today I am raw and open, so please be gentle should you choose to read

I am feeling deeply the cycles of things, the remembering and forgetting and remembering again, the love and loss and love and love. I'd like to share words of some of my highest teachers (and former selves) that I have found myself revisiting and 

re-membering today.

1. This piece of Mary Oliver's “In Blackwater Woods”:
   
   
   Every year
   everything
   I have ever learned
   
   
   in my lifetime
   leads back to this: the fires
   and the black river of loss
   whose other side
   
   
   is salvation,
   whose meaning
   none of us will ever know.
   To live in this world
   
   
   you must be able
   to do three things:
   to love what is mortal;
   to hold it
   
   
   against your bones knowing
   your own life depends on it;
   and, when the time comes to let it go,
   to let it go.
   
   
   
   
2. Cheryl Strayed's words from this interview (one that also mentions post-traumatic growth) on what has helped her through heart break:

I think the number one thing that makes us stronger is love. Sometimes even just the memory of love. When I was at the bottom, what really pulled me through was the realization that so much of the negativity I had inside of myself, so much of that grief, or of that sense of "I can`t live" or "I'm messed up" had to do with just how much I loved my mom. And that ended up being an awakening: Wow — grief is actually about love.

So here again we have this ugly thing that is actually a beautiful thing. Grief is ugly, and yet we wouldn't be grieving as fiercely as we do if we didn’t love that person. Grief is only about love. Remembering that was really powerful to me — also remembering the love my mother had for me. Thinking I have to make good on this.

3. And finally this, a letter to a woman whose importance to my being feels too intricate to describe. She is one of my mothers, one of my pillars. She is certainly among the beautiful winds that brought me to all of you, and in that way I feel like you already know her. The religious school at the shul where I grew, where my dad too was raised and his parents and sisters all sang and prayed and laughed—it was named for her in January of last year. I wrote the letter then, as a piece of a project to celebrate her. A few weeks later, she died.
   
   
   Thank you for allowing me this sacred space in which to honor her. (And thank you, Einat you fierce beauty, for encouraging me to post this tribute. It feels like time.)
   
   
   
   January 15, 2015

Mrs. Halachmi,

Last week I came home to bury my grandmother. It was cold and it was sad and I walked through those familiar doors of West End Synagogue with a pit in my stomach. It felt like the end of something important—in my family, in the story of my life, in this place where I had once giggled and skipped and learned to love to sing.

There was a moment during the endless before-the-service waiting time. My family gathered in the library. The air was heavy, and I slipped out to the hallway looking for a small escape, heading to the bathroom. You know the one—the bathroom with the giant let-me-check-my-hair mirror, the tiny stalls behind that heavy door, across from the office of hershey kisses and Bubeleh, get back to class.

     And that's the thing: standing in that hallway, I could hear you calling bubeleh, bubeleh. I could smell the challah baking—maybe burning—in the kitchen. I could taste those if-we're-lucky Kit Kat bars and the usually-stale-but-who-cares bagels and shmear after morning minyan.

     A strange calm came over me, and as I thought of you, I was overcome with a sense of place, the comfort of home. That feeling I'm certain has nothing to do with that hallway or the intricate workings of memory. It is not a comfort held even within all of the children and parents and teachers and friends who had once shared those halls. It's the stuff of a people. A history and a tradition that stretches far beyond what any of our own memories can hold, that cannot be contained by mere walls. It's held deep within our stories and our struggles, our humor and our bones.

I want you to know that I have carried that feeling, that sacred center of things with me across this earth. I have sung it in the desert and at the top of Masada. I have lit it into candles and danced it at the Wall, whispered it to strangers who would become the kindest, truest friends that a person could dream to know. It has found me in the quietest, stillest moments of loss. As I sat with pain. As I lost my way in a darkness without words. As I forge my way in this world, build and re-build my life anew, grow my own family and begin to make my way back among the living, I can feel it calling me home.

     And it crept back into my heart last week, as I stood transported in that hallway in West End Synagogue, numbed by the loss of my last living grandparent.

I want you to know that that moment—and others like it that I have come to know—it is like the warmest, full embrace of an old friend. Like the rocking of a parent, lulling me to sleep. It is safe and love and holy. And I know in my deepest knowing that it was you, bubeleh who lovingly and thoughtfully ushered it into my life.

     What I mean to say is this: you are a bedrock of all of the best things that I am and those that I most strive to be. A caring teacher. A person of faith and purpose. A woman of the Torah and strength and humor and grit. Your knowing presence is a piece of my truth, and I have and will and do carry you with me as I make my way in this world. I pray that I may continue to know and share this gift that is your love, to feel connected and rooted and blessed.

For all of the holiness that you have brought into my life, in the lives of the people that I love, in the lives of all the people that each of our lives will touch in ways beyond our wildest understanding, in words that feel too small for the occasion, for the magnitude of blessings that you have planted, sowed, and are just now beginning to bloom across our world: thank you.

With all my heart,

Tricia