1) This Tiny Desk Concert by Nickel Creek (which you can even download) is holding me. Especially the second song, which starts our around 4:55. “What a great way to start the first day of the rest of my life…”

2) These photos of one of your silly friends participating in the Chocolympics on team Red Hot Chocolat - an event in which Sackler medical students let out some steam by eating a lot of chocolate competitively (duh). The bottom one here is me with a whole lot of smores getting shoved into my mouth.

3) My mom loved Maurice Sendak. When I just searched my email for his name, to try and remember who first shared this interview with me (almost certainly Anna – thank. you.), I found that she cited Where the Wild Things Are in an academic article bibliography.

Illustrated excerpt of Maurice Sendak’s interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Air

One of my favorite lines… "I have nothing now but praise for my life. I'm not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more. ... What I dread is the isolation. ... There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready."

4) Ruthie recently re-shared this poem that I shared with many of you on Avi’s two? three? year yahrtzeit. Every time I reread it, it has new meaning… new hues.

Wait
Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Is it lewd that I'm leaving this here?

#ThrowbackDigger


http://www.wired.com/2015/02/best-sex-toys/

Home stretch

Hi Friends,

Though February can be oh-so-cruel, it is also oh-so-short. What a kind gift. Thank you...Pope Gregory? HaShem? --  I don't know who to thank. But I feel really glad it's almost over.

Yesterday, in spite of the freezing cold and the colorlessness of urban winter, I unexpectedly was  hit with a surge of gratitude for everything and everyone in my life. It's the best when that happens! I felt energy flow through my blissfully young, active body, and excitement for spring, and joy that I get to do meaningful work and keep learning every day, and be loved and love.

Here are a couple things I listened to and looked at while I was in that mood that kept making me smile bigger and bigger. Hope they bring you some of that same feeling!

1.  Most of all, this video of some badass elderly folks getting down to the song Uptown Funk. OH THE DANCE MOVES. That's how I want to be when I grow up. (A girl can dream...)

2. Just, this. No explanation necessary.

3. This beautiful video, the introduction to which reads: "What happens when you combine the talents of Russia's ballet bad boy Sergei Polunin, Irish gospel luminary Hozier and photography pop wizard David LaChapelle? Apparently, a whole lot of angsty, sexy, beautiful dancing ensues." Not as smiley, but mmmmm. 

4. And lastly, PUPPIES!

Happy almost March, dear ones!

Mountains and beaches of love,
Nomi

February's Key

Dear Everyone,


I have cracked the code of February and it is simple:

go home.


Now that I've made that bold statement, let me temper, clarify, analyze, and do all the things.

When I say I've "cracked" February, I don't mean I've found a way to take the February out of February. Much like what I call The Rock of Truth--something I contend with in my work as a nonfiction writer--you can go under February, you can't go around February, you can't go over February...


you have to go through it.


We all know about this. And though we all gamely do it every February and find a little digital refuge on this blog, I can't recommend highly enough the Good Medicine that going home during February has to offer.

Now about this "home." I bet you all understand that when I say "home" I don't necessarily mean the place where you grew up, though home might mean also that to you. Last year in the last week of February, I got to go back to Seattle, the place where I grew up, for a conference related to my graduate studies. When I saw Mount Rainier, that ever-present monolith that's so always there that it ends up becoming kind of invisible to Seattleites, I wept with relief and release.

When I say home I mean your spiritual home. Duh. I'm willing to wager that many of you are fortunate enough have more than one of these. So what I'm saying is if you have any way to get yourself to one of these homes during this longest shortest month of the year

do it do it do it do it. 

I also want to add that home might not even be a place. To modify a line of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, home can be wherever you're with a "you." And by a "you" I mean someone you cherish and who cherishes you, with whom you go waaaaaay back, who is your Partner in Getting It.  
Now, watch this toe-curlingly delightful video from Burning Man 2011, which uses "Home" by Edward Sharpe et al. to evince both the person and place meaning of the word. 

So all this throat clarifying this is to say that last weekend and this February I had the opportunity to return to another one of my homes--

Brown.

Some of you probably already saw my posts on Facebook about this. I'm going to repeat myself a little. Please excuse me.

So when I got to Providence it was about 12 degrees outside. But I was so happy to be back that I didn't care. Brown is a place that was supremely nurturing for me. It was a place where I met so many of the people whom I continue to deeply love, many of whom are reading this blog, and where I felt wholly seen and appreciated and valued for what I have to offer the world for the first time in my life.

The first thing I did when got to College Hill was tramp through the 3 foot deep drifts to the Main Green and feel emotional.

Then I went to Hillel and continued to feel emotional, thinking of you--

The next morning, I went to Coffee Exchange and sat with my latte watching the elder men gather and assess the day. I always loved that it happened at Coffee Ex, but when I was a student, I always felt like I had too much work to do and never stopped to just watch it all unfold. This time, I left myself.

The whole reason I was back at Brown was to lead a workshop on ethical storytelling at the Swearer Center. Though they're no longer exactly my peers, Brown students continue to blow my mind. I opened the session by asking the group to freewrite for 5 minutes about what came to mind when they thought of the word "integrity." This how one of the young women drew out her understanding:

Later, I went to the bathroom in the Swearer Center, saw this, and remembered for the bajillionth time why I continue to be obsessed with this place.

Jana asked me to take a picture of the First Baptist Church for her, so I'm going to include that as well. Just looking at it is one of the many small pleasures of Providence. 

The next morning, I had the great pleasure of breakfast at Seven Stars with Sarah Rapoport and later of staying over at her charming and huge apartment. How we managed to not take a picture of any of this, I'm not sure. 

And as if all that wasn't enough, Sophie drove from Boston to hang for a few hours with me on Saturday, which we spent at the Athenaeum and then the RISD museum, visiting this old friend: 

Then we had a bit of a photoshoot.

I left Providence on Sunday with a sore throat but nonetheless feeling nourished and full and refueled. I can't think of a better way to say it than the way I originally said it on Facebook, so here's that again: 

This visit to Providence made it clearer than ever that Brown planted the seeds from which I continue to grow. It was the place where I saw integrity, passion, vision, great heart, and powerful thought modeled on a daily basis. It gave me a blueprint for a life.

Revisiting touchstones and reconnecting with roots. It's significant and powerful and damn it feels good. It might be a little late for anyone reading to do this with the remaining three (!) days of February, but then again, maybe not. Revisiting, rerooting, and reconnecting can be as simple as getting on Facetime. It can be as impulsive as booking a plane ticket or hopping in the car. 

I hope this ramble inspires some of you to reach towards home in whatever way is right for you now. And for those of you who share Brown as a spiritual home, I hope this post has brought a little dose of it for you, giving you a teensy push to get you to the finish line. 

Feb 24th

I finally caught up on reading the beautiful Feb Project blog posts you each posted. Although I now feel so moved after reading your insights and wisdom (we are so young and yet so wise!), I am finding myself without any real thoughts of my own. And I felt this way when I wrote my other post earlier this month. Sort of reminds me of the emptiness Ruthie wrote about. 

But after thinking some more, I realize that there are two things that I would like to share with you all. 

One is this nice little nugget that really resonates with me and perhaps with all of you twenty-somethings too:

One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.
- Joan Didion

And another is this poem, that I was going to say "one of you" posted around the time of Rosh Hashanah...but the truth is that I, in my crazy way of documenting everything, had emailed myself this poem and had written in the subject line: "poem for rosh hashanah / new year (from jana via micah weiss)" so let's give credit where credit is due.

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what I said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen
and twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

-lucille clifton

It feels appropriate to think of February, with its cold dark days begging to be left behind, as a symbolic end-of-year -- and March, with its transition into spring, as a fresh new beginning. Let's run into this 'new year', propelled by love and with Februaryness blowing back like a wind. And away we go! 

Stay warm (literally & figuratively),

Tali

this.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/22/upshot/internet-language-quiz.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

Life crafting, 2/23/15

There’s a concept I’ve been learning about in school called job crafting. The idea is exactly what it sounds like: create the job we want. It hinges on negotiation, hard work, and a vision for what success looks like. If we extrapolate the concepts of job crafting to life, we can assume that we create the life we want by asking for it and by being diligent about its specifications.

I have an offer to work in San Francisco this summer. I also have an offer to work in Minneapolis. And perhaps one in Denver, too. As you might recall from my post a week ago, I have a rather love/hate relationship with the Bay Area. I know what it would feel like in early morning gridlock on the 101. I know how my body would feel after a day of work on a yoga mat. I know how many layers I would wear to a Giants game. It’s oddly comforting to come home even to the things I dislike, to feel like my perpetual motion is temporarily stopped, and I can just breathe. I don’t have to start over. I don’t have to live off adrenaline anymore. And everything that will happen has been foretold. As I was leaving the Bay last year, I spent my last night in a redwood forest with my two best friends. One looked me in the eye and said, over my loud protestations, “I can’t explain it, but I feel like you’ll come back.”

So maybe I’ve always known. Maybe I’ll date the same weird boys. Maybe I will go to all the happy hours with all the software engineers. Maybe I will spend all the weekends hiking in Marin County, singing Queen off-key.

Or maybe I’ll move to Denver, where everything will feel new and there isn’t any attachment to the things I love. The adrenaline feels good. Everything has sharper edges when it’s new. I get a little taste of the manic, and I like it. I live among mountains, and I drive down roads I’ve never seen before. But look, I still don’t know if time is linear or not, and I still don’t know if I can do this life crafting thing alone or if I require direction. So maybe I’ll move to Minneapolis because I spent the first half of my twenties praying for guidance, and now that I’m my own guide, it feels unkind to move backwards. Which assumes, of course, that time is linear in the first place. Or, maybe time is linear but the choices I make are never as clearly defined as I think. As one of my dearest friends often repeats about regret, “there isn’t ever a choice to be made. You do what you need to do with the information you have at the time.” In other words, we life craft from the materials we have. The rice, the beans, the laughter, the traffic, the wind, the salary, the sex, the exhaustion, the frivolity, the sweat, the lies, and mostly, the appreciation for the glorious unknown.

Another Great Video

Don't you if any of y'all watched the Oscars. You probably heard about the incredible performance by Common and John Legend of their song, "Glory," which was totally epic and took the award for Best Original Song. Lady Gaga also did a frighteningly good Sound of Music medley.

So the absolute joy that was the live performance of "Everything is Awesome" might've gotten lost in the shuffle.

Let's make sure that doesn't happen.  Click the link below to watch Tegan and Sara tell you how everything is awesome. The crew even sings a list of various awesome things. I started to think about OTHER things that are ALSO awesome, and I encourage you to do the same.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/22/8088497/academy-awards-2015-everything-is-awesome-lego-movie

Improvising Together

Friends,

What a blessing to be included in this sharing and receive such great daily doses of love. Thank you for all your inspiring words!

This past year my mom has been intensively studying improvisational singing with her teacher Rhiannan. Its become one of her most important spiritual practices and has helped her grow tremendously as an artist. I grew up taking a lot of music lessons and improvisation was always the hardest area of music for me to grasp. I could study theory all day long, but taking the leap to letting the music freely flow out of me and loosen my analytical grasp was too scary for me.

Inspired by my mom, I've been trying to find more spaces to spontaneously make music and nurture my improvisational side. My favorite part of improvisation are the unspoken connections and cues that guide people to co-create music. Even if you've never studied music theory, we share musical patterns that allow us to easily create song and melody together. In the video below, Bobby McFerrin shows the power of the pentatonic scale that brings a random group of people together in song:

If you go to this webpage for an imprivisational singing workshop, the first video gives me chills listening to people so simply making a beautiful song together:

http://www.eomega.org/workshops/circlesongs-1#-workshop-video-block

I'll leave you with these final words:

“Improvisation involves coming into a situation without rigid expectations or preconceptions. We must keep going forward, fearful or not, and be ready for anything that comes our way. That’s how life is. Remembering that life can be full of surprises is always useful. We’re improvising all the time—it’s good to recognize that.” —Bobby McFerrin

Love, Micah

Bonus Post

This. Watch all of it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=ozoTzkCeO-A

Hey dudes

This is Benj on Aleeza's jawn. Unfortunately I could not figure out how to post as myself, so as I am wont to do,  I am conveying my message via my dear wife.

I don't have much to add to the eloquent language of the previous blog logs. I am honored to be included in a group of such deep thinkers and meaningful speakers. Thank you.

Music always brings me light. And searching for new, different, and ultimately mind-melting music is particularly thrilling. This playlist of 1000 deep cuts, curated by the multi-instrumentalist Dan Snaith aka Caribou, shines real damn bright. Put it on, hit shuffle, bliss out for a little bit. Y'all deserve it.

(Jump over to youtube for full list and shuffle function)


Much love and warmth,
Benj

2/20 by Sam Potasznik

Well, what do I say after THAT? Damn, y'all. How lucky am I?

----

I don't have that much to say today, but I'll drop some things here which I've been finding useful. One's words, one's an image, and one's a podcast. They're all on the same theme of "Let go." and "Don't stress out too much about your work." They've been helpful to me, and I hope they are for you, too

The first is from the already-febproject-blogged-about Cheryl Strayed's advice column Dear Sugar. Writing to a struggling 20-something writer, Sugar says, "the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor." Let's repeat that. Get. Your ass. On. The. Floor. You think you should already be accomplished? You think you're great? Well, accomplishments are false idols, and you are but dust, bunny so you best lower yourself to dust.

I like it. Be humble. Achievement is nothing.

The second is a little poster from I don't know where:

Something I struggle with is editing my work before its time. Rules 6 and 7 are useful reminders not to. It's already broken. Just keep going.

The last is something to listen to. Has anyone febprojected On Being with Krista Tippett yet? Let's do so if not. Here's a great episode with a woman who researches shame and people who live "full" lives. One quote sticks out to me, and I've been using it as a mantra:

"Productivity is not self worth."

It's true. Hopefully tonight, the start of Shabbat, the day and time which led to me meeting so many of you reminds us of this fact. Going slow is good. Breathing is good. Breaks are good. I hope you have a great one this weekend.

Shabbat shalom.

Flowers, New Life, Educational Media and Somebody Loves You (SO MANY SOMEBODIES!)

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a workshop on the creation of engaging, educational media to motivate behavior change. The back story for this particular video is that BBC Media Action got permission to use a popular Bollywood song

and changed the original lyrics, which translate to "one, two, three" to "one, three, two" to remind people that there should be three years between babies one and two. Am I a total nerd? Yes. But is this video kind of amazing? Also yes.

In a previous post (I love that it could be last year OR the year before) Harry shared a song that made him "want to dance under the covers." Betty Who's Somebody Loves You does this for me always, and the original video, before she had a budget to make the better known version, is my fave. Supposedly she made this video with friends, which makes it even better in my mind.

In addition to attending super awesome workshops, another thing I do in Nairobi is walk past beautiful flowers that make me grateful to be alive, grateful to have eyes, grateful to live here, and generally just...grateful. In another hat tip to Harry, I share these photos, not as amazing as his but, you know, still gorgeous if for the subject matter and not the talent taking photos and choosing filters.

As blessed as the flowers on my walk to work make me feel, and as much as I enjoy attending workshops that make me (endearingly?) nerdy, sometimes I feel sad about how far I am from so many people I love. FaceTime, Skype and other internet wonders make me feel less far away. And yesterday, I felt so close as I FaceTimed in to the bris for my cousin's newest son. I got to listen and watch and cry and sing as he was named for my grandmother. Here's a blurry photo of rabbi, abba and baby getting ready to make history:

And finally, these maps that show just how crazy words can be.

With the deepest of love, affection, admiration, and gratitude,
Ruthie

Dark Gifts and Love Poems

We walked through night 'til night was a poem. 

—Brenda Hillman

There's this conversation that (my partner) Sam and I have often. 

It goes something like this:

He'll say, “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night,

                  look at me sleeping next to you and wonder,

                  Who is that?”

I'll say, “Duh. All the time.”

He'll then say, “Like last night. You were curled up and I was like,

                  Who is this lady anyway?”

“Right, like what's the deal with this person 

                  and how I feel about him?”

Then we'll laugh because it's so true.

And the answer is: I have no idea.

It's kind of like measuring the exact weight of clouds. It's kind of like when a baby sees a mirror or the second time that I learned to walk this earth. It's kind of like an itch or a poem, challah french toast or thunder, that heart-shattering Adon Olam niggun that gets me every time.

It's just beyond what a brain can know. We know it in the land beyond words and understanding and this plus that must always be this other thing. And so, you do not need to know us to get what I'm saying. And you don't need a map or a list of the chasms of hell we've forged—they're only words anyway and they never get it quite right.

What I mean to say is this: there are dark gifts that we have been given. In Em Claire's poem, in Sugar's "obliterated place" and the mother-temple she has built there, in all of your words the past days that have rung me so deeply that I could swear I had written them myself. They are the things that slip into the gaping holes left behind, the places where we know we will never again feel whole. To me, they are dark gifts because there is no them without the loss. There is no good and true and sweet and kind without the pain, the grief, the sorrow. They are all one and the same.

And though I have been given a slower way and kindness, I have been given these first blossoms outside the bathroom window

 

and hot coffee, deep bathtubs and a little boy who calls himself Stars,

I have also been given the knowing that today is a love poem day.

Just trust me when I say that there was a time when I had no words. Really. When the words found me again, which took time reaching out past the infinite, my life lit up. And when the words found me again, there was only one thing to write and it was a love poem. It was after Nick Sturm's Lettuce;    Tricia tells you writing a love poem is the purest form of healing. She tells you they bring her heart back to life    because writing a poem is choosing where I want to spend my time, exactly what temple I am building in my obliterated, holy center. 

And so, today, what I most want to be and to build is this:

Sweet Sam,

You must know

you are the thing

that I have been given

over and over and over again

not the first time,

not overlooking the snowy green

not from the anger

      or the illness.

Today

again today just

your grin this morning

your smell on my pillow

your laughter, your whole heart

         how, through all the years and bitter darkness,

         we continue to come back to each other.

Today I imagine our grandmas—

the Sylvias—

playing maajong

in the temple

eating something chocolate

and sending us this sun.

They watch

as we fumble,

colliding against the walls

    of our truth, pretending

    we can imagine

    what our lives might be 

otherwise.

I can see them    shake their heads     and sigh

how ridiculous

how silly

that we don't see

that we just don't get it

how held we are

how we could ever forget

and waste time with

questions with 

wishing and 

worry

their beautiful eyes roll

       the eyes that are your eyes

       and the eyes that are my eyes

       and the eyes that are the eyes of our children

                           who we may or may not ever know

          

because

we've been given to each other.

We just have.

I just know

so cling tight 

to me my bear

let's be glad a while

for this gift

and not forget to say and say and say and say

thank you.

Thank you.

I just discovered one of my spirit animals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o-VplYrqBs

Unplanned post to share this cool thing here:

http://www.featureshoot.com/2014/08/dita-pepe/

On Choosing Joy

Dear Great Mystery,

Thank you for this life where Abundance is Truth and Scarcity is Story.

Thank you for the reminders that I am not in Control and it is Not About Me and that the more that I surrender to Your Grace the more My own Beauty shines through and my own Life takes form.

Thank you for beloved community that is family that holds me accountable to living my most magnificent life.

A dear friend helped me remember today to be the source of my own joy instead of my own pain.  It's got me reflecting upon radical acceptance of what arises and what falls away and opening to the reality that resisting what is true, resisting what has happened, clinging to stories- especially ones that involve a "poor me" who was "wronged by an other"- only leads to me getting in my own way.  And so I surrender... to my life, to my most spectacular, vibrant, rich, rich life.

Much is brewing, is bubbling, that I'm called to share- though it's not quite ready to pour into a sweet ceramic mug yet.  Perhaps I will indulge in a later post to share what this five year marker is illuminating for me.  In this moment I am simply called to share the poem that my friend read to me today as he urged me to choose joy, to choose love, to choose to wish everyone, even the most challenging of relations, even my sweet, tender, emotional, strong, emerging, beautiful, fallible, mysterious, imperfect SELF only the best- only happiness, wellness, peace, wholeness and love... and to love my self so deeply, so fiercely, that all that I experience, that I feel, that I am continues to be welcome and welcome and welcome and worthy of radical, unconditional, enduring love.

And so it is here, on this breezy California evening with the perfect combination of intimacy and distance and chosen family, that I begin.  I give thanks for how effortless it is to wish, with the quietest of minds and softest of hearts, each member of this tender community only the best.  My we all breathe in and out the goodness, the love, the joy that is so abundantly available in this life.

We Have  Come to Be Danced

by Jewel Mathieson

We have come to be danced
not the pretty dance
not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
but the claw our way back into the belly
of the sacred, sensual animal dance
the unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance
the holding the precious moment in the palms
of our hands and feet dance

We have come to be danced
not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance
but the wring the sadness from our skin dance
the blow the chip off our shoulder dance
the slap the apology from our posture dance

We have come to be danced
not the monkey see, monkey do dance
one, two dance like you
one two three, dance like me dance
but the grave robber, tomb stalker
tearing scabs & scars open dance
the rub the rhythm raw against our souls dance

WE have come to be danced
not the nice invisible, self conscious shuffle
but the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
shaman shakin’ ancient bones dance
the strip us from our casings, return our wings
sharpen our claws & tongues dance
the shed dead cells and slip into
the luminous skin of love dance

We have come to be danced
not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
but the meeting of the trinity: the body, breath & beat dance
the shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
the mother may I?
yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
the Olly Olly Oxen Free Free Free dance
the everyone can come to our heaven dance

We have come to be danced
where the kingdom’s collide
in the cathedral of flesh
to burn back into the light
to unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
to root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced
WE HAVE COME

With the deepest of gratitude for this web that we continue to weave,
and with thanks to each of you for agreeing to be danced with me, February after February,

Lizziebee

Out of a Great Need

Happy February, from the sunshine and 75-degree air of Berkeley, California.

Tortured prose to follow, good links at the bottom, I promise!

(One of these Februaries, I'm not going to be writing about this kind of thing. If you had asked me in October, I'd have told you that would be this February, because I knew I was no longer hurting over the things I had been hurting about in prior Februaries. That, technically, is still true. That old hurt is healed. As summer settled in, it looked quite convincingly like heartbreak would be entirely off the February menu. I was even grateful for past Februaries, because they got me to this way better person and this way better thing we were doing. So there's some emotional whiplash here.)

Right now I'm drafting the post for the 15th on the 14th, because it feels rich and ready. I'm sitting at my friends' house, where for the next two days I'm babysitting their 2 year old daughter while they are on vacation. They have never left town without her, and my friend is expecting another baby in a few months, so like, this is it. I was honored they asked me to watch their daughter, and all too happy to send them off. I was especially happy that my gig would start on the 14th, because in case my charge wakes up terrified or needing some Tylenol or just otherwise wondering what the hell is going on, I'll be ripped from the clutches of this stupid "holiday" and forced to think about something way more important.

I'm not so wracked that it's Valentine's Day, per se. But it is my ex's birthday; that just adds a certain...something. I remember when it first came up in our relationship, and I expressed sympathy about it. He's the type who wouldn't care about Valentine's Day, but has to deal with it falling on a day he'd probably like to celebrate unencumbered by superficial distractions. My birthday is Christmas Eve, so I relate to not wanting to share the day with something that's significant to everyone but me. But I thought, "It's probably great to date someone whose birthday is February 14th, because it can JUST be birthday." It's a great diversion of superficial emotional attention to a truly worthy cause.

I still got to do that sorta; today was Shabbat, and there's no worthier cause in my book than praising G-d for a day which represents total completion in the Universe, a day when I act as if life, as it is, is precisely what it is supposed to be. Of course, that's always aspirational; Shabbos is a taste of the World to Come, only a gesture toward completion. Today my rabbi's son, age 6, asked me if I would walk him home from shul. I told him to check with his dad. My rabbi came back over with his son and said to me, "I think Hoshaya thinks he has a G-I-R-L-F-R-I-E-N-D." I replied that he could do worse. So I took him by the hand and we walked home. On the way, I noted that he had snagged two brownies on the way out the door even though I had expressly limited him to one, and he said "Uh oh" while the chocolate melted all over his hands, but I had a napkin at the ready because sometimes I do things just right, and we played red-light-green-light but he'd call the "light" so fast that I was always running the reds, tripping on my skirt, laughing my way to our game of pick-up hockey, and telling him that "one more time" really means ONLY once more. "Hoshaya thinks he has a G-I-R-L-F-R-I-E-N-D." Maybe for the Valentine's day Shabbat of my ex's birthday, this was not so incomplete after all.

But I still hate it, because everything that fell apart those months ago is still falling apart inside me with that low-grade constant ache, as it does. February hasn't actually felt particularly more troubling to me than January, or than December before that. But I guess coming upon my ex's birthday smack in the middle of the month adds a certain sting that only February knows how to provide. After Shabbos, I logged onto Facebook to see (and rigorously analyze) the birthday messages populating his typically sparse wall. He and I don't speak, we have only once since he left me and it got ugly, which was something I never thought anything between us would ever get. Even a birthday email these months later wouldn't be appropriate, which is insane when I think about how had things gone only slightly, slightly differently, we'd have gotten married. I can't tell him how happy I am that he was born, so I'll tell you all instead: major gift to the Universe, this man; on the worst day, of the worst month, there he is, all 6 plus feet of his intensity and seriousness which might have even surpassed mine ("Who says you're too intense? You're doing just fine over here, babe"), all that blonde hair (but not much of it, if we're being honest) and blue eyes and smile that takes up his whole face, all that loneliness he's used to, all that post-court whiskey habit and hand-rolled cigarettes and excellently tailored menswear and custom-made shirts and shoes kept in shoe trees and expert record collection and old-fashioned shaving habits and pristine apartment complete with drum set looking out over the east river and black motorcycle and stellar dance moves and yiddish just good enough to have a half-way decent conversation with a senile old man on a street in williamsburg, all that humble brilliance and patient curiosity, all that quiet wisdom and love of all things old and mystical, all those lines delivered at the perfect moment except for that one time, all that deep passion and gentle strength--what an outrageous blessing the World somehow lucked itself into for the 36 years he has been in it.

Look, it hurts more than any of the others, but I'm also somehow better at it than I ever used to be, which is something I've been thinking about a lot this February. I didn't know how to mark whatever today is or meant to me, how to acknowledge everything it carried with it. The best I could do was put on this necklace he bought me. I had stopped wearing it after he left, but then started wearing again. Because it is beautiful and it is mine and it is what I have and I think it's okay to give yourself permission and I think it's brave to work with what you have.

Here's what else I'm working with:

--This amazing video of some of hip hop's greatest MC's sitting around a table, casually doing what they do (Mos Def is always my favorite but I think Big Pun gets the best of him here).

--Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

--Anything written at the-toast.net, but this in particular.

--This great 10th Circuit opinion.

--My favorite Hafiz poem, the message of which I did not heed carefully enough with my ex to secure myself a better February, even though I knew it was the instruction I needed, but I was too scared, which I never am, so now I read it every day:

Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous

For
That.

Because you can never have too many bonus posts

...and because this piece just made me feel and tear and smile, and all the people I would have forwarded this to are here...

http://fullgrownpeople.com/2015/02/12/end-road/

Conscious Living Candy Hearts

Dear Everyone,

I must begin by offering a digital deep bow to everyone who has typed their guts and hearts onto Blogger's digital sheets of white paper and shared beauty and pain and painful beauty and beautiful pain and light and dark and joy that aches and aches that are somehow also a joy.

On this day of love, I wanted to also offer something too, though lighter in fare than than other gorgeous posts from today, but who says no to a laugh?

To honor Avi's death a few days ago, Sophie and I spent some an hour together via Facetime. Here is a screenshot taken by Soph, which is why my face is big and hers is small.

At one point we got a little punch drunk. We started talking about alternative messages to put on those chalky candy hearts no one really wants to eat. We're calling them Conscious Living Candy Hearts and we think there's a market for them. So, please imagine these

stamped with the following: 

I Feel u 

I Hear u 

I See u

I Feel Seen by u

Let Me Hold Ur Space

Luv ur Energy 

C u @ the Burn

My Partner 

Be Mine 

(but not in a possessive way) 

SENDING LOVE TO ALL OF YOU RADIANT, CONSCIOUS LOVERS TODAY AND EVERY DAY.

Off-Script in Cali, 2/14/15

I’m off-script too because, honestly, I’m an off-script person.

It’s been about nine months since I left San Francisco for good (for now), and this morning I find myself back here for the first time, sitting in a Westin SFO hotel room watching the sunlight stream in, about to board a plane back to Detroit. I came back for an interview, and then right afterwards I boarded BART to San Francisco for dinner. And then I had an out-of-body experience. Because there’s an imprint of me – a younger, angrier version of me – who was riding BART with me. She had longer hair and fuller cheeks and a little less inspiration. She didn’t think she’d be here now, wearing a suit, spending her $150 per diem on dinner. (Yes, there is waste in the system. The Japanese call this muda, and it’s a true thing that there’s no such thing as a perfect system. So, why should I company give me $150 to spend on food when it’s a waste? Because, as it turns out, people are the only thing worth wasting on. And if you can get good people to join your team for $150, sometimes maybe that feels like a pittance.) Below is what the angrier version of me had to say about all this. And here’s what the me today feels about: “your anger is beautiful, and it will probably come back some day, and that’s okay.” Because the best thing I ever learned from you all is to live in the dualities.

***

California

I tell her that it’s not that I’m afraid of driving, exactly, it’s that I just hate doing it. I hate doing it just like I hate riding bikes, which I can’t do because I’m afraid of it. My brother once put me on a multi-gear bike downhill into a lake, and now I can’t ride bikes.

“Do you avoid driving?” she asks me.

“Yes, basically at all costs,” I answer. “I’ll find any excuse not to do it.”

“Avoidance is a classic symptom of phobia,” she replies.

I shake my head. “But I’m really not a person who’s afraid of things, generally. I love air travel. I’ve moved apartments, cities, and jobs without thinking twice about it.”

“It’s a funny thing to be a person who has such a big life but has limited it by refusing to drive,” she says.

“Right?” I mock, looking for humor, not bowing to the implied cruelty in her words. “Why would I intentionally make my world small?”

“Okay,” she relents. “Tell me what it feels like when you get behind the wheel.” Sometimes she surprises me. Sometimes she doesn’t ask the obvious question, like, “I don’t know, why would you make your world intentionally small?”

So, fine. I’ll tell you what it feels like. It feels like my mom’s mom once had to drive to the grocery store because her husband, my grandfather, was away on business, and she drove a car downhill into a ditch. She had to place a call to her brother-in-law to bail her out. She never drove again. It feels like my dad’s mom once got into a car accident so atrocious that she didn’t leave her bed for a month after. She never drove again. It feels like my own mom stopped driving thirty years ago and has never considered getting a new license because why should she, really, when the subway line is half a block from our apartment in New York and my dad is a perfectly good driver? It feels like my aunt, my dad’s sister, almost didn’t go through with her move to the suburbs because she was panicked about driving. It feels like, how much inherited trauma do I carry with me and don’t even know about? It feels like every time I’m behind the wheel maybe there’s a ditch I’ll drive into or a person I’ll kill or a better driver I will find out there, ready to take this wheel from my unworthy hands.

We have this conversation in Oakland, on a beautiful cul-de-sac about a mile from Piedmont near the lake. I habitually remember nothing about the place: not the street it’s on, nor the house number, nor even, frankly, my therapist’s name (Marly? Marnee? Marty?). All I know is how to get there, and when I arrive, I buzz a doorbell, and I sit on Marnee’s couch and take off my shoes. It’s always been a long day at work, or I’m always tired. There’s a pillow and chenille blanket on Marnee’s couch, but I don’t remember the color of either. I hate this place. I hate Oakland. I work in an abandoned school sandwiched between two freeways, and the great hilarity is that I can’t drive myself home. I hate Oakland because everyone else loves it, which makes me hate it even more. I hate how it’s always sunny. I hate how there aren’t any people on the sidewalks.

She has asked me what it feels like to drive. “I don’t know,” I finally say in response.

“Do you ever picture yourself driving?” she asks.

“All the time,” I say. “I picture myself on the freeway with the window slightly cracked, with the wind in my hair. It’s California, always. I’m always effortlessly merging and changing lanes. I’m always driving a little too fast, I’m a little too skinny, and I always have a can of coke in the cup holder.” I pause for effect. “I don’t drink soda, by the way. In other words, I’m always roleplaying Joan Didion.”

She doesn’t laugh. I don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t get the reference or if it’s because it isn’t funny. Marnee is a strange woman. She looks like the actress who plays Madame Maxime in the Harry Potter movies: very tall, very bent in the spine, with short dark hair and eyeglasses that hang from a chain. How terrible, I think, to look like that. How hard it must be to find love. And then I check myself. What if mine is the body that can’t be loved?

“So you must love California, then. You must be sad to leave it.”

I’m counting down the days, actually. There are times I’m so desperate to leave that I wander in loops around Duboce Park and realize that the only person walking with me – in fact, walking the same exact route, following me, really – is the same homeless woman I see around the Lower Haight all the time. She has tightly-curled, very frizzy hair cropped close to her head and drags alongside her a navy blue sleeping bag. She looks like someone I could’ve grown up with, a Ruth or a Samantha or a Rebecca, except for the fact that she whispers indecencies to herself and has the mad, scratching-of-arms look of someone high on crack. I’d never smelled crack before I moved here. I would feel badly for her except for the fact that I am spending all my time and energy feeling badly for myself. “There’s a little part of you that loves feeling unhappy,” a friend of mine says. It’s true. Who could deny a thing as true as that?

In response to Marnee, regarding my imminent departure: “Sad isn’t the word that comes to mind.” I’m aware of how I look. My shoes are off, and I rest my elbows on my knees. My coat is draped across my shoulders. I’m sweating profusely, and my face feels shiny. I’m too caffeinated, and my feet have trouble staying planted on the floor. Every now and then I roll my left ankle and hear it give a satisfying pop.

“No? So, you aren’t sad to leave?” she asks, wide eyed, which is the characteristic way people respond when I say I’m leaving California. I hate when Marnee repeats what I say. I hate when we get off-topic. I hate when we’re on-topic.

No, I feel like telling her. Every morning I wait for the N Judah and wonder, what’s the point of all the apps? All of the Series A rounds? All of the deals and meetings and events? Every morning is sunny. Every morning someone is optimizing their stock options. Every morning everyone is well-hydrated and full of ideas. Every night is filled with bonfires in which we eat nothing but quinoa. These are the years in which we “normalize” all of our sadness. I hold a gnawing fear there’s no way out, that everything will feel this way forever, or that the escape hatch is, stunningly, a very tame-looking four-door sedan that will eventually kill me on some inglorious freeway somewhere in this great state. It’s not lost on me, by the way, that my new chosen home is arm’s length from The Motor City.

“I don’t think this is where I’m supposed to be,” I say, but what I don’t say is that I’m afraid of saying this out loud. I’m afraid of being the one at the party who wants hormones in my milk and red meat in my tacos and French fries instead of salad. I’m afraid of wishing for the rain, or the snow, or a serious (but not too serious) acute illness to test who really loves me and who just says they do. I’m afraid to say that every time I get in a car I think of my two ex-boyfriends, like bookends, who taught me to drive, each in his respective fuel-efficient car so that I never got to enjoy a real roar of an engine the way I’ve always imagined. I’m afraid to say that every time I land in a new city I imagine there’s someone at the airport waiting for me and then feel the inevitable stomach sinking disappointment when there isn’t.

“Well then, where are you supposed to be?” she asks, and because I know she means it in a sincere way, I don’t roll my eyes.

I smile, and think: on the 101, heading south. The windows cracked, the wind in my hair, music playing on the radio. Until the sun sets red on the horizon, the day turns to night, and I’ve left this whole place behind.