When our three children were little, we had an end-of-summer tradition. In that awkward in-between time, when camp had ended but school had not yet begun, we would wake the kids very early one morning and drive them, bleary-eyed, to the beach of Lake Michigan to watch the sunrise together. Then breakfast at a diner in the city, followed by the drive to Michigan where we would spend the day blueberry picking. The day would end back at the beach - on the other side of the giant lake - watching the sunset from the Michigan sand dunes.

This was our family ritual. Through the teenage years. This magical chasing of the sun, sweetened by cinnamon rolls and blueberries that stained our hands.

This year, we couldn’t find time for the tradition. I don’t think we did it last year either. Our last time sharing this ritual may have been 3 or 4 years ago now.

Our kids are older now. Young adults. They have their own busy lives.

This summer, each one had a separate adventure, and our end-of-summer family time was no more than ten shared days at home. Ten days with all three children at the same address.

My kids know that I have become a bulldog about protecting our precious together-time, now that it has become so evanescent. I text them all well in advance to let them know which days and times to save on their calendars, between their other social commitments. Dinner out. Time at our family summer home in Wisconsin. Ice cream trips. Bowling, mini golf. I am the activity coordinator. Because I know that if our shared time is not guarded and organized, it will disappear. And I can’t let that happen.

This past week, we said goodbye to our two older kids. The eldest moved to Washington DC, and our middle left for a 5-month study abroad program in Europe.

And at both farewells - one on the street outside my son’s new apartment and one inside the airport terminal - I fell apart.

Both moments of swelled hearts. Filled up with that messy mix of pride and sadness and excitement and grief.

They are both in good places and anxious to begin these new chapters. And I am so happy to see them venturing out to grow and experience and learn about the world and themselves.

And I also felt that hole in my heart open back up.

I am getting used to this leave-taking.

At this stage of life, our older two are home for fleeting days before they are off again. And our youngest has only one year left with our home as his permanent residence.

As the kids grew and international travel became more of a possibility, my husband and I started to talk about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. We made lists and shared ideas. And I started watching lots of Instagram reels. Of amazing places to hike and bike and explore and eat. I clicked on one too many videos of hut-to-hut hiking expeditions, and suddenly I was flooded with videos of astounding views and breathtaking trails. In Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland. I think I know all of the possible routes now.

I love this mode of travel. You get to hike and explore rugged, natural landscapes, but you have the comfort of landing each night in a warm hut where you know there will be a bed and a delicious meal. And you can fill up and sleep well and then set off again in the morning.

The huts are like way stations. Stopping points along the through-path.

This is what our home feels like now. A way station for our children as they stop by for a visit before setting off again. I make sure their beds are ready for them and their favorite foods are in the refrigerator and I am so eager to open the door for them. This is my work now.

I know that they are only stopping by.

They won’t be staying long.

I am reminded of a favorite poem by Kay Ryan about lighthouses:

Lighthouse Keeping / Kay Ryan

Seas pleat

winds keen

fogs deepen

ships lean no

doubt, and

the lighthouse

keeper keeps

a light for

those left out.

It is intimate

and remote both

for the keeper

and those afloat.

This leave-taking is a part of life. And I know that it doesn’t just show up when children grow. The leave-taking can be anticipated or unexpected. It is tied up with all kinds of losses. The gradual and the sudden. The healthy and the heart-rending. The ones that come with stories we can tell and the ones that eclipse our capacity to speak of them.

Over the past few decades, immersed in Jewish learning, I have also explored other religious and spiritual traditions. And all religions wrestle with the concept of impermanence. The ephemeral, ever-changing nature of existence. Buddhism, Taoism, Ancient Judaism. In Ecclesiastes and Psalms. We are continually reminded that everything here, right now, is temporary. It is fleeting. Mere breath.

I have always struggled mightily with impermanence. Not intellectually. I know it to be true.

But emotionally.

To love fully and fiercely while knowing that that love and the objects of my love are taking leave. Not here to stay.

Ache. It is one of those truths that causes physical pain.

The other day I got the yahrzeit reminder for my beloved father in the mail.

This year, his yahrzeit falls on my and my husband’s wedding anniversary.

We will light his yahrzeit candle and say mourner’s kaddish, and we will celebrate our love and marriage. And honor how my father’s life and leave-taking colors and textures the marriage we build together.

That’s the truth about life. Our joys are intermingled with our sorrows. If we see them clearly.

Our most vibrant treasures live beside our deepest griefs. One enmeshed with the other.

This time in the seasonal cycle - perched on the slender edge between the abundance of late summer and the incipient decay of early fall - always feels redolent with ambered melancholy. It’s that time of year when we try to eat as many peaches and as many ears of corn from the farm stand that we can stomach while knowing that the cool winds and changing leaves are looming.

Pico Iyer writes beautifully of this paradox, this duality, from his home in Japan in his gorgeous book Autumn Light:

“We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. In the central literary text of the land, The Tale of Genji, the word for “impermanence” is used more than a thousand times, and bright, amorous Prince Genji is said to be “a handsomer man in sorrow than in happiness.” Beauty, the foremost Jungian in Japan has observed, “is completed only if we accept the fact of death.” Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.”

When I held my two older kids tightly for too long and kissed their cheeks as we said goodbye, I turned to the blessings that first came to mind and whispered them in their ears.

The blessing we say over them each Friday night. Praying for their peace and protection and light.

The Shehechiyanu to celebrate these new moments and new experiences that were before them.

The Irish poet and writer John O’Donohue offers his own blessing for those setting out on new paths (from To Bless the Space Between Us):

A journey can become a sacred thing:

Make sure, before you go,

To take the time

To bless your going forth

To free your heart of ballast

So that the compass of your soul

Might direct you toward

The territories of spirit

Where you will discover

More of your hidden life,

And the urgencies

That deserve to claim you.

May you travel in an awakened way,

Gathered wisely into your inner ground;

That you may not waste the invitations

Which wait along the way to transform you.

And one more beautiful blessing for leave-taking, found in the Talmud in Berachot 17a.

This was one said upon departing the study hall:

״עוֹלָמְךָ תִּרְאֶה בְּחַיֶּיךָ, וְאַחֲרִיתְךָ לְחַיֵּי הָעוֹלָם הַבָּא, וְתִקְוָתְךָ לְדוֹר דּוֹרִים. לִבְּךָ יֶהְגֶּה תְּבוּנָה, פִּיךָ יְדַבֵּר חָכְמוֹת וּלְשׁוֹנְךָ יַרְחִישׁ רְנָנוֹת, עַפְעַפֶּיךָ יַיְשִׁירוּ נֶגְדְּךָ, עֵינֶיךָ יָאִירוּ בִּמְאוֹר תּוֹרָה, וּפָנֶיךָ יַזְהִירוּ כְּזוֹהַר הָרָקִיעַ, שִׂפְתוֹתֶיךָ יַבִּיעוּ דַּעַת, וְכִלְיוֹתֶיךָ תַּעֲלוֹזְנָה מֵישָׁרִים, וּפְעָמֶיךָ יָרוּצוּ לִשְׁמוֹעַ דִּבְרֵי עַתִּיק יוֹמִין״.

May you see your world, may you benefit from all of the good in the world, in your lifetime,

and may your end be to life in the World-to-Come,

and may your hope be sustained for many generations.

May your heart meditate understanding,

your mouth speak wisdom, and your tongue whisper with praise.

May your eyelids look directly before you,

your eyes shine in the light of Torah,

and your face radiate like the brightness of the firmament.

May your lips express knowledge,

your kidneys rejoice in the upright,

and your feet run to hear the words of the Ancient of Days” ( translation from Sefaria)

May we all - those who are taking leave and those who remain behind - find nourishing ground on which to place our feet. Where our heels can anchor, our toes still wriggle, and our soles find their way to new lightness.

I have been on a coffee date campaign lately.

This Spring, I began a new role as scholar-in-residence at a local synagogue. Over the coming year, I will be offering educational programs and spiritual support to congregants. Growing into this new position, I have wanted to learn more about the community. And the best way to understand a community is to spend time with its people.

So I have been making lots of coffee dates. With staff, lay leaders, community members. Each conversation over iced coffee has opened up new windows onto this warm and rich place. Each one an opportunity for slow, quiet time to hear one person’s story.

I love the time to talk one-on-one. As I have gotten older, I have craved, more and more, going small and deep, rather than big and wide.

Last week, I met with one community member, and we shared our mutual love for a quote we had both come across:

“If you want a village, be a villager”

So many of us are drawn to the idea of belonging to something larger than ourselves. A place where we are known and seen and held. A place for uncovering meaning and connection and identity.

I yearn for the perfect village. I have a vision in my mind of the perfect metaphorical village - all of the right components in place. And while I am a part of many beautiful villages, I also, if I’m being honest, encounter moments of sadness when the village in everyday life is somehow less shiny than the one I had held in my heart’s eye.

But when these feelings of disappointment surface, I come back to this quote.

Villages don’t just materialize for me to join. I have to be a part of building them.

This coming week, we greet the Hebrew month of Elul. That charged, sacred month of preparation. The runway to the New Year. This is another one of those holy arcs of time in our tradition when we walk with intention from one state of being towards a new one. We’re given a number of spiritual practices to begin this work of introspection and return - four weeks to dig in - so that when Rosh Hashanah shows up, we are not caught off-guard. We have put in some work.

Each year, I return with love to the cycle of Torah readings from Deuteronomy that accompany us on this walk. Last week we read Parshat Re’eh, and next week we will read Parshat Shoftim. When I read these portions with an eye towards the spiritual accounting and reflection of this time of year, there are words that rise in bold relief.

That seem to be speaking to me. Urging me to slow and notice. Words in blinking yellow lights.

Last week, in Parshat Re’eh, the billboard word for me was Makom - place.

As the various instructions and warnings are shared with the People of Israel before they enter the land of Israel, different versions of the same phrase are woven throughout the verses:

“Ha’makom asher yivchar”

The place that will be chosen.

In most cases, the place is a place that will be chosen by God, for us. This place as part of a covenantal promise to us of belonging and sovereignty and safety.

But I keep coming back to the refrain - the place that will be chosen.

Beginning Elul, and taking its invitation seriously, can feel intense.

If we decide to open ourselves to the real work of teshuva - return - it can ask of us hard things. Vulnerability. Honesty. Repentance. Repair.

Exhausting.

I know that I am not always up to the fullness of those pieces. Especially in those inner places that feel raw and prickly.

But this year, I am thinking about the work of the season through the lens of makom. Place.

As part of the work of Elul, how can I begin to think seriously about the makom that I yearn for? The community, the village, the connective threads that I want to hold me in the year ahead? And how can I think about what I might do to build that village, to contribute to it?

Not alone. Because we can’t do that work alone.

But with others. Other likeminded villagers.

How do we find our villagers?

I know that I am affected by the people who surround me. I wish I could say that I am impervious to outside energy, opinions, and emotional judgment. But I am not. I don’t think many of us are. We are all deeply interwoven, and I know that my heart and body are impacted by the hearts and bodies around me.

Maybe part of the work of Elul is gaining clarity about who you need in your village so that you are able to show up in the ways that most closely align with your yearnings and aspirations. Because we know that even with the best of intentions, we will mess up. We will fall. We will have to face what we’re not sure we can face. And that’s when we will need our villagers. To forgive us. To inspire us. To remind us of who we are and what we are capable of. To see us and hold us.

And what else?

Some more billboard words:

לֹ֣א תֹסִפ֗וּן לָשׁ֛וּב בַּדֶּ֥רֶךְ הַזֶּ֖ה עֽוֹד׃

You must not go back that way again ~Deut. 17:16

In order to move forward and shape something new, sometimes we need to let go.

To release our hold on a grudge. An imagined past. A painful pattern.

We can’t go back. Not if we want to move forward.

We have to be willing - at times - to soften our backward gaze, so that we can look ahead with greater courage and clarity.

תָּמִ֣ים תִּֽהְיֶ֔ה עִ֖ם יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃

You will be wholehearted with your God ~Deuteronomy 18:13

Because what more do we really want, other than to feel whole?

This makom, this village, that we help to build should allow us to feel whole. Fully ourselves. And our villagers should help us see that that wholeness is within reach. With our shared commitment and care.

This Elul, I want to trust that we can each build the makom that we are thirsting for. By surrounding ourselves with the villagers who lift us up, who show up, who share the load of the work with us. One intimate, love-bound village at a time that can vibrate its energy outward into our broken world.

And we can create the village we imagine by being the villagers we want and need.

There are many ways to be a villager. Each of us brings unique gifts and demonstrations of love and care.

May we all feel the gates cracking open to our barest yearnings and hopes this Elul. And may we accompany one another in the slow work of shaping beautiful villages that can nurture us all.

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If you are interested in sharing in the spiritual work of Elul, you are invited to join the 4-week live online course I will be leading beginning on August 20th. You can find more information here.

Love usually feels easier in the summer light.

In these warm months of verdant landscapes and long nights and bright sunshine, feelings of love arrive with greater ease. In the summer, we seem to lean into joy with less reservation as the natural world invites us to step out and feel the sun and breeze.

In just a few days, we will greet the minor Jewish holiday of Tu B’Av (the 15th day of Av).

A day which comes just six days after Tisha B’Av (the 9th of Av) - the day on our calendar that is most heavy with grief and sadness. We move in six days from sitting amidst the ruins of our losses to dancing in the vineyards:

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said: There were no days as joyous for the Jewish people as the fifteenth of Av and as Yom Kippur, as on them the daughters of Jerusalem would go out in white clothes, which each woman borrowed from another. Why were they borrowed? They did this so as not to embarrass one who did not have her own white garments… And the daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards…

~Mishnah Taanit 4:8

In ancient times, it was a day for matchmaking, for the beautiful possibilities of love. The text above from the mishnah speaks of a day of equality and generosity, of shared joy and love.

It is a sweet and moving image to conjure.

But these days, I am thinking more about a different kind of love.

The love of a place.

After 5 weeks in Israel, I am sitting with the question: what does it mean to love this place?

This summer, two of my children spent a significant amount of time here as well. They spent days at the beach, eating phenomenal meals, playing sports, enjoying the nightlife, dancing and laughing and soaking up the vibrant Israeli culture. And I am so glad that they both had experiences that deepened their love for this place.

My time here was spent a little bit differently.

I ate delicious Israeli food and watched World Cup games with cheering crowds on the Jerusalem streets and walked along the tayelet (boardwalk) by the beautiful beaches of Tel Aviv.

But I also spent many hours with texts and ideas and questions and narratives that surfaced and touched the hardest aspects of this place right now. I met with Israeli friends who all shared their deep worries about this holy place. I heard, again and again, from them that they are carrying heavy anxiety about the state of things here and the direction in which the country is headed. As one Israeli woman said: “One day Tikvah (hope) and the next day Yeush (despair).”

As I walked around the streets of Jerusalem on this trip, I often found myself remembering past trips here when I was young. Passing sites that invoked memories of being here as a child with my siblings and parents. Parks we played in. Grocery stores we shopped in. Cafes we sat at. Then, my love for Israel was simple and pure and bright. I had not yet been taught the complexity of this place and its history and people.

I don’t begrudge my younger self’s naive love. I am appreciative that my heart still holds that radiant, unadulterated love. It still sits inside of me.

But the more that I have learned, the more that I have heard and studied over the years, the more that I understand and acknowledge that that simple love is not the whole story of this special place.

On our group’s trip to the West Bank, we came to listen to people’s stories. Not to question or debate or challenge. First, to listen. We listened to the voices of Religious Zionists and Palestinian residents. All of whom love this land ferociously. We watched an Israeli settler embrace and sit beside his Palestinian neighbor and then each told their own story - stories that painted radically different life experiences. At times, one story contradicted the other’s story. One used terminology that the other rejected. But they stayed and listened and embraced again at the end of their time with us. This was a sitting with a complex and conflicting kind of love. A love that can be broad enough to hold another’s love too.

During our day there I recalled a text we had studied during our first week here, an essay by Moshe Halbertal titled “On Holiness, Sovereignty, and Sacrilege”. In it he writes:

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a border dispute. It is a feud over a homeland…Land and water can be divided, but can the same be done with symbols? In the evolving religious debate, both parties are making a similar baseless argument, linking sanctity and sovereignty…In fact the relation between holiness and sovereignty is quite the reverse. It is actually places, times, and people that cannot be controlled which become holy…

Sanctity is that realm that is inaccessible and that cannot be controlled.”

Holiness cannot be owned. It cannot be controlled.

The category of the holy transcends the geo-political realm.

In the face of centuries of geo-political tumult and violence in the Mideast, this might seem like a quaint and ridiculous claim.

But I find it both provocative and true.

This holy place is home to so many. So many with such drastically different stories and truths. And they all love this place.

In light of the outbreak of abhorrent violence in the West Bank over the last few days, we are reminded of the extreme dangers of letting your own love become so intense that another’s love becomes impossible.

At the end of our long day there, we returned home, heavier with the stories of so many lives.

Back in my apartment, I read a moving poem by the Israeli writer Amos Oz:

Loving the Land/ Amos Oz

The Land of Israel is not a museum of God.

No place is a museum of God,

No person and no inanimate object is a thing of worship.

It is permissible to both touch and change these things

On the condition that you yourself are prepared

To be touched and changed.

The condition is love.

I know: it is impossible to “educate to love” -

You cannot “educate someone to love the land”

Nor can you “educate someone to love the scenery”

With love, you can “infect” someone else.

Sometimes love can be awakened,

Sometimes, but not with a strong hand,

Not with an outstretched arm, and not with burning anger-

Rather through an approach of mutuality.

You come to a place - a hill, the desert, a spring, a house…

You change it and make your mark upon it,

But it is also open

And give it the opportunity to leave its mark on you.

This hard and magical place leaves its mark on me every time I come. And the mark gets deeper and more contoured with each visit.

My love for this place remains my 10-year-old pure love for this land and its people. But that love now has added layers. Layers of conflict and contradictions and painful realities in all of its corners. Which don’t diminish its radiance. They only make it more real and sturdy.

Maybe loving this place means being here.

Listening to what is difficult and heartbreaking.

Honoring the incredible strength and bravery that it takes to make this place your home.

Holding my own love alongside the love of many others whose languages and stories are different from my own.

Acknowledging that both can be equally as real and powerful.

This walk between Tisha B’Av and Tu B’Av, from mourning our pain to recommitting to the possibility of shared love, feels absolutely critical. We face our loss and brokenness, and then we rise and demand a return to hope. We demand and pray and work towards it.

I am returning home without answers. Only new stories and a deepened curiosity and a complex love that aches and grips my heart even as I say farewell for now.

To the land I love - until next time.

There is dust everywhere, on everything.

Two years ago, when I came to study in Jerusalem, I stayed in a beautiful apartment off of Emek Refaim, a popular thoroughfare in the German Colony neighborhood. My morning walk to the Hartman Institute was quiet and serene, and the air smelled of rosemary.

This summer, I am back in an apartment off of the same street in the same neighborhood, but my morning walk is anything but peaceful. The entire length of the street is torn up by the construction project that is ongoing, one which will be ongoing for the next 5-10 years, I am told, as they build a light rail track. The air is constantly swirling with dust, coating everything in a dirty sheen, and I dodge diggers and rocky debris and gaping holes in the cement as I walk the ten minutes to the institute each morning.

And yet. It still feels magical to me. Dirty and chaotic and magical.

As I watch where I place my steps, I notice the vibrant flowers arching over doorways. And the tiny pomegranates growing. And the unexpected appearance of sacred Hebrew words intermingling with the construction rubble.

The juxtaposition of the dirty and the holy, the everyday and the elevated, always arrests me in Israel. The richly textured way that paradox lives side by side here never ceases to make me pause and behold it all.

One morning, as I was walking and silently cursing the mud that I had to trek through, I noticed the Hebrew words on the construction barrier. Me’ir Ba’Aretz Or. Light Illuminates in the Land.

For all I know, that is the name of the construction company doing the work. But it made me stop walking and smile. Here was light shining through the mess.

This construction barrier, with these elevated words, felt like a portal to a different time, different place, a different consciousness that caught me off guard.

I am so often caught off-guard here. By the unexpected. By the coexistence of seemingly opposing ideas. By the surprising openings to different plains. By these magical-seeming portals.

While I spend my days here immersed in Jewish texts and teachings, I come home each night and fall asleep to my novels. Right now, I am reading Land by Maggie O’Farrell. It is the story of an Irish mapmaker and his family, but it is much more than that. The book is filled with evocative characters and relationships and terrain, but the narrative motion of the novel revolves around a tobar - the Irish Gaelic word for a well or natural spring. This tobar is a magical element in the book - it serves as a sacred portal that connects individuals across vast swaths of time. It is a physical site that transcends space and time and links characters across generations.

I have been thinking of portals a lot since I arrived here.

They seem to appear so often in this place.

(translation: one should always pray in a place with windows, Babylonian Talmud, Berachot, 31)

In texts.

Last week, we had the privilege of studying four of the five megillot (scroll texts) with Tanach scholar, Dr. Orit Avnery. We explored Ruth and Esther and opened up the literary and theological parallels between the two texts and with other texts in our canon. Words that were speaking to each other across time periods. Illuminating each other through centuries.

In spiritual practice.

Every Wednesday night in Jerusalem, there is a sacred singing circle led by several gorgeous singers and musicians. The space is quiet and candlelit, and we spend two hours singing and moving to music that is both ancient and brand new. Each Wednesday night, our bodies vibrate with transcendent melodies, transporting us to a different place and time. Out of the mundane into the holy.

In people.

Two summers ago, we studied with the scholar of Jewish mysticism, Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed. Her teaching - and her presence - touched my heart and soul then. This summer, she was not on our learning schedule, but she asked to find a time to meet with us. We were invited to her home one evening for tea and desserts. As we sat together, she looked at us and asked us: how is your soul? A question that we don’t get asked often, and don’t ask each other often, but the question was so Melila. And it disarmed all of us. Many tears began to flow, and we began to shed our intellectual armor and reconnect with the deepest places in ourselves. We talked and shared and witnessed for one another.

So many of these moments, these opened portals, caught me by surprise.

And yet, I shouldn’t have been surprised. This place always breaks open my heart with its cavernous depths and its unparalleled complexity. Nothing is simple or easy here. Nothing is just as it seems on its surface.

I only have a short time left in Israel, and I am beginning to ask myself - can I access these sacred portals back at home, back in the flow of chol, in everyday life?

I think we can.

Not in the same way, perhaps, but we can.

In texts.

In spiritual practice.

In people.

This place is one big tel. Everywhere you go here there are layers of meaning, history, culture, religion that dance together, horizontally and vertically, the ancient intermingling with the new.

And the co-presence of all of these disparate pieces breathe an unique aliveness into the air. You can almost sense the vibrations beneath the dusty streets.

And when these portals make themselves known, they offer an opportunity to pause and perceive the depth of the space and time you find yourself in. These are moments for reflection and deep perception of our smallness and our interconnection.

Yesterday we spent the day traveling through the West Bank, meeting with Israelis and Palestinians, activists and settlers. There is so much to say about the people we met and the land we traversed, for another time.

(translation: The prophet said: you may not be called faithful until you love your brothers in the same way that you love yourselves)

But during the day, there were many arresting ‘portal moments’ - encounters that shifted our awareness and understanding, that acknowledged the hard ways in which the holy meets the political, where the visionary meets the real.

I believe that in our lives, we need to look for and pursue these ‘portal moments’. We need to seek them out. They offer critical opportunities for texturizing our own spiritual, emotional, and psychological landscapes. While we may often crave a static and stable world - which I definitely do at times - such a world is ultimately not coherent with reality. And when we look for openings to transformed consciousness, we are giving ourselves - and each other - the chance to shift and grow and perceive and move in ways that help us live among the true complexity of existence.

I am reminded of a teaching by the Degel Machaneh Ephraim, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov, writing on the pit that Joseph’s brothers threw him into:

“The matter is as follows: There is a difference between a be’er (well) and a bor (pit/cistern). A be’er is something that has its own spring bubbling up from below to above, and it is “living water” (mayim chayim). A bor, however, does not flow from itself at all; it only holds whatever water is gathered and poured into it from above to below (mayim mechunasim — stagnant, collected water)...”

There is a difference between a bor, which holds static water, and a be’er, which requires digging through dirt to reach water. The model of the be’er can help one access the vitality of reality. It requires effort and attention, but the reward is a connection to what is ultimately life-giving. It is a tapping into the essence of existence that transcends oneself.

This land testifies to how hard this work is. And how destabilizing it can be to be thrown off-center, again and again. To awaken to the paradoxical and the complex and the holy that is far from pristine. But it is a part of life here. It lives between the dusty construction debris along the road. You walk among it every single day. And you keep your eyes peeled for the be’erot openings, even as you sidestep the rubble.

I hold such sweet memories of blessing our three small children on Friday nights around the Shabbat table. Of laying my hands on their cheeks or their soft hair and whispering the Hebrew blessing into their ears. When they were little, the ritual was often rushed, as they squirmed under our fingers, never sitting still, but they knew that the blessing was a given. An expected short, but intimate, moment of connection. I’m not sure how they understood the blessing when they were young, other than knowing that it was part of our Friday night routine. But for me, it was one of the many sacred pauses that Shabbat affords. To slow down. Reach out. Connect. Honor. Bless and pray.

As the years progressed and my children grew, the traditional words of the blessing stayed the same, but my private intent varied. As they moved through health scares, social drama, and emotional struggle, each week I directed my blessings towards those jagged edges and darkened places that had made themselves felt in my children’s lives.

When my oldest, and then my middle, left for college, we shifted the weekly Shabbat blessing to Facetime. With them gone from the family Shabbat table, I began calling them sometime on Friday, catching them in between classes or heading out to Chabad, to give them their blessing over the phone. I miss the laying-on-of-hands. The tactile feeling of holding their sweet faces. But distance forces adaptation. And my older two children know that Shabbat can’t enter without us connecting and the bestowal of their weekly blessing. I think they look forward to those calls, bowing their heads on video through their phones, closing their eyes while I say the Hebrew words.

This past week, I knew that my older son would be spending Shabbat in the Sahara desert in Morocco, and worried that I wouldn’t be able to reach him on Friday, I called on Thursday to give him his blessing early. Just in case.

But Friday morning, I got a video call from my son, as he had just finished a camel ride over the sand dunes. He turned the camera around and showed me the beautiful desert landscape, and he said that even though I had already blessed him, he felt like the magnificent surroundings called for another Shabbat blessing. So we called my daughter, who is in Tel Aviv, and she joined the call, and I blessed them both. Using the traditional Hebrew words and then adding a spontaneous blessing in English.

May you be safe in that wild and beautiful place.

May you be open to the transformation that can occur when you experience new things and encounter breathtaking settings.

May you soak it all in and feel God’s presence with you in the holy wilderness.

We wished each other Shabbat shalom and said goodbye.

The other night, my husband and I had dinner with some non-Jewish friends. We had a lovely meal, and before we ended our dinner, our male Christian friend asked us, earnestly, what we would like him to pray for, for us. What prayers we felt we were needing or yearning for in this moment.

The question disarmed us both. Stripped away the formalities of conversation. I felt my eyes fill a bit and paused. The question asked us to look inwards to our hearts. To what we were holding but often don’t have the space to surface.

We both took our time and then shared with him the prayers we are needing right now.

It was a beautiful moment. One that shifted the orientation of our dinner from a warm dinner with friends to an intimate moment of connection and care. It moved me deeply.

In Jewish tradition, we have the practice of offering misheberach prayers for those who are sick or in need of healing. People often keep a list of the Hebrew names of those who are navigating illness and insert their names when the communal misheberach prayer is offered in synagogue. Some also have a practice of praying privately each day for those individuals, mentioning them by name, as I do.

But I don’t know of a Jewish ritual that integrates this type of more free-form prayer for others. It is not something that we often do in Judaism - asking someone how we might pray for him or her. But I love this spiritual practice.

All of this discussion about offering prayers and blessings for others brings to mind the perennial theological question: do we really believe that praying for someone will alter the course of events in that person’s life?

Personally, I don’t wrestle with this question. When I pray for someone who is ill or bless my children, I don’t view my words as magical incantations that change future events. I don’t believe that our prayers and blessings work in that way. I see the act as changing me and changing the recipient as a result of the exchange of blessing or prayer. When I pray for someone, I feel more connected to, more responsible for, closer to the person on the other end.

I am reminded of something beautiful that Rabbi Shai Held shared in a recent podcast interview on “Answers withHeld”. He was exploring faith at the end of life with Dr. Lydia Dugdale. At the end of the episode, Rabbi Held was asked how tragic deaths impact his faith. He talked about how we care for each other in our darkest moments:

“We love each other not because God will then take care of me.

We love each other because we’re all we have. And what God created for each of us is all of us. And that’s a very powerful place.

I don’t mean that, though, to be Pollyannish. There is tremendous loss in the acknowledgement that God is not coming to save me. There is a tremendous loss in that.

And I think there’s also an invitation to a certain kind of maturity.”

I think Rabbi Held is speaking to a mature faith that acknowledges that much of what we will experience will feel unjust and misaligned with a rational teleology. If we can let go of our yearning for a coherent providential framework where reward and punishment fit neatly in the appropriate cases, then we can turn our yearnings - our prayers and blessings - towards each other.

I am not saying that I believe that the Divine is not a part of this praying and blessing equation. I very much feel God’s presence in those charged moments when the energy of blessing is flowing and connecting between two people, as Buber writes in I and Thou: “...Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the eternal You.”

But when I ground my prayers and blessings in the human beings in my life, rather than directing them only to God, I am feeding these relationships and giving spiritual energy to what I have some control over: the ways in which we love and care for one another.

And I want more of that kind of prayer. More blessings like that. That reach out and acknowledge and elevate my fellow humans who are making it through each day in the face of pain and sadness.

This Hebrew month of Tammuz sits in the abundant sunlight of summer yet holds the mournfulness of certain historical events marked by loss and brokenness. It is beautifully bright with dark shadows.

But Tammuz is also the month of sight - the time of year when we lean into seeing deeply, penetrating beneath the surface of things.

The practice of offering prayers and blessings for others is that holy pause that allows us a moment to really see each other. To see each other beneath the armor we so often gird ourselves with. To slough off our shells and look at each other with vulnerability and tenderness that is the core of our humanness.

So I want to end by inviting you to reach out to me personally to let me know if you have something in particular that is sitting on your heart right now for which I can pray. I would love to know and add your yearnings to my daily tefillot (prayers).

We are closing out the third week of the Omer.

Tiferet.

Majestic beauty.

Beauty that sits at the intersection of complicated.

In the kabbalistic map of the sefirot - the different manifestations of the Divine - tiferet sits in the middle, at the meeting point between chesed (lovingkindness and generosity) and gevurah (discipline and restraint). If chesed is a turning on of the tap of our heartfulness and love, gevurah is the counter to this outflow -it is the discernment that leads to knowing when to turn off the tap, or slow its outpouring. Chesed is tempered by Gevurah, Gevurah is softened by Chesed. They work in partnership.

And in this central place - where Chesed and Gevurah meet - we find Tiferet. The beauty that is found when we experience a sense of balance and harmony. The peace of equilibrium between the churning pull of love and restraint.

Right now, we are making our way through the book of Leviticus in our weekly reading of the Torah. Leviticus - the book of blood and animal parts, ritual defilement and prescriptions for purity. It is a highly technical part of the Torah, with so many details about how the People, with the Priests’ help, were instructed to navigate the messiness of human life. Last week, the portion explored childbirth and the disease of leprosy and how these precarious physical encounters must be handled within the community.

This coming Shabbat, we will read Parshat Acharei Mot-Kedoshim. After death, holiness.

The portion begins with a brief mention of the tragedy that was still hanging in the air - the death of two of Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, when they brought an offering to God that was not prescribed. The portion begins in the aftermath of those deaths. The opening verse acknowledges that the horror of that experience was still present, certainly for Aaron and his remaining sons. What follows is God’s reminder to Aaron to stick to the prescribed directions about ritual and sacrificial service. There are rules that have been put into place to govern the meditation of what is most Holy, and they must be obeyed. If they are not, we see what can happen.

The second part of the portion - Kedoshim - begins with the well-known invocation:

“You shall be holy, for I, the ETERNAL your God, am holy.” (Lev. 19:2)

We reach for holiness.

God is holy, and we are created in the image of God as partners with God. We share in this legacy of holiness, but we cannot rest on this inheritance. We must stretch towards holiness. Actualize it. Through our actions and our reactions, our restraint and our responses. In the everyday of human life.

These past few weeks, paying attention to these fascinating chapters of Leviticus, I am struck by the ways in which the Torah is offering ways to manage the messiness of life. There are acknowledgments that the physicality and complexity of being a human being - as individuals and in relationship with one another - can often be fraught and scary and uncertain. We will get sick and we will bleed, and we will be tempted at times to act in unkind and even malicious ways towards others.

The Torah responds to these truths with rituals. By creating maps for navigating these moments of distress and disequilibrium.

Even if we no longer offer animal sacrifices, we can still learn a great deal from these attempts at addressing difficulty and recalibrating as needed.

The impulse in our tradition to respond to rupture with rituals of caregiving and accompaniment is beautiful. It is majestic, even.

It is the crafting of a container to hold our humanness - in the rawest of moments.

And here I see the presence of tiferet. Again, that quality that sits at the meeting place between lovingkindness and boundaries. The beauty of holding our lives with both at once.

Over the past weeks, both of my older children have accompanied friends to the hospital during times of sickness. When you send your children off to college, you hope that they are equipped to deal with the everyday ups and downs as independent young adults. I speak to my older two nearly every day. But I am conscious of trying to intervene less, advise less, and step back gently in certain moments to give them space to chart their next steps on their own. And I pray that they are up to the task - knowing that neither they nor I know what the ‘task’ will be.

In both of these instances, my children had to figure out how to help their friends in emergent situations. Who to call, where to bring them, and how to stay by their friends’ side in the hospital while they were cared for. To remain with them for hours until they were stable enough to be discharged. And to bring them back home.

In both cases, I did not get calls from my children right away. They knew what to do, and they stepped into the mess to hold their friends and accompany them. I spoke to them later, after hours in the hospital.

And in both cases, my children were strong and steady in their presence for their friends. Only hours later did they share their emotional exhaustion with me, and I reminded them of the ways in which they needed to care for themselves now, to replenish their bodies and rebalance their nervous systems.

Although I wish our children did not have to confront these difficulties in such close proximity, I know that they will. We all will. The question is how we will respond. How we will show up. How we will both care for each other and ourselves.

Even in life’s heartbreaking moments, there is beauty. Tender beauty that can be found in our capacity to hold what is messy in our hands and find the invitation for holiness even there.

This year we mark Yom HaShoah ve’HaGevurah - Holocaust Memorial Day - during this second week of the Omer that is dedicated to the quality of Gevurah. Which is so fitting. Gevurah is strength. Might. Heroism.

Over the past few years, I have become much more attuned to this truth: the most powerful demonstrations of strength come in the quietest forms. This kind of strength does not yell its presence or assert its domination. This is a strength that is summoned in the private and deepest pockets of our hearts and souls. It is a strength that is being summoned invisibly to meet the battles we know we must face.

Often, it is a strength to resist. Resist succumbing to fear. Resist allowing others to determine the shape of our identity and sense of self. Resist the impulse to let despair swallow our hope. Resist others’ insistence that we stay quiet. Resist all of the reasons to be felled by our anxiety. These are moments of the greatest strength. Raw and real.

And this is the stuff of which we are made. We discover strength when strength feels radically impossible. And we draw on our ancestral memories of those who came before us, those who sacrificed and persevered and survived. Their strength meets our own inner capacity, and that is the place where we discover ourselves and find the hope to keep walking.

May the memories of all of the precious souls that were lost at the hands of the Nazis be a source of profound blessing, strength, and resilience for us all.

I am grateful for Lake Michigan. On days when the world feels like too much, it is a blessing to live near an expansive lake. One whose other side is beyond sight, somewhere off on the horizon. It’s a lake that feels like an ocean in its vastness. And it is a comfort to stand on the rocky shore, watching the waves dependably roll in and out. To breathe to the rhythm of the water.

Before Passover, I started reading a new book on awe, on the recommendation of author Michael Pollan, whom I heard speak at the New Orleans Book Festival. The book explores the science and transformative impact of awe-filled encounters. The researcher Dacher Keltner defines it as:

“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world…awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life.”

Awe can be accessed through moral acts and collective effervescence, the wildness of nature, creative arts, and spiritual experiences. among other forms. Awe-filled moments are not always positive or beautiful. They can be harsh and challenging too, as Keltner describes. But awe shifts something deep within us.

What shifts?

Keltner describes the ways in which “being in a context of awe leads to a ‘small self.’” He goes on to explain:

“...awe shifts us from a competitive, dog-eats-dog mindset to perceive that we are part of networks of more interdependent, collaborating individuals. We sense that we are part of a chapter in the history of a family, a community, a culture. An ecosystem.”

In one particular study, exposure to ‘awe-filled experiences’ led to a diminishment of the default mode network (the region of the brain that processes information from an egocentric perspective) in the participants’ brains:

“This finding would suggest that when we experience awe, regions of the brain that are associated with the excesses of the ego, including self-criticism, anxiety and even depression, quiet down.”

Awe can quiet our anxious thoughts, among other good outcomes.

The start of Pesach was joy-filled. Time with family at two meaningful seders. Time in synagogue for prayer and gathering in community over tuna fish and macaroons. Time for naps and family games. Time outside of time.

And yet, if I am honest, I cannot recall another recent moment when I felt more anxiety about the state of the world. There are always distressing world events to provoke worry, but this steady state of tumult and threat feels unique. At least to me. The wellbeing and future of this country and Israel feel incredibly precarious, to say nothing of the insidious growth of overt anti-semitic articulations and acts of violence around the world.

I like to think that I am a naturally hopeful person and that I have access to habits and practices to keep my head and heart looking for the light even in dark moments. But it has been a struggle lately.

The other night, I went to see the new documentary called “The AI Doc” with my oldest son. I had barely heard of it, but he very much wanted to see it, so I tagged along.

The film was terrifying. At the end of the film, my son and I couldn’t get up from our seats. He had tears streaming down his cheeks. I can’t capture all of the dark portents contained in the film (go see it, please) but it left us both with deep, paralyzing, existential dread. Neither of us slept that night.

And the horrible irony is that the source of all of this potential catastrophic harm to humanity and civilization is us. Humans. It is borne out of our own creativity and innovation. Such a frightening reminder that our creative capacity can be used for good or ill. This capacity needs strong moral guardrails, and without those, we are in profound trouble. Intelligence without morality can lead to annihilation.

The film didn’t help my generalized anxiety. As a parent, I wanted to reassure my son and comfort him, tell him that it would all be OK, but he is a young adult now, and there is no hiding truth from him anymore. So that night and the next morning, we sat in our dread together. We shared it and looked it in the face. We got involved in the small ways the film suggested. I acknowledged his fears were well-founded. I felt them too.

And then we made coffee and he worked on an essay for one of his classes and I went to exercise at the gym.

And I went back to the shore of Lake Michigan. Looking out at the movement of the waves and the expanse of water.

Tomorrow we will mark the seventh day of Pesach. A day that commemorates the moment when the People of Israel stood on the shores of the sea and crossed over, wading into the water, trusting that the sea would split and they would somehow make it to the other side. They crossed and they sang. Tomorrow we will read from Shirat Ha’Yam, the song of the sea. A song of praise and gratitude and faith. We will remind ourselves of the cathartic power of song to help us release the residue of trauma.

In a beautiful teaching from 1886, the Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Ger) writes that just as the six days of the week are in service to Shabbat, so the first six days of Pesach are in service to the 7th day. The tachlit - the purpose - of the Exodus from Egypt, he writes, was the song at the sea. The singing was the pinnacle of all that came before. They went out so that they could sing.

Musical experiences - attending concerts, performances, sharing in communal singing events - are one peak way to experience awe. There is something magical that can happen when we surround ourselves by music - alone or in community - as John O’Donohue writes:

Music alters your experience of time. To enter a piece of music, or to have the music enfold you, is to depart for a while from regulated time. Music invites a rhythm that beats out its own time-shape...Feeling is where the heart lives. In claiming the heart so swiftly and totally, the beauty of music crosses all psychological and cultural frontiers. There is a profound sense in which music opens a secret door in time and reaches into the eternal...Music embraces the whole person. It entrances the mind and the heart and its vibrations reach and touch the entire physical body. Yet there is something deeper still in the way that music pervades us. In contrast to every other art form, it finds us out in a more immediate and total way. The inrush of intimacy in music is irresistible. It takes you before you can halt it. It is as though music reaches that subtle threshold within us where the soul dovetails with the eternal.

The 7th day of Pesach cannot come soon enough. I need song, music, to tether myself to what is eternal. Something to serve as a reminder of a different, broader temporal horizon.

I am looking to be in relationship with awe and hope more often these days. In all sorts of ways. I am keeping a list of the access points. We can sing. We can jump in a lake. We can look for buds blooming on tree branches. We can buy packets of zinnia seeds to gift to friends. We can sign petitions. We can invite friends to a meal. We can spend time with art. We can be in search of awe in our everyday lives - we can make space for it - to answer the despair we also see.

Where are you finding awe and hope these days?

And We Sing

In every generation

We do the brave work of imagination

Feel ourselves there

Unrisen dough

Heavy on our shoulders

Fear heavy on our hearts

And tambourines rattling in our bags.

We rush under this cover of darkness

Lamb still between our teeth

Blood dried on our doorframes

Stepping barefoot into the cold desert sand

Trusting that out there is better than in here.

We know we must cross a sea and traverse a wilderness

But we can sing our way through.

We can sing

When words fail and

anxiety strips us of articulation.

We see hazy horizons

Indeterminate distances ahead-

Which ones will we reach?

Will we meet our grandchildren?

Will we sink under this load?

Will we touch the border of the promised land?

Will the redemption be worth these bruises?

Or will we see

That standing here

On this shore

Side by side

My hand in yours

Our toes touching

the wet sand

Is enough?

Closing our eyes

and girding our hearts

We sing

as we step

into the water

Ankle

Thigh

Waist high

Trusting that dry land

Is awaiting us

On the other side

Of these crushing waves

And flowers are waiting to bloom

Almost two weeks ago, we marked the holiday of Tu B’Shevat. Like most Jewish holidays, this festival has layers of meaning that have accrued over the years - each layer a reflection of a certain time period and a different way of viewing and living in the world. It has its agricultural and economic meaning, its mystical meaning, its ecological meaning, and various spiritual angles. At its core, it is about the trees. Noticing and celebrating the tree.

On the holiday this year, I led a mini retreat for a small group of people, and during this program I shared a teaching that I find particularly beautiful.

There is a tradition on Tu B’Shevat to offer a special blessing over the etrog (the citron fruit) that we will use during our celebration of Sukkot - a holiday that will come some seven months later. So as we sit in the middle of winter, honoring the invisibly-stirring sap beneath the knobby bark of the trees, we set our eyes on the fall harvest holiday that is far from our imagination at the moment. We say a fervent blessing over the etrog tree that it should have the vigor to grow a magnificent etrog for this future holiday:

May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors, that You bless all the Etrog (citron) trees to produce their fruit in their proper time, and that they produce good, beautiful, and magnificent Etrogim, clean from all blemishes.

Let no spots rise upon them, and may they be complete, having no deficiency, not even the prick of a thorn. May they be available for us, and for all our brethren, the House of Israel, wherever they are, to fulfill with them the Mitzvah of ‘Taking’ [the Four Species] along with the Lulav on the holiday of Sukkot that will come upon us for good life and for peace—as You have commanded us in Your Torah through Moses Your servant: ‘And the fruit of a majestic tree (Etrog), date palm fronds, a branch of a braided tree, and willows of the brook.’

And may it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors, that You help us and assist us to fulfill this mitzvah of taking the Lulav, Hadas (myrtle), Aravah (willow), and Etrog properly, in its right time on the holiday of Sukkot that will come upon us for good life and for peace, with joy and goodness of heart. And may You prepare for us a beautiful, magnificent, complete, clean, and kosher Etrog according to its laws.

For some reason, I felt my eyes filling when I returned to this blessing this year.

I was struck by the beauty of linking one holiday - one day on our calendar - with another holiday that won’t come for many months. With this blessing, it is as if we are picking up a sacred thread and carrying it with us, trusting in a future that feels far away.

In Judaism, we have several holy arcs of time. Periods between one date and another that we fill with certain rituals and prayers and intentions.

There are long arcs and shorter ones.

From the beginning of the month of Elul to Rosh Hashanah, the start of a new year.

Or, from Tisha B’Av - when we mark the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem - all the way to the end of Sukkot, the harvest holiday.

From Passover to Shavuot, as we count the Omer each day.

From Purim to Passover.

From Tu B’Shevat to Sukkot.

The Jewish calendar is busy.

Rich with daily, weekly, monthly, yearly moments to pause and hallow.

But it is not only about these discrete days or occasions.

We are pointed towards the linkages between them.

To the arcs that connect one to the other.

To the bridges that we can build as we knit these various days of observance together.

Right now, in our Torah reading cycle, we are in the book of Exodus, one of the books that carries us through the wilderness.

Since the time of my diagnosis, I have felt more keenly this experience of walking through the wilderness.

Of wrestling with greater dislocation and unknowingness than had previously touched my life. I have come to see that this is the new way of things. That some of the churning beneath the surface of everyday life will not subside completely. It is a new companion that I need to find a way to befriend. To carry on my skin.

Not that I accepted that at first.

I didn’t.

I resisted its presence, hoping that with enough intentional joy and optimism and fun distractions, those anxious currents would leave me for good.

I know that that is wishful thinking.

When I think about the wilderness ahead - the uncertain terrain of life that lies in front of all us in this human experience - I often feel swallowed by its enormity.

But then I come back to these arcs in time.

When I stand in Tu B’Shevat and am able to honor that day and also look forward to another future day - Sukkot - I am constructing a bridge of meaning from one temporal signpost to another.

And I think that this is deeply comforting.

I don’t need to conquer the whole vast wilderness in front of me, or even spend energy spinning out in my head about what might be around that hill of sand or beyond that distant mountain.

I only need to feel the beauty of today and set my eyes and heart on a place just a bit ahead of me. To imagine that I am standing in this precious moment, tucking its thread inside my pocket, and walking forward to the next destination. That the nourishing waves of right now will sustain me until I reach the next stopping point.

There are times when I need these arcs to be short.

Today to tomorrow.

That’s it. That is enough of a trek.

But there are times, when my breath feels more spacious, and I can soften into the wider arcs of time.

I can be here now, and look ahead to next week, or next month. To that moment, that encounter, that happening on my calendar.

Holding and living into these contained sweeps of time can make moving through less heavy.

And when we link one day with another, we are reminded of the connections that illuminate our days. The refractions of color that can be found when one moment is speaking to - and elevating - another. We can build these connections ourselves and suffuse them with meaning.

I love that we are always walking through two currents through time.

The linear movement from one day to the next, from one age to the coming one. We are getting older each day.

And the cyclical movement of the calendar that repeats and circles upon itself.

We are walking forward and spinning around at once.

Taking steps ahead while also always coming home. Returning to the beginning.

I am always playing with spiritual practices and trying on new ones.

One that I am leaning into lately is visualization.

Giving myself some time each day to float into that imaginative space of encountering and touching and feeling in the space of my mind.

I am loving it - and, my dreams at night have been much more vivid lately as well.

It feels playful and taps into an entirely different part of myself.

As do creative pursuits.

I recently had the joy of going away for a long weekend with a very old friend (meaning, the friendship is very old, though we ourselves are not that young…) to mark our 50th birthdays. We spent the weekend doing a lot of precious nothing together, and for some of our time, my friend worked on her latest knitting project. I asked her if she would re-teach me how to knit. It was something I had dabbled in years ago but long since neglected. So I brought along some yarn and knitting needles, and she taught me how to knit again. We spent hours talking and knitting. And it was sublime.

One way, I believe, that we can knit together different moments and find our way from one day to the next is by opening up to the magic inherent in our creative selves.

In a favorite text of mine, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook writes about the importance of the imagination:

In the education of an individual, and so too with the education of the collective, the nation and all of humanity, we need to pay special attention to spiritual unity. That is – that the intellect will directly shape the emotions, and emotions will shape the imagination, and the imaginative powers will influence one’s actions.

Because when there is a breakdown between these elements – then destruction finds a place to dwell.

And on the basis of these 4 components – the intellect, the emotion, the imagination, and action – ascends the essential holiness, of the individual and of the group, to the supreme source of everything. (Orot Ha’Kodesh, III:247)

Using our imaginative capacity is vital. Life-giving, actually. It is an essential realm of living and swimming through this world.

One text that has accompanied me over the last year has been Suleika Jaouad’s book The Book of Alchemy. It is filled with inspiring short essays and prompts about nurturing a creative life. Jaouad writes:

“...as humans, we are meaning-making machines, and relentless seekers of patterns, rhythms, and rhymes. Not only do they feel like signs, but we find beauty in them…This kind of alchemy is available to each of us. You only have to tap into that mystical, propulsive, seemingly divine trait that exists in every human: creativity.”

May we feel invited into this type of magical bridge building, on those hard and easier days, as we listen in to the mystical wavelengths coursing around us and find ways to knit one moment to the next using our imaginative spirits, creating new patterns of grounding and beauty.

It is now one year since I found out I had lung cancer.

It is not the anniversary of the biopsy - that happened three weeks later. But that visit to the pulmonologist, who pulled up my chest CT and looked me gravely in the eye - that was the day I knew.

That moment is etched in my tissues.

I was alone. My husband was working.

The pulmonologist pulled up the scan and asked me if I wanted to look at it with him.

No thank you, I said.

Do you want to lie down? Should I get your husband on the phone? - he asked.

Yes please. To both.

He said that he couldn’t say for sure until the biopsy was done, but that the mass looked very concerning.

I could see it in his eyes. I didn’t need the confirmation of the biopsy to know that everything had now changed.

I remember walking to the car in the parking garage shaking. Unsure if I could make the drive home.

I called my sister.

I am coming over, I said.

I sat at her kitchen table and wept.

How?

How was this happening?

How was I going to tell my children I had lung cancer?

I wasn’t looking for answers. There are none.

I was looking for a place to unleash the fear that had overtaken my body.

How? Why? How and why?

In those early days, those dark and looming questions ran through my veins, day and night.

I knew that after that visit with the pulmonologist, I had stepped over a threshold, and I did not yet know what lay on the other side.

The Jewish tradition honors thresholds and gives us rituals and tools to move across them. The mezuzah, that sits affixed on our literal thresholds, reminding us to pause and notice where we are and how we are moving through. The ritual of havdalah said at the end of Shabbat- a ritual that acknowledges both light and darkness, holiness and the everyday, and asks us to sanctify that moment of crossing over.

John O’Donohue writes about thresholds in his book On Beauty:

…the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life. You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life on a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seemed so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing…

…a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing…

How we cross is the key thing.

Those moments in life when everything changes. Moments when we find out something that shakes the reality we have known. Moments when we come to a new place of clarity. Understanding. Truth.

We don’t control and cannot predict those moments. But when they arrive, when the threshold is before us, how will we cross it?

With a difficult medical diagnosis, the ‘how’ of crossing - the practical, logistical aspect - is often determined by the medical professionals. They tell you what you need to do. What the treatment details will be. And you follow their instructions. You take those next steps that are indicated. Someone else is in charge. You have a schedule given to you. Medications prescribed. Notes detailing what you must do.

That, in my experience, is the easy part.

But the ‘how’ of crossing a terrifying threshold runs much deeper than that.

How will you hold the anxiety?

How will you manage the rest of your life and responsibilities during this crossing?

How will the core relationships in your life change, hold up, fall away?

How will you know when to feel safe trusting your body again?

How will you be reshaped? From this moment forward?

When I finished my chemotherapy treatment last April, at my final appointment, I had a totally unexpected reaction.

I wept. Again.

Not from joy. From fear.

I thought that I would feel such happiness and relief. That I would ring the end-of-chemo bell and feel a great weight lifted. The treatment was over. I was done.

But that was not my experience.

From the time of diagnosis through the end of chemo, I was given a roadmap. I felt held and shepherded by my doctor and nurses. It was clear what I had to do and when. There was a problem and I was addressing it.

When the treatment concluded, I could sense that I was now preparing to cross a new threshold. Of living as a cancer survivor. A much more ambiguous chapter.

As I sat and cried in my oncologist’s office, he looked at me gently and spoke to me about survivorship. He said he understood what I was feeling. He referred me to support services for this next stage.

So over the past seven months, I have grown to better understand what survivorship means. For me.

It means living in six-month increments.

Every six months, I have to go in for a CT scan.

In between those scans, I can exhale. And live without caveat. Walk with less weight. Plan without worry. Or less worry.

And when the day of the scan approaches, my body feels the threshold approaching. My chest tightens. My appetite lessens. I turn inwards. Even more inwards than usual. I feel my soul girding itself for this walk, again, through the territory of the unknown. The fear is real and felt.

And yet. After receiving a cancer diagnosis, I know that I possess new muscles. Muscles that have been built up throughout this process. Heart muscles. Deep-seated soul muscles. In places I could not identify but their presence lives in me and reminds me that I can do hard things. When I need to.

We all can.

Knowing that helps.

That truth steadies me a bit, slows my breathing down as I wait for the scan results.

Two days ago, I had my most recent scan.

As the day came closer, I found my mind skipping to those what-if spirals.

What if some new cancer is found? What will I do then? Would that require more chemo? Radiation? How will I move through Thanksgiving, with my children all home, holding that hard news?

But I steadied myself.

Because I can only cross a threshold one footstep at a time.

I reminded myself that I am standing here now, right now, in the remission territory. And I do not want to cross a threshold in my mind before I am called to.

So I stood on the ground of this moment. And breathed deeply. Longer exhales than inhales. And said some silent prayers of gratitude to being here in this land of survivorship.

When the scan results landed in my inbox, I felt that familiar terror return. Do I look? Do I wait? When is the right time to read the results?

I waited until I was alone in my room and opened the email.

All clear. Nothing concerning detected.

Noted, looks good - in the words of my oncologist.

The clenching anxiety lifted from my chest.

And as I felt relief, I also reminded myself that it could have been otherwise. That in the future, it might indeed be otherwise, as the poet Jane Kenyon reminds us:

Otherwise / Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

Survivorship means living with the truth of otherwise. Knowing that in your bones. Always holding the possibility of recurrence.

Living with the awareness of death and mortality and the wonder of being alive at once. One feeding the other.

And the breathing relationship between those two surprised me. The fear persists, is always there in various gradations. But the more that I let myself consider my mortality, the more I walk through my life with awe and joy. A joy that is fuller than joy I have felt before. Because it’s a joy that looks reality in the face. That acknowledges all of it. A joy that feels bare and honest.

When I opened the email with the scan results, I felt flush with gratitude for the good news.

And I immediately thought: what prayer does one say at this moment? Hatov Ve’hametiv? Birkat HaGomel?

Neither felt exactly right. So I wrote my own.

In these moments, when I am called to walk closer to the valley of the shadow of death, I do feel fear. The fear is there. But I ask for the capacity to befriend that fear. To sit with it. Carrying fear, I feel your presence with me, God. Your arm around me, holding me close, even as I shudder.

With this positive result, I feel renewed in my gratitude for the medical care I receive, for the medical tests that are available to me, and for more time here, in good and stable health. I do not take any of those for granted. They are blessings and gifts. I feel blessed to cross this threshold feeling this Divine light and trusting in the embrace of my loved ones, through regions of light and regions of darkness.

This past Shabbat, we read from the Torah portion, Tazria-Metzora - that section of the Torah which deals with the enigmatic yet fascinating rules around states of purity and impurity. Many verses are devoted to the case of the metzora - a person who has been inflicted with some kind of scaly skin disease; it has often been described as leprosy, but scholars believe that it was likely some other kind of illness we can’t pinpoint. 

But the medical particulars are unimportant. This disease is presented as a spiritual malady, an external manifestation of an internal ailment.

The ways in which it is treated are rich with meaning.

The Priest serves as the individual in charge of guiding the treatment of this individual - he is a combination medical and spiritual healer of sorts.

And the steps that must be taken are extremely detailed; the instructions for the different variations of the ailment are specific.

Between the lines of these prescribed treatment steps, we can see that the motivation behind all of this care and attention is not really the wellbeing of the afflicted person; the Priest is concerned with the integrity of the community. Eruptions of impurity - as manifested through this skin disease - were seen as deeply threatening to the ritual purity of the camp. They have to be dealt with promptly and rectified.

This is very interesting to me - the interplay between the ill individual and the health of the community - and I have thoughts on the importance of truly understanding and caring for this dynamic.

But for now, I am focused on the individual. 

The suffering person at the center of these rites.

One section particularly draws me in:

Leviticus 13: 2-4-

אָדָ֗ם כִּֽי־יִהְיֶ֤ה בְעוֹר־בְּשָׂרוֹ֙ שְׂאֵ֤ת אֽוֹ־סַפַּ֙חַת֙ א֣וֹ בַהֶ֔רֶת וְהָיָ֥ה בְעוֹר־בְּשָׂר֖וֹ לְנֶ֣גַע צָרָ֑עַת וְהוּבָא֙ אֶל־אַהֲרֹ֣ן הַכֹּהֵ֔ן א֛וֹ אֶל־אַחַ֥ד מִבָּנָ֖יו הַכֹּהֲנִֽים׃ 

When a person has on the skin of the body a swelling, a rash, or a discoloration, and it develops into a scaly affection on the skin of the body, it shall be reported to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons, the priests. 

וְרָאָ֣ה הַכֹּהֵ֣ן אֶת־הַנֶּ֣גַע בְּעֽוֹר־הַ֠בָּשָׂ֠ר וְשֵׂעָ֨ר בַּנֶּ֜גַע הָפַ֣ךְ ׀ לָבָ֗ן וּמַרְאֵ֤ה הַנֶּ֙גַע֙ עָמֹק֙ מֵע֣וֹר בְּשָׂר֔וֹ נֶ֥גַע צָרַ֖עַת ה֑וּא וְרָאָ֥הוּ הַכֹּהֵ֖ן וְטִמֵּ֥א אֹתֽוֹ׃ 

The priest shall examine the affection on the skin of the body: if hair in the affected patch has turned white and the affection appears to be deeper than the skin of the body, it is a leprous affection; when the priest sees it, he shall pronounce the person impure. 

וְאִם־בַּהֶ֩רֶת֩ לְבָנָ֨ה הִ֜וא בְּע֣וֹר בְּשָׂר֗וֹ וְעָמֹק֙ אֵין־מַרְאֶ֣הָ מִן־הָע֔וֹר וּשְׂעָרָ֖הֿ לֹא־הָפַ֣ךְ לָבָ֑ן וְהִסְגִּ֧יר הַכֹּהֵ֛ן אֶת־הַנֶּ֖גַע שִׁבְעַ֥ת יָמִֽים׃ 

But if it is a white discoloration on the skin of the body which does not appear to be deeper than the skin and the hair in it has not turned white, the priest shall isolate the affected person for seven days.

There is a critical variable at play here when the priest goes to examine the afflicted person.

“Ha’nega amok me’or besaro”

Is his affliction deeper than his skin?

When the skin ailment is merely on the surface, he only needs to isolate for 7 days.

But if the ailment has penetrated beneath the skin - if it is more than skin-deep - the person enters into a state of ritual impurity and many other steps follow.

“Ha’nega Amok me’or besaro”

The ailment is deeper than the skin on one’s body.

For the past six months, most of my energy has been directed towards the medical treatment of my physical ailment. Navigating the visceral physicality of blood draws and scans, MRI’s and IV’s, surgeries and chest tubes, and many medications swimming through my veins. My days were filled with the medical treatment of this illness that erupted into my life.

I did what I was told I had to do by the medical professionals I trusted with my care. One step after another. 

And the physicality of it all was all-consuming. Keeping watch on the side effects and taking certain drugs at set times to combat the side effects of the other drugs. 

I felt caught in a medical storm.

With the end of chemotherapy, I have felt that storm abate somewhat. There will be scans ahead and more medications, but I have felt the intensity of the treatment regimen slowly dissipate.

There has been relief there for sure, but - unexpectedly - also the surfacing of new pieces that I had not anticipated.

Once the dust of chemo began to settle, and I could begin to look for myself again through that haze, a dear friend reached out to me with a precious gift. She offered to gift me a session with a friend of hers who practiced an embodied form of energy healing. 

Yes please.

I am not sure that I have the words to capture what took place for me during that session. Words would fail to communicate the power of that time.

I had never gone to a healer of that sort, but I came in fully open-hearted, completely willing to go where the time took me.

Our time together - through words, touch, chant, sound, tears - unlocked a deeper layer of ailment that had been lying beneath the skin, waiting to be seen and released.

Ha’nega Amok me’or besaro

The wound deep beneath the surface of my skin.

I was able to surface layers and layers of intense emotion that I had previously not had the energy to probe. I had been devoting my energy to the physical, medical treatment, while the subsumed elements of this illness were lying within me, unseen and unnoticed.

After the session, I was able to see with such clarity the difference between treatment and healing. And the many-layered components of recovering wellness. The subconscious strata of pain that can reside in the body, in the spirit, in the heart, that stay submerged until we have the capacity and the courage to look there.

It reminded me of the words of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, speaking about her teaching of medical students:

“We thought we could cure everything. But it turns out that we can only cure a small amount of human suffering. The rest of it needs to be healed, and that’s different. It’s different.”

What surfaced during this session surprised me - and didn’t. 

Of course that was there.

How did I not notice I was holding that?

I could not have let it surface on my own. 

I needed a gentle guide to lead me. To let me open to it.

Three and a half years ago, I lost my father to brain cancer. We cared for him in his year-long illness, were with him when medical treatment was exhausted, and accompanied him as he died. 

I mourned and grieved then. I continue to grieve. I think of him - and miss him - every day.

When I first got my diagnosis, my world shrunk and became focused on my treatment and my immediate family. 

My grief for my father was pushed down. Submerged.

That loss had nothing to do with my illness.

So I thought.

But of course it does. 

Of course my struggle with cancer is laced through by my father’s illness, and his presence and absence. In deeply complicated and heart-rending ways.

Ways I am just beginning to consider and unravel.

Because throughout my treatment, my focus was on the physical, the medical, and I didn’t have the energy to contemplate - let alone excavate - the deeper and earlier layers of pain and loss that held these newer ones.

But now I do.

I know that there is much to learn and share about the research that has been done into the ways our bodies, our nervous systems, our tissues hold onto the layers of trauma and loss and pain that we have experienced - the accrued repositories of what we have gone through in our lives. We all hold layers and layers that are particular to our own lives. And I am just beginning to explore in greater depth this field of learning.

But when we understand the complexity of what our bodies hold onto, we need to adjust our understanding of healing and wellness as well.

Getting a cancer diagnosis.

Losing a loved one.

Experiencing a miscarriage.

Going through a divorce.

Enduring the illness of a child.

I could go on and on. We are all faced with so many challenging things as a part of being human, and I think we often tend to surface-level care. We may deal with the technical parts of the adversity without noticing, or touching, the shadowy tiers of pain and loss.

Because dealing with that is scary. And very hard. And who has the energy to navigate new layers of messiness.

But it is there. It’s all there. It lives in our bodies. In our tissues and our hearts and our nervous systems. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk describes in his book The Body Keeps the Score. And as Dr. Christine Runyan discusses in this evocative interview.

Sooner or later, it will surface. And while we think we are keeping it safely submerged, it is sapping us of life energy and making surprise appearances in other ways.

Whole healing means acknowledging and facing all of it. All of those conscious and subconscious layers of awareness. The pieces lodged in our tissues and nerves, the deep recesses of our hearts. Over time. At our own pace. When we feel ready. When we have the help we need to guide us through and over. When we feel we can do the work with generous self-compassion and tenderness. 

And I believe that we do this healing work for ourselves, but for more than just ourselves. We heal ourselves for our loved ones too, our partners and children, for our friends, our colleagues, our communities - because if we don’t, these layers of pain may show up in ugly ways in our relationships and our work in the world. 

And our collective wellbeing is founded on individual wellbeing.

We are as whole as each person’s wholeness.

We are all part of the One.

All of the dates were marked in my calendar. Four rounds of treatment, each 3 weeks apart.  

12 weeks to get through and then I would be finished. This would be over.

After the first round, some of the mystery dissolved. Now I knew what a daylong infusion of the cocktail of drugs would be like, and I began to see how my body would respond and slowly recover, day by day. Lethargy, nausea, but a little less yucky each day. After the first round, I felt well enough to travel a week post-treatment. 

I can do this, I thought. 3 more rounds.

And then just 2 more rounds.

The third round was tougher. I felt more tired and swollen and scarred. 

But only one more round to go. 

I was numbering days, marking weeks. 

Leaning into the countdown and looking to a new reality beyond that final treatment date when I would reclaim my former life.

When I could socialize again without fear of getting sick.

When I would feel well enough to host friends in our home.

When I could mentally let go of this load I was carrying on my body, in my heart, woven into my spirit.

When I would be free of this deep heaviness.

The 4th round is now done. I am officially through my chemo regimen. And a big piece of me is celebrating. It feels like an important milestone to mark with gratitude and relief. That is all true and real. And I have several anticipated celebrations of joy and life planned in the coming weeks which may include karaoke and cocktails :)

And. 

As anyone who has had a cancer diagnosis knows, finishing a regimen of treatment usually comes with the follow-up that will continue for some time. Regular blood tests, periodic scans, and check-ins to make sure there is no recurrence.

I would love to put my diagnosis behind me completely, but its shadow will follow me for the rest of my life. And its imprint marks me. I know this is true, even if I wish it were not.  These last months have left me changed, psychically, somatically, spiritually.

I think that often, when we are faced with something challenging  - a health crisis, a loss, a scare facing ourselves or someone we love - we find ways to get through the peak crisis and then look to - hope to - move on. To leave the panic and fear of the intensity behind us so that we can release it and step forward, unencumbered. It feels good to think this is possible, and yet, it is rarely the case. Most often, those encounters with loss, with mortality, become etchings on our souls. They leave behind markings that give new shape to how we move in the world and new contours to the way we think about ourselves, our lives, our work, our relationships, what matters and what does not. These markings are not something to denounce or reject. They simply are.

When we are brushed with fear of death in a close way, that stays with us.

I knew this to be true. 

So I want to be honest with myself. Not fool myself into thinking that I could now go back to being the self I was before I was diagnosed. That self is gone.

How can I - with honesty and brave acceptance - metabolize my experience and move forward, carrying it - allowing it to shape me but not wholly define me?

My final treatment was scheduled for chol ha’moed Pesach - the middle days of Passover, that time in the festival when the People are walking to freedom, preparing to cross the Sea to their liberation. 

After the People crossed that threshold from constriction to expanse, they sang. They lifted their voices in song. A song of triumph and celebration, praise and gratitude.

I loved that as a model. To sing your way over the thresholds. To use song to release what needs to be released and to voice what needs to be voiced. 

I was beginning to compile a playlist for crossing this threshold. There was what to release and what to voice, for sure.

But there was another model that surfaced for me from the Torah (Bible). 

Returning to one of my favorite sections of Genesis, chapter 28,  Jacob is fleeing his home and his enraged brother. After a heavy and complex display of parental love and alliances, Jacob has deceitfully taken his brother’s birthright and blessing, and he leaves home in order to save his own life. He runs, escapes.

He is alone in the wilderness, on his way to somewhere (somewhere between Beer Sheva and Haran), and he lies down to sleep. While he sleeps, God visits him and promises him protection, guidance. When he wakes up, he begins to understand what has happened to him. 

וַיִּירָא֙ וַיֹּאמַ֔ר מַה־נּוֹרָ֖א הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה אֵ֣ין זֶ֗ה כִּ֚י אִם־בֵּ֣ית אֱלֹהִ֔ים וְזֶ֖ה שַׁ֥עַר הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃ 

Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” 

וַיַּשְׁכֵּ֨ם יַעֲקֹ֜ב בַּבֹּ֗קֶר וַיִּקַּ֤ח אֶת־הָאֶ֙בֶן֙ אֲשֶׁר־שָׂ֣ם מְרַֽאֲשֹׁתָ֔יו וַיָּ֥שֶׂם אֹתָ֖הּ מַצֵּבָ֑ה וַיִּצֹ֥ק שֶׁ֖מֶן עַל־רֹאשָֽׁהּ׃ 

Early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on the top of it.

He marks this moment of revelation, of transition, by erecting a  matzevah - a pillar - and he sanctifies that pillar with oil.

In this small ritual, Jacob is demarcating a moment, a pivotal moment, in his own understanding of his life and his place in the world. This place - a place in the wilderness that is neither here nor there - becomes marked by the encounter he had there and what was revealed to him. The place becomes a stopping point of meaning and significance along his way.

He erected this pillar, sanctified it, and then kept traveling. Picking his way forward.

Could this serve as a meaningful model for how to mark transformative encounters? For recognizing the power of our past brushes with fear and mortality, allowing us to honor them for the way they shaped us, while also enabling us to move forward?

Maybe we can erect matzevot along our way to recognize what we have learned, who we have become, what new things we now carry.

Throughout these past months, I have been searching for the right images, metaphors or symbolic representations for this experience. 

For a while, I was using the word ‘chapter’ to think about moving through. There was the chapter of the ER visit, the chapter of the surgery, the chapter of the diagnosis, the chemo chapter. Using that word felt that each aspect of this had a clear beginning and an end. 

And yet, I don’t feel that to be true anymore. 

Because each stopping point along this path carries the imprints of the previous stopping points. The surgery may have been 3 months ago, but my body still carries the scars and my heart does too.

Today, I am thinking about a different image. 

Back in day camp, many summers ago, I remember making sand art in glass containers. We were given small jars and different colored sand, and we could layer in the vibrant sands, one layer, one color at a time. The layers were distinct, but each layer bled a bit into the others around it. The grains intermingled and became new blended colors.

Perhaps this is another way in which we can think about our many transformative moments.

As defining layers, one on top of the other, that reveal new truths to us. We may find ourselves now pouring the yellow layer, but the red, the orange, the green, and the blue beneath are still there, intermingling with the fresh layer. Sharing grains and imprinting on each other and creating new beauty.

There is an interchange, a conversation going on between the grains of sand.

Maybe we can think of ourselves like tels, multi-layered creations that are composed of different strata, each capturing an encounter, a moment, an experience that has shaped who we are and who we are becoming.

Later on in the Torah, we are told to distance ourselves from erecting matzevot, but I am still leaning into the idea. 

I am opening to ritualizing these significant thresholds. And while my dance with cancer may continue in new forms over the months ahead,  I can acknowledge that I have crossed certain thresholds, each one peeling back new layers and revealing new and surprising pearls of understanding and meaning.

On the day after my last treatment, I dragged myself out of bed and went to Lake Michigan. And I stripped down and immersed myself in the frigid waters. And when I climbed out, swathed in a towel, I built my own matzevah - a little pillar of water-smoothed stones -  and I offered my own prayers of sanctification.

I erected a matzevah to gratitude for weathering the treatment.

A matzevah to acceptance of how I have been changed.

A matzevah to the scars my body holds that are imprints of courage.

A matzevah to the love that carried me through.

A matzevah to the generosity of other beneficent souls.

A matzevah to this moment - of being able to stand on that beach and breathe in the cold air and feel so accompanied by the birds flying in formation off in the sky.

A matzevah to remembering that I am not alone - that I was never alone - that I am held in ways I cannot fully understand. But in ways I know and feel. Deeply.

It was about 11 or 12 years ago. I was putting my youngest to sleep. After reading the bedtime books and singing the nightly lullabies, I cuddled up to lay with him until he fell asleep. He was 4 or 5 years old at the time. 

“Mommy, why does God make people die?”

I still recall that night because it was the start of many questions and conversations about God with him, about theodicy, about how to make sense of the unknowable parts of being human. This child was born with a tender and worrying heart.

Since the start of my health challenge, the questions have returned with more focus.

Just the other night: “Do you believe that God has a set life plan for each person? Do you think that your cancer is part of God’s plan for you?”

I was silent. I just looked at his sweet probing face. I felt the same lack of words, absence of response, that I experienced those years ago cuddling with him in bed.

Since the start of all of this, I have avoided the “why me” question. It felt like a distraction, an unnecessary use of energy to consider a question that had no useful answer. I needed to direct my energy to hope and optimism and strength. I think a part of me feared that opening up that question would take me down a darker road and would imperil my spiritual fortitude that I needed to keep intact.

As a teacher of spiritual studies and practice, I have taught many classes on just these questions. Why bad things happen to good people. Understanding the Divine. Wrestling with evil. Crafting your Personal Theology. I had all of the sources, lots of texts, words and words and more words that offered answers.

Why does God cause one person to get cancer?

Intellectually, I knew the different theological approaches one could offer in response.

But when the subject becomes your own current experience, the texts and conceptual frameworks shrivel in significance.

And as much as I wanted to avoid the personal theological questions at the moment, my son wasn’t going to let me off so easily. His questions prompted me to clarify my thinking and articulate it out loud - to him - and I am grateful now that he asked.

I told him a few things.

I have a strong and close relationship with God, and I feel that that relationship - being able to speak with God and feel God’s presence with me - has helped me tremendously over the past months.

I do not believe that God caused me to get cancer.

“So you don’t believe that God controls what happens in the world?”

The God I am in relationship with is not one who sits in heaven and pulls the strings, directly causing all of the events that happen in the world. 

“But didn’t God act that way in the Torah (Bible)?”

I believe that at different periods in the long arc of human history God has acted in the world in different ways - sometimes in overt, direct ways, and at other times, in more hidden ways, moving through the actions of human beings. Our spiritual task is to train our minds and hearts and spirits to look for and feel the Divine, even when that feels challenging.

The God I am in relationship with is a God who is not somewhere outside of myself, but a God within and among. I feel the Divine presence most intensely when it emanates from within myself or when I see God from within another human being. I shared with him the Hasidic notion of nekudah penimit - an idea I first studied through the Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger - that all of us possess an inner point of Divinity and that serves as our connective place with God, almost like an umbilical cord linking us with the Divine.

“Do you think God has a plan for you? And that this cancer is part of that plan?”

Yes. I do.

Irrationally and inexplicably, I do.

And this is where it got a bit messy.

“But I thought you said you don’t think God is controlling everything that happens in the world?”

I don’t. But.

I told him that my relationship with God and my personal theology is always evolving. Both are breathing and changing and flowing in new directions all of the time, which I accept and actually see as a positive thing.

And that while a part of me is intellectual and rational and has to reckon with things that ‘don’t make sense’, another big part of me is mystical and irrational and leans into magical thinking.

And that now that this has become a part of my life, I am opened up to what it can teach me and lead me towards. This is my story now, and I own it and hold it tenderly, learning from it.

When I first found out that the growth in my lung was cancer, I began praying more intensely to God for healing. Speaking to God and pleading for recovery.

El nah, refah nah la.

Please God. Heal me.

The rational part of my brain does not really believe that my prayer will make my cancer go away. I have prayed too many times for people to be healed who have not found recovery or wellness to accept that one-to-one relationship.

But.

This is where the magical thinking comes in.

I know I don’t understand most of the ways in which the world works. With deep humility, I surrender to what is mysterious and outside of my grasp.

And I am a big believer in using our spiritual lives to lean into k’ilu thinking.

The holiday of Passover is almost here, and one of the central parts of the Seder is a reenactment of the Exodus from Egypt. 

בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרַיִם

In every generation, each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt. 

We are asked not just to tell a story that happened long ago, but to imagine ourselves into the experience, to behave and think and feel as if we ourselves were enduring that historical moment.

It is a bold practice of spiritual imagination, a magical act of time travel. 

That word - k’ilu - means “as if”. We are to act “as if” we were a part of the experience.

I love that word. Because while we mostly partake of this magical engagement on Passover, that concept is one that I think should be more widely applied throughout our spiritual lives.

K’ilu. How does leaning into that magical as-if landscape offer us something healing and nourishing?

So much of life is mysterious and unknowable.  We like to think that we can know and understand and control and predict, but ultimately, we cannot know or understand or control or predict much in life.

When confronting any kind of health issue, we owe so much to the wonders of medicine - the  tests, the procedures, the specific targeted treatments, with new ones emerging every day. They save lives all the time. There is so much we can know and understand now when we get sick. Thanks to medical knowledge, I have a complex genetic mapping of the tumor that was growing in my lung. I am equipped with more medical data about my condition than I understand or know what to do with.

And yet, when facing a frightening illness, that information can only offer so much comfort. 

When I pray to God to heal me, I adopt a different spiritual posture. I let go of what I know and understand and I open my heart and mind to what is beyond the edge of my knowing.  And I meet God there. Which is where I need to meet God the most. In those moments, I accept new possibilities and imagine new realities. And that practice nurtures hope for me. That time spent in what-might-be - in the place of k’ilu, as-if - yields joyful and optimistic thoughts.

And hope is a spiritual muscle that is needed.

As Rachel Golderg-Polin told us so often throughout her horrible ordeal trying to rescue her son Hersh, hope is mandatory.

Dr. Jerome Groopman wrote in The Anatomy of Hope:  

“Hope is the elevating feeling we experience when we see - in the mind’s eye - a path to a better future. Hope acknowledges the significant obstacles and deep pitfalls along the path. True hope has no room for delusion… Clear-eyed, hope gives us the courage to confront our circumstances and the capacity to surmount them.”

We spend so much time in the world of hardness and struggle with its borders and edges. We need to devote just as much time to dwelling in the world of imagination and magic and mystery and the not-yet-but-possible. To honor the holy yet invisible parts of our human experience:

To be bereft of a relationship with the invisible is to be bereft of a proper intuition of the future. To have no perception of the inner horizon within us from below which, the invisible can emerge, is to be bereft of a necessary inner source: the invisible is the deeper well from which we drink, and to live without conversing with the invisible makes us unaccountably thirsty for something we cannot quite imbibe through our readily visible world. (David Whyte, Consolations II).

I hope my conversations with my son continue. That he continues to feel comfortable speaking to me about God. I hope I am able to share with him - with honesty - my own questions and my own evolving theological wonderings, assuring him that it will all continue to change as I continue to change. I hope I can persuade him to open to this k’ilu posture - to soften into the not-knowing and the magical, the refuge of our spiritual imaginations.

After the surgery to remove the tumor from my lung, I was discharged from the hospital. They told me to wait for the genetic sequencing results to come back. It could be two, three weeks, they said. Recovering from surgery when you know that that is your final hurdle is one thing. Recovering from surgery while you wait to find out if the cancer has spread to other parts of your body is a different thing.

As anyone who has gone through any kind of medical test knows, waiting for results is hard. And with the amazing technological advancements of today’s world, with medical results available online to the patient often before the doctor even sees them, receiving results - and trying to decipher them on your own to understand what they mean for your health and future my googling random medical terms - is its own form of anxiety. 

When the test results showed cancer cells had spread to one of the lymph nodes tested, my surgeon told me to find a thoracic oncologist. 

When my father was still alive, I would have called him, and he would have helped me find the best thoracic oncologist in the country. But I couldn’t make that call.

So I did the next best thing. I called one of my oldest and closest friends. And she showed up for me in a way that came very close to the love and care I would have received from my Dad. She called and texted medical colleagues throughout her network, found the most esteemed thoracic oncologists in the area, and managed to get me in to see them that week. It was a deep act of chesed (lovingkindness).

My husband and I made our way to the two prominent - and enormous and teeming - medical research centers in Chicago. We drove in traffic, parked in giant parking garages, and made our way through wings and elevators to reach the cancer centers. The large waiting rooms were filled with dozens of patients waiting to be seen. We met with these two leading oncologists (with my friend calling in from her phone to be a part of the appointments and taking notes for us).  Both doctors were thorough and kind and recommended the same treatment protocol. Regardless of which medical team I chose, the treatment would basically be the same. 

The appointments were hard. Mentally and emotionally draining. We both felt exhausted thinking about having to embark on yet another stage to this whole journey. We tried to synthesize the information we were given and gird ourselves to make the right choice for my medical team.

Just for the sake of covering our bases, we decided to also make an appointment with the head thoracic oncologist at our local- and smaller - hospital system, ten minutes from our house. When we arrived at this cancer center, we were greeted by a smiling nurse and brought into a room with windows and a beautiful quilt hanging on the wall. Beneath the quilt, there was a small sign that said it had been sewn by a cancer patient. She made the quilt - it read - to express gratitude for the loving care she received there and because she wanted other cancer patients to be surrounded by some beauty when they came to get their treatment. 

I sat in that room, waiting for the doctor, looking at the quilt, and started to cry.

I was so moved by the beauty of the quilt. By the beauty of the generous gesture of the quilter. And I realized in that moment how much I had been needing beauty since my health challenge began. 

Since October, when the wheels started to come off, I had found myself hungrier and hungrier for beauty. Natural beauty. Artistic beauty. All kinds of beauty. 

We ended up choosing this smaller hospital for my treatment. We loved the doctor, but the quilt - and the attention to beauty in the physical surroundings at the treatment center - played a role in the decision (And now that I go in for regular blood draws, I appreciate the photos of cute animals and beautiful natural scenes that have been taped up all over the lab walls). 

As I have written earlier, when this all began I retreated socially. I had no emotional energy to be with people, to talk, to pretend, to act like all was fine. I wanted to be home with my family. And I wanted to spend more time in contact with beauty. 

I don’t think I could have named it in that way months ago, but I was craving beauty. I would often find myself, in the middle of the day, driving to Lake Michigan. Different beaches. Just to sit there and watch the waves, the seagulls. I would drive to walk in nature preserves and slow down to notice the beauty of the stark wintery landscape. I would sit in parking lots and listen to classical music. I spent too much time searching on Etsy for beautiful handmade items. I even convinced my youngest to go with me to the aquarium to look at magnificent marine life (even though he was sure that trips to the aquarium were for 5 year olds). 

Navigating a brush with mortality can often lead you to relate to your life differently. To reorder your priorities. To take stock of how you spend your time. It can sensitize you in new ways to the world around you. 

I remember, years ago, coming across a blog post by the writer Courtney Martin. She was writing about parenting and how it brought you in contact with love and loss. She wrote:

“ …if we had the courage to acknowledge our own frailty, we would relate to our lives and those we love differently. One of the great spiritual challenges of my life is managing my own fear of losing those I love. I sense the ways in which there is a chance to feel the fullness of the miracle of my daughters only by way of acknowledging that their very existence is not promised. It’s the darkest truth I can imagine looking straight in the eye, but it simultaneously helps me see them in technicolor.”

I have thought about this idea often over the years and have held onto that last phrase - seeing life in technicolor. That something about confronting life’s fragility and the possibility of loss awakens us and suddenly, the world is in technicolor. That is what I had been feeling - in a potent way. I needed the technicolors. I thirsted for the vibrancy of life - even as I came closer to my mortality than I ever had before. 

In the famous story in Genesis, chapter 28, Jacob, fleeing his home and the wrath of his brother Esau, lies down to sleep and has an encounter with the Divine. When he awakes, he understands that he now sees the world - and his life - in a new light:

וַיִּירָא֙ וַיֹּאמַ֔ר מַה־נּוֹרָ֖א הַמָּק֣וֹם הַזֶּ֑ה אֵ֣ין זֶ֗ה כִּ֚י אִם־בֵּ֣ית אֱלֹהִ֔ים וְזֶ֖ה שַׁ֥עַר הַשָּׁמָֽיִם׃ 

Shaken, he said, “How awesome/terrifying is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.” (28:17)

He wakes up and says “mah norah ha’Makom ha’zeh”. The Hebrew word “norah” is a rich, enigmatic word. It can mean terrifying and awful, and it can also mean awesome and awe-inspiring.

Maybe that word captures the truth.

That terror and awe sit alongside one another.

That what is terrifying can break us open to what is awe-inspiring in ways we could not have anticipated.

That being scared can help our eyes to see the world in technicolor.

To be clear, I am not saying that I got cancer so that I could see my life and the world differently.

But I am saying that getting cancer has led to that outcome.

John O’Donohue, the gorgeous Irish poet and writer, understood the spiritual significance of beauty: 

“The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion, and in ourselves…When we experience the Beautiful there is a sense of homecoming… Beauty is a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other… When we experience beauty, we feel called. The beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life…Beauty does not linger, it only visits. Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm, it calls us to feel, think, and act beautifully in the world: to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful.”

So much of this sings for me. 

Beauty can remind us of what is good and holy and sublime and transcendent. Whether it is a sunrise or a handmade quilt or a breathtaking Bach cello suite performed by Yo-Yo Ma.

I have been thinking about a favorite teaching from the Hasidic Rabbi known as the Sefat Emet (Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger) that I have shared many times in classes I have taught. It is a teaching on stockpiling radiance in our hearts:

Genesis 41:35-36:

35 And let them gather all the food of these good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. 36 And the food shall be for a store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine.' 

What can we learn from this passage?

To prepare ourselves well in days of plenty, in those times when holiness is apparent to us. 

We must fix that radiance firmly in our hearts, so it may be there for the bad times when the holiness is hidden…

In the past when I have taught this text, I have focused on the idea of how we might store up that feeling of abundance we experience during the times when life feels good and full and smooth, so that - when we have to navigate challenges - we can call on those memories of abundance and use them to carry us through the rough waters.

But now, I see this text so differently. 

Holiness and beauty have been in stark relief during this period of illness. I am learning that times of ‘famine’ can open us up to radiance in measures not encountered before. 

I want to be honest and real. When you are lying in bed, feeling swollen and nauseous, as if you just got routed in a boxing match, looking for beauty is not the first thing that comes to mind. Making that choice, turning in that direction, requires energy that you don’t always have. But I have learned that when I do find the energy, the presence of mind, to go seeking beauty, it can be a way to lift myself up.

When we struggle, we thirst more for that beauty, for that luminescence hiding in our everyday reality. We need it. Desperately. It feeds our faith that the world is filled with goodness even during a very hard time. It is an antidote to feelings of despair and fear. An infusion of luminosity.

Beauty reminds us of life.

Of our capacity to create.

Of abundance.

Of joy.

Of surrendering to what is larger than our individual lives.

What beauty have you experienced recently?

Since I began sharing my writing through this space, I have received emails and messages of different sorts. Some friends ask if I write for myself or for others - which is an interesting question. I respond honestly - the writing is not new. Only the sharing of that writing is new. I have been writing my way through my life since high school. I write because I need somewhere to put my messy thoughts and emotions, and the process of writing allows me to give shape to what is moving and confused and heavy within me. It tames and structures and wrestles into meaning all of my inner rumbling. And I love language. I love looking for the words to distill an inchoate thought.

But reading also plays an integral role. Reading is writing’s sibling. It feeds its engine, so to speak. What I read forms what I write.

I wrote earlier that I have been reading one psalm each morning and writing from those words. With my coffee, I sit with my illustrated copy of tehillim (psalms) and read the verses of that one psalm slowly. I tend to focus in on one phrase, sometimes just one word. I wonder about the original author, the moment the words were written, the setting and the emotional state of the writer all those many years ago.  What battles were raging, inner and outer, when those lines were penned? What dangers were lurking? What loves and longings were surfacing in the writer’s heart? Reading the words slowly permits me to time travel. To step into the multi-directional current of time.

The 150 poems in the book swim through the full range of emotions in the human experience. Love. Faith. Hope. Terror. Trust. Uncertainty. Overwhelm. Longing. Doubt. Anxiety. Yearning for Peace and Joy (and magical thinking, about which I will write more in a later post). It is all there, in moving language and imagery. No matter the psalm, each morning I find myself in its lines.

There is something anchoring and nourishing about reading words that are ancient. I read many modern and contemporary texts too, but when I read old words, they touch a different part of me.

When I read a psalm (or another ancient text) from thousands of years ago, two related but opposing things happen. I see my own life in newly intimate and clear ways, and I also am able to situate my personal experience within a wider landscape. It is as if the aperture both zooms in and zooms out. I can focus in and also pull back. I am uniquely me, but I am not alone.

And that is where - for me - the healing comes in.

Language - reading and writing - is always grounding, but especially during this time, it has been a lifeline. Quite literally.

As with any experience, I have moved through moments in stages. I have experienced pain and fear and moved through to calm and greater ease. And I have turned to words to hold me throughout. 

Back several months ago, when this was all beginning and I knew something was wrong, but I did not yet know what it was, I was studying Talmud with one of the teachers in my rabbinic program. We were studying Berachot, a tractate that explores the technicalities of prayer. No one in my study group knew what was going on with me at the time, but I was in the thick of anxiety and not-knowing. I don’t think I would have chosen Berachot as the comforting text of choice for navigating a health crisis, but that’s where I found myself. And the words from that 6th century text met me in that moment. I found myself in conversation with the Rabbis of the Talmud, opening up their words and fitting myself between their letters. The writing I did then is my own artifact of the intense fear I was feeling. The words of Berachot offered a place to put that fear. Their words gave my words sound.

When I read ancient texts and write, I am reminded of the saying from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook that I have always loved as a spiritual maxim:

הישן יתחדש והחדש יתקדש 

ha-yashan yitchadesh v'ha-chadash yitkadesh

The old shall be made new, and the new shall be made holy

By diving into ancient texts - which are records of ancient hearts and souls and minds - we can join them in sacred conversation and renew their ideas and sentiments. And what is born from the meeting of the ancient and the present is holy. Holy and vital and life-giving. Reading helps us meet what is larger than us of which we are a part. Writing permits us to weave new threads into the vibrant quilt of meaning.

In Judaism, we know the power of words. Words create and destroy. In Genesis, God creates the entirety of the world through words, intentional utterances. In Hebrew, words are called “devarim” - they are the ‘things’ that construct the universe. Lawrence Kushner, in his book The Book of Words  writes:

“...God made the world with words. God just spoke and the world became reality…Not only are words instruments of creation, in Judaism they are a primary reality itself…To know the word therefore is to know reality itself.”

There is another Hebrew word for ‘word’ - teva. Teva can mean ‘word’, and it also means ‘ark’, as in the vessel that Noah built to weather the Flood that God brought to the world. When God was instructing Noah to build the ark, he told him: 

טז) צֹ֣הַר ׀ תַּֽעֲשֶׂ֣ה לַתֵּבָ֗ה 

Genesis 6:16-

(16) Make a Tzohar for the ark…

What is a tzohar? 

Some say it is a window. Others say it is a glowing gemstone.

It is something that provides light, illumination.

In the midst of the Flood, Noah was to build a ship to weather the storm and protect himself and his family and the animals, but the ship had to have a source of illumination. Something to let light in.

During the last few months, I have come to value the immense potency of words to provide light during a stormy time.

Words from my ancient ancestors who navigated their own storms.

Words from my contemporaries who have faced similar challenges.

Words from my beloved community of friends and family who check in and send short notes to say: I am here. I am thinking of you. I am sending love.

Words that find their way through my pen to the page, giving my mind and heart some rest.

May we all find ways to tap into the light-giving power of words to heal, connect, and access love and peace when we most need them.

My body has been an active body for my entire life. From dance and gymnastics as a child, to long-distance running as a young adult, to yoga certification as an older adult - I have never not felt supported by and at home in my body. Daily exercise has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and my mental state has been intrinsically linked to my capacity to move my body with vigor and freedom. I took my physical health for granted. Completely. Feeling strong and pushing my body to new limits felt like a part of my identity. It brought me a sense of vitality.

The initial heart scare that brought me to the ER was unnerving, but my heart checked out as fine and healthy, and I left knowing that I had to slow my physical pace for a few weeks, but I would soon be back to my usual speed. This slowdown was temporary.

When my husband looked at my chest CT results and told me to make an appointment with a pulmonologist, I felt stopped in my tracks.

Was something going on within my body that I did not know? Was it possible that my body, my cells, were betraying me in some deep and threatening way? It took my breath away - thinking that this body I had cared for and appreciated for its health and strength might be turning against me.

Just as experts speak about navigating grief in different stages, I navigated this rupture in my relationship with my body in stages as well. Shock. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Disorientation. All of it. I felt all of it, sometimes all of it at once.

Once the diagnosis was clear, it took me weeks to be able to say “I have cancer” to myself. To be honest, it is still difficult. The word carries a heaviness, and it is deeply triggering.

The little that I knew about cancer, generally, is that it involves certain cells that, for a wide variety of reasons, mutate and begin to multiply in ways that are inhospitable to the health and stasis of your body. 

The language I had heard used about cancer centered largely on harsh, violent words.

Fight cancer. F&*K cancer. Kill cancer. Beat cancer.

Believe me - I understood the feeling behind those words. Especially in the beginning of this process. I didn’t want any of what was happening to me. I wanted to beat the hell out of it, kill it and be done with it. I was angry and scared, and I knew that I needed all of my tenacity and strength to move through the next steps of treatment.

So, yeah, F&*K cancer. I get that sentiment.

But there was something about that approach that, over time, felt off for me.  Personally. That did not sit well with who I am or how I think about my body, my spirit, my heart. The language - as much as I resonated with its tenor - felt incongruent with the rest of myself.

For much of my adult life, I have been drawn to learning and practice that center the integration of mind, body, and spirit. That focus on an idea of wholeness - shlemut - that honors the connections between these parts of ourselves. I feel God’s presence most powerfully when I access the Hasidic idea of nekudah penimit - the innermost point of Divine presence within us. This was the core of my spiritual outlook, the teachings that grounded me. When I feel God’s presence most keenly, I feel it in my body. In my tissues and limbs. And my home tradition, Judaism, sees the human body and all of its messy physicality as sacred and worthy of holy treatment and honor.

How could I square that spiritual framework with the reality that my own body was fighting against me? That my cells were violently attacking me from within? 

I didn’t know how to reconcile these ideas.

Not long after I made my diagnosis public, a dear friend reached out and gently pointed me to a teacher she had come across through a retreat. This man was a longtime meditation teacher, and had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer. She shared an interview he did recently speaking about how he has navigated just this paradox, this troubling incongruity.

So I took my phone and my airpods and went for a long walk at the Middlefork Savanna - the nature preserve where I went to walk in the weeks after my father passed away. And I listened to the interview. I listened and walked and stopped to sit and sob and continued walking when I could. 

And as I listened, with tears streaming down my face, I kept nodding my head. Yes. Yes. He understands. He gets the need for a different language.

He speaks about his own struggle with reimagining his relationship to his own body after his cancer diagnosis - and finding a way of relating to the cancer that was consonant with the rest of his worldview.

He speaks about coming to a place where he moved from saying F&*K cancer to “Thank you cancer. I love you cancer.”

This was a huge leap. He knew it, and I felt it, for sure. I was not ready to say “I love you” to the cancer. But listening to his words unlocked something in me. It softened the rigid fight reflex I had adopted towards my reality. Everything softened in me, and while I was not yet ready to say those words that he was suggesting, I knew that I wanted to move in that direction. I needed to.

If I teach and study and believe, wholeheartedly, that my body - and every body - is holy and precious, a vessel for the Divine, I cannot adopt an adversarial stance towards it. My cells - and yes, even the cancer cells - are a part of my holy body. I had to love all the parts of my body with an equally tender love. I felt this. I could not heal and get well if I was fighting against myself. 

A little over a week ago, I was in Miami with my rabbinic cohort preparing for a 3-day silent meditation retreat. My attendance had been tentative - I had to wait to see my oncologist, get my bloodwork, and determine if I would be cleared to travel. Thankfully, I was. My pace is slower these days, but a silent meditation retreat was something that I could handle. I welcomed the chance to see my beautiful cohort friends and have some quiet, nurturing time in a sun-drenched place. That sounded perfect.

On this retreat, we spent our time being led and taught by several teachers, sitting in silent meditation, pursuing walking meditation on the beach, praying together and being led in yoga practice.

The experience was much harder than I had anticipated. I wrote earlier about my struggle with meditation that places one’s focus on the breath. That was a no-go for me at the start of all of this. One of my other central practices that keeps me grounded - yoga - was not something I had been able to return to yet. I have been practicing yoga since college, and recently became certified as a yoga instructor, but the practice felt closed off to me now. I was too nervous, too anxious in my new skin, too worried that I would move in a way that would open an incision from my surgery or twist something that was not ready to be twisted. 

The first time we laid out our yoga mats to practice, I placed myself in a corner. Slowly, gently, I tried to move my body through versions of the postures. I cried my way through the practice - tenderly urging my body to remember what I was sure it remembered. Stretching my comfort level, gently. But I was left with sadness. Unsure if I would ever reclaim the fluidity and ease I had once felt moving my body through the practice.

During the retreat, one of our teachers (who also happened to be a good friend, which was such a blessing) shared that one of the central phrases that  has guided him in his practice has been the phrase “B’rachamim tashuv” - Return with compassion. When we lose our focus, when we have missed the mark, when we find our minds drifting off to another worry or memory, we can always return. Return with gentle compassion. We can direct that rachamim - that tender compassion - towards ourselves, rather than beating ourselves up.

The last morning of the retreat, we began the morning with a 30-minute silent meditation. I settled myself in by the door so that I could hear the crash of the waves along the shore. I began the meditation with a slow body scan, beginning at the crown of my head and moving down through the different regions of my body. I immediately found myself drifting into that place of worry and anxiety that has been attached to my embodied self since the start of this journey. 

I needed to reset.

B’rachamim tashuv.

I tried a new approach and began again. As I moved down through my body, I noticed each part of my body as its own holy vessel- my forehead, my eyes, my nose, my tongue -  and I directed compassion and gratitude to each part of myself. Tender loving compassion for all of the ways that body part has served me over my 49 years.

My eyes. All of the beautiful sights and people my eyes have taken in, all I have been able to read, all of the art I have seen, the sunrises.

My nose. I thought about all of the beautiful smells I have had the blessing to inhale. The fragrant flowers. The spices at Havdalah. Baking challah.

My teeth and tongue. I recalled the sustaining foods I have been able to eat and enjoy and savor, which have nourished me throughout my life.

My heart. That keeps beating and keeps beating and stays steady moment after moment to keep my body alive. 

My left lung -(and this is where I began to feel anxious) Which is now not whole; it is missing a part of itself. It is not what it was.  It is changed forever. But it is resilient and learning to be strong in a new way. Learning to adapt and breathe with less capacity. My brave and strong left lung.

I moved down through my body, pausing for a good while near my abdomen, thinking about my uterus which carried and grew my three beautiful children. Such an astonishing miracle.

I went on- slowly holding each part of my embodied self up for compassionate gratitude and wonder. 

At the end of the meditation, I felt stripped clean. I had found a way to meet my body - my old-new body - with this gentle, loving gaze - to appreciate it for what it has done and what it is now, mourning less over what has been lost. It was a profound shift.

I know my relationship with my body will evolve over the coming days and months and years, and I pray that I can continue to come back to it with rachamim (compassion) and hodaya (gratefulness), holding a beginner’s mind, remembering that each day we meet our body and soul anew. Each day, each breath, we begin again.

This Body

I knew this body so well

even as it shifts and softens, 

It was still my own,

An old friend to whom I could speak 

In intimate whispers

With its trusted parts that walked miles

And grew and nursed life

Into being.

But I feel it taking leave of me

As the universe beneath my skin

Changes its course and 

leaves me no map.

II.

They start with fluids

Fill my veins with salt water 

Then layer on liquids

One more caustic than the prior

Spackling this ill body with medicine

that singes and kills 

Then others that repair,

Easing the harm

with apologies.

I am bloated with foreign agents.

III.

This is not a body I know.

It is a body I fear

A stranger that threatens,

Operates as a rogue actor 

With rules I can’t place.

IV. 

He reaches out

to touch my side and

I flinch

Ease away

Scared of his touch

brushing my scarred flesh.

V. 

I’m sorry 

but I am lost

This is not a body I recognize

With it’s distensions and 

Phantom sensations.

I keep looking for the home

That was mine

Turning down streets and peering in windows

But I fear it may have burned down

For good.

VI.

Is this a body that I can know

Anew, perhaps -

A body that breathes and bends to

A rhythm I have not heard

A body that carries the cellular markings

Of survival

A body that has entered a chapter that

Is still being written-

Can I learn to love its new language 

And claim it as my own?

When I first received the diagnosis of cancer, I told only a handful of family members.  It was too much to process, let alone share. I couldn’t even say the word aloud. It was raw and terrifying.

Not long after that, I attended a volunteer event organized by a local pastor, distributing food, clothing, and other items to residents in need. I had never met this pastor before; a friend had told me about him and his wife and their grassroots efforts to bring the community together and organize events to support one another. I spoke with him briefly, for just a few minutes, at the event, when he thanked me for coming. But his radiant spirit struck me.

A few days after that event, the pastor sent out an email to the group who had volunteered, expressing gratitude and sharing news of upcoming events. And, at the end of the email, he shared an open offer.  He said that a large part of his spiritual practice is praying for people individually, and if any of us needed prayers, to please reach out to him directly.

Reading that email touched my heart.

It felt like his offer traveled to me just when I needed it most. 

At most, 4 people knew about my diagnosis at that time. 

But I emailed the pastor and told him. I explained all that had transpired with me over the previous weeks, I shared my deep fear and anxiety, told him I would be having surgery soon, and I asked him to pray for me. And he responded immediately - to offer comfort and presence, to share his plans to pray daily for me using specific psalms. He asked when my surgery was, what day and time and where, and if it would be Ok for him to check in with me on my cell that day and after.

The morning of my surgery, as I sat getting my IV put in, he texted me. He had remembered the date and time of my surgery. He just wanted to let me know that when I was in surgery, I would not be alone. He would be with me throughout the surgery, praying for my welfare. I felt so calm when they wheeled me back. Aside from the presence of my loving husband and the support of my family members, this stranger was praying for me. I felt accompanied and protected.

I am not new to offering prayers of healing for those who are sick. The Jewish tradition has prayers specifically for that - the misheberach prayer that we offer on behalf of those who are ill. As a community, we often have the practice of reciting psalms to plead for healing for someone suffering. And I have been very moved by the many people who have reached out, since I shared my diagnosis publicly, to ask for my Hebrew name so that they could add it to their misheberach prayer.

I am still not sure why this offer from this pastor broke me wide open. Why it felt so different. Perhaps because I barely knew him. I was not a member of his congregation. He had no obligation to me. I was just a random human who was ill and scared. Maybe it moved me because it was so personally connected and directed. So authentic in its spiritual intensity and intention. He has continued to follow up with me, to check in and let me know that he is still praying for me.

Dr. Lisa Miller, in her book The Awakened Brain, writes of her research into the power of spirituality to nourish and support wellbeing - physical, emotional, all of its many facets.  Spirituality can mean many things, and it is a word that is used, and perhaps overused, in ways that may make it lose some of its significance. But it is critical to our wellbeing in powerful ways. In her book, Miller speaks of ‘relational spirituality’ - the type of spirituality that manifests through our relationships with one another.  She writes:

“…altruism and love of neighbor correlated with cortical thickness across the spiritual network of the brain, including regions of bonding, suggesting a robust protective benefit of relational spirituality, a personal spirituality that emphasizes both our commitment to other humans and our awareness of a transcendent or higher power - and how divine and human love are linked.”

Over the past few months, I have been overwhelmed by the love and care from my family, my friends, my community, from people I do not even know, or know only tangentially, through a friend of a friend. I have watched people show up and offer demonstrations of support in unexpected ways that have moved me to tears. Nourishing food, healing books, gifts designed to offer some sweetness and comfort, precious spiritual talismans, a recording of a gorgeous musical piece performed by one of my oldest friends and emailed to me, offerings from cancer survivors of things that they found soothing. So many loving outreaches. I think of the phrase from Psalm 23 -  כּוֹסִ֥י רְוָיָֽה - my cup is overflowing. 

And - this experience of others' support of me has led me to question myself: how have I shown up for my friends and loved ones when they were struggling? How have I failed to show up? Have I shown up in ways that were welcome, needed, appreciated? Being the recipient of overwhelming love has made me far more sensitive to showing love to others. I hope that this health struggle will continue to tenderize my heart towards others. That is my prayer. 

I have been thinking about the Hebrew term hiddur mitzvah. This phrase is often translated as “the beautification of the commandments” and we normally think about applying this concept by buying an especially gorgeous kiddush cup or setting a Shabbat table with our finest dishes and linens and vases of flowers. And I have always found this attention to beauty in our spiritual and ritual lives to be moving and meaningful. We don’t just do a ritual to get it done. We elevate it, treat it as a holy object to be enhanced.

But I am now thinking about the term hiddur mitzvah in a different way as well.

The Hebrew word mitzvah is related, linguistically, to the word tzavta - which means connected or joined. 

Hiddur mitzvah. The beauty in our connection to one another.

All of these demonstrations of love and care are holy threads that connect me to you, and you to me. You, the people I know well and love. And you, all of the people I don’t yet know and may never know. I believe so strongly that the heart of our spiritual lives is our connection to one another. This is the tender love, the radiating beauty, that binds us to each other and that lifts me up when I fall, and allows me to lift you when you fall. That relational beauty sustains us through the dark and frightening times. It is the healing balm for our human hearts. And especially in those moments when our connection to the Divine may feel less sturdy, we can look for the Divine in each other, as Rabbi Arthur Green writes in his book Seek My Face:

“...for all of us humans, God is most to be discovered within the human community, in relationship with others and with knowing ourselves. In fact, our search for God is fully bound up with our being human; our knowledge of God is in no way separable from our own humanity. We come to know God through the deep connections we make with one another, opening ourselves to the Divine presence as manifested in those whom we allow ourselves to love…”

May we all feel that radiant Divinity through the precious connections we nurture with each other, in times of ease and in times of challenge.

As parents, what do we choose to conceal from our children? And what do we choose to reveal?

I remember Facetiming my children from my hospital room, when my unexpected ER visit turned into an unexpected 3-day stay in the hospital. I consciously straightened my hospital gown, tucked my IV’s out of sight, and hid the heart monitors stuck all over my chest. I smiled and kept my voice light.

Mom, are you OK?

That’s really what they wanted to know. Am I OK. Would I be OK.

I shifted into reassuring mode. Cheerful, reassuring mode. 

Yes, I’m fine! Of course I’m fine. They’re just doing some tests, and I will be home very soon. 

I watched their shakiness, and I felt desperate to keep them calm, to assuage their fear. 

And I was back home soon. But then the hard part began.

The new worries, the uncertainties, the doctors’ appointments and tests, the time waiting to hear results. What followed were weeks of anxiety and not-knowing. I could barely hold it together through those weeks, so I knew that I had to shield them from all of that messiness. There was no reason for them to know anything was going on until we had something clear to share. Until we had concrete news. A plan.

And so we lied, and made up excuses when asked what we did that day, concealing the truth. For weeks.

This felt like the right parenting move. Why should I burden my children with worry? I wanted them to continue with their beautiful, busy lives without having to carry any additional anxiety.

In mid-December, when I found out I would be having surgery at the start of January, our family was preparing for our older two children to return home from college and looking forward to a beach vacation with our extended family. This would be precious time. Precious, precious time - time together that now carried an even greater weight. I was not going to taint this rare shared time with my medical news. We decided to continue concealing what we had been holding for the past month and a half. 

Our family vacation felt like time out of time. It was a blissful gift, an opportunity to ignore all of the worry for a bit and relax and just have fun together. Pretend all of it was not waiting for me, for us.

We returned home 2 days before my lung surgery. David and I decided we had to tell the kids the night we got home.

As we sat around our kitchen table eating Thai takeout, I shifted into controlled storyteller mode. I had rehearsed with David what I would say - I would not mention the “c” word. I would speak honestly but calmly, sharing a brief medical synopsis without too many details, reassuring them throughout that I would be OK. 

They found a growth in my lung that has to be removed. I will have a simple surgery and be home soon after and then it will all be over. No big deal. 

I willed myself to speak without crying.

So you have cancer? - one of my kids asked.

My plan disssolved into a puddle.

Our kids are not young - they are teenagers, young adults. They understood what I was trying to hide. They saw me trying to conceal in order to protect them.

Well, technically, yes. I do. But it was caught early, I am so lucky, I just need this surgery and then I will be fine. I felt my eyes starting to well up.

We got through that evening and I went to sleep that night feeling like a weight had been lifted off my heart. 

Hiding truth is so heavy.

After the surgery, more uncertainty ensued as I waited for the pathology results. Was this over or would I need to speak to my children now about treatment?

When I found out that chemotherapy would be in my future, I again withheld the information as we visited with 3 different oncologists and gathered information. Again, we would share information when it was clear and determined. No need to make my children hold the not-knowing.

When the plan was in place and my treatment schedule was determined, it felt like the time to speak to our children, each separately. With my older two away, the conversation was had over Facetime. Calm. Clear. Reassuring. Trying to project optimism. 

I have these 12 weeks of treatment ahead, but I am OK. I will be OK.

Having that conversation in person was harder than through a screen.

So, it turns out I need to have a few weeks of treatment, of chemotherapy, and then this will be over. And the doctor said that the treatment is well-tolerated. I might be tired and a little nauseous but otherwise feel OK. And I won’t lose my hair. I will be OK, really. I promise you - I said, staying calm and upbeat.

His eyes began to well up.

Mom, I’m not a baby. You don’t have to feel fine and OK all of the time. It’s fine if you feel scared. You can tell me how you are really feeling. Even if you feel scared. You can tell me that. Just be honest with me.

All my effort to stay stoic and not cry went down the toilet.

I hugged him and cried and told him thank you. Thank you for his permission to feel scared.

Parenting is so hard. It is so impossible to know the right thing to do and say, to figure out what they need in each moment from us. I felt sure that my kids needed me to project calm and strength and to toe the “it will all be OK” line. And in some sense, they do need that. But my son was letting me know that he actually needed something different from me. He needed me to be real with him. He was giving me permission to be more honest with him, which in turn gave him permission to be honest with me. It struck me that if he saw me pretending I felt nothing but calm, I was not making space for him to feel anything more difficult. If I was going to pretend, then he was expected to pretend too. That’s not what I wanted.

So we made a deal: I would try to show him more of what I was really feeling if he would do the same.

I worried about showing him any of my fear. Yet it occurred to me if I could show him a bit of my more difficult emotions, and also talk to him about how I was dealing with those emotions, maybe it could be a ‘teachable moment’ as we parents like to say - maybe that would give me the opportunity to both be more ‘real’ with him and also model how we navigate fear and anxiety when it comes. I thought of this very powerful teaching from Rachel Macy Staffords, a parenting educator-

One of the best decisions I ever made was to stop hiding my humanness from my kids.

Struggling, especially in a difficult season of life, is not something to be ashamed of—it’s what makes us human. At times, we all need support. We all need to be reminded that life is not without challenges or disappointment. It’s better to come to terms with that fact than to ignore it, repress it, or deny it.

By displaying authenticity, humanness, and self-acceptance during stressful situations and difficult seasons of life, I hope to alleviate some of the future pressure my kids are bound to put on themselves. I hope they will see through my example that it’s brave to ask for help.

In a world that looks for the quick fix… that powers through the pain… that resists the need to talk about hard things like mental health, we often walk right past ourselves and our loved ones in times of struggle. When we do, we forfeit the chance to connect, heal, and strengthen through an honest, loving response.

Let’s not walk by. The truth is often where the healing begins.

My friends, our children need to know that pain is a part of life—it is not something to hide or repress. And by voicing our struggles in appropriate ways, we can model forms of healing, coping, and resilience building.

I am still figuring out what each of my children are really asking for when they ask me questions, trying to carefully read behind the questions and see the heart behind the words in order to discern the response that is needed. And they are all different and processing this differently. I am letting them be my teachers. 

We are building this path together as we walk, trying to stay connected to one another’s hearts. And I am humbled by the truth that they will show me what they need if I am quiet enough to listen.

I was sitting in the pulmonologist’s office, and the look on his gentle face constricted my chest. He asked me if I wanted to look at the chest CT image with him.

No thank you.

I need a minute, please.

I sat on the paper-covered examination table, closed my eyes, and started to tune into my breath. Tried to settle my mind and body by calling on my mindfulness meditation practice. Bringing my awareness to my breathing.

But the more that I rested my attention on my breath, on my ailing lung, the more I felt my chest seize up and my arms go numb. The more fear flooded me.

The doctor went to get me some water, and I continued to sit. To desperately demand that this practice that had served me well in easier times would now, please, help me out a bit. Just a little.

But it didn’t.

I have, for many years, been someone who has gravitated to spiritual ideas, practices, experiences. I have sought out teachings and writings, retreats and immersive encounters that would open up new tools I could add to my spiritual toolbox. And I have, for many years, been an active participant in thick religious communities, joined in leading rituals and prayers. And as a teacher, I have tried to share practices that I have found meaningful and nourishing, with the hopes that they might offer similar richness to others.

And now I needed those practices. 

I wrote earlier than I have been, for the most part, in retreat mode. I have stepped back from my regular attendance at synagogue, for several reasons, so that routine engagement with religious community has been more absent. But I knew that I needed to find some set of practices that would carry me through the coming few months.

What do we do when our usual practices fail? Or are not available to us?

Over the past few months, I have given myself license to experiment. To try different approaches and see what might help.

And what has helped me has been to create a morning ritual.

Each morning when I wake up, I say the Modah Ani (“I am grateful”) prayer to myself and then go into my side room, close the door, light a candle, and lay down on the large mat we have there. Sitting in an upright posture right now can be painful; lying down is easier. For a while, I would lay there in stillness and send out prayers to others whom I know are struggling. Saying their names and wishing them healing. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been putting in my airpods and listening to the recorded weekly meditations of a new teacher I have recently discovered (more on him later).  While I used to meditate in silence and tune into my breath, that is not helpful right now. Listening to someone else’s words guide me is more settling. And being guided to expand my awareness beyond myself, beyond my body, is often more grounding. After meditation, I go to the beautiful glass blessing jar that a dear friend got me, and I write down one blessing I am noticing that morning. Write it on a small slip of paper and drop it into the blessing jar.

I come downstairs and make coffee, sit with my coffee, and take out my siddur (prayerbook).

Saying the full traditional morning service each day is not something I wanted to commit to right now. Instead, I read the beautiful preliminary prayers at the opening of the siddur- prayers that are grounding in feelings of gratitude, connection beyond myself, my relationship with God. These prayers contain beautiful language; saying the Hebrew words and hearing their poetic rhythm softens my heart. I follow with the Birchot HaShachar - the daily morning blessings that truly contain all we really need - the words are simple and symbolic, focused and attentive to the daily wonders of being alive and encompassing of the all, when you let your mind read into the space between the letters. 

After praying, I open up my Tanach ( Bible) and read one psalm. One psalm a day. I keep my Tanach with my journal, and as I read, I notice which words, which verses, hit me on that morning. And I write those words down and then keep writing. Whatever comes up. Whatever emerges from those ancient holy words when they hit my half-awake mind and heart. Sometimes it is questions; other times, it is poetry. I let go of rules here and trust that whatever comes out is what needs to come out that morning.

I do this most mornings, not Shabbat, but most other mornings - though there are some mornings when I skip something or focus on just one piece. I have found that creating a ritualized morning routine that fits me is calming. Its predictability is a firm place to stand at the start of a day. I have borrowed from my ancient tradition and its words and practices and interwoven some contemporary forms too. This syncretism works for me, and it gives me the option to make changes, to mix it up, to alter the routine if something new is offered.

When faced with so much uncertainty, rituals can provide an anchor. An anchor I need right now.

And I have also felt permission to create new practices when the right one does not exist.

As I prepare to start treatment, I looked for a blessing or ritual that could be used to begin this process. But I didn’t find anything that resonated with me.

So I wrote my own blessing that I will be saying before I begin chemotherapy.

As I begin this next step in the healing of my body, may I leave space for my fear and worry, acknowledging that my body holds that fear even if my mind feels calm on its surface.

May I carry with me trust in my medical caregivers and their wisdom, having faith that they are a part of this healing team, present to support and guide with love and expertise.

May I hold with me the generous wisdom shared by others who have walked this treatment path before me, calling on their suggestions and resting in the belief that their strength will carry over into my hands now. May I remember my deep gratitude to those brave friends.

May I rest in patience, knowing that this course will take time to do its work and that the weeks ahead will have both hard and easier moments.

May I find the capacity to relate to my body - all of it, the strong and the weaker parts - with tenderness 

May I remember that while I am the patient, I am not alone - my loved ones are around me, and those closest to me are also carrying stress and worry. May I hold them with gentle love.

May I feel God’s presence sitting beside me as I take this next step towards healing and wellness.

When you are hit with something hard and unexpected, it can unmoor you. Knock you down. I know others have described similar experiences like being slapped in the face. The ground pulled out from under you. A loss of your connection to those things that you have counted on, taken as givens, assumed would always be true. 

Even if we intellectually know that life is uncertain and filled with unpredictable challenges, that idea can feel just like an idea, until it hits you like a wave.

Looking back on the past few months, my relationship to time has been punctuated by moments that shifted everything.

Being told that my EKG in the emergency was not normal.

Hearing the concern in the pulmonologist’s voice when he showed me my chest CT.

Reading my lung biopsy results.

Meeting with the oncologist to learn about my treatment ahead.

Each one of these moments loosened my connection to normal time. With each successive interaction, I floated farther above my normal life, away from my routine with its predictable components and expected plans. So much that I had planned for and focused on before fell away. My mind became uncluttered in a strangely clarifying way; I could only focus on one thing, really. I had little energy for anything else. It all became hazy, receding into the background.

But without my usual attachments, I grew more withdrawn. Isolated.

When I teach, I often begin by asking my students a question that one of my teachers would ask: 

What is your makom (place) right now, today? Where do you find yourself? What are you holding?

This question is meant to be understood spiritually, emotionally, psychologically.

When my teacher began class with that question, it offered us an opportunity to ask that of ourselves before we began learning: from where were we coming? What were we carrying with us into the learning that day?

It was always a gift - to take a moment to locate and ground ourselves in this moment in time. 

And so I often ask my students the same thing, at the start of a class. Even when we show up to a class together at the same time, we are all arriving from different places, with different spiritual baggage in tow. It helps the learning process, I think, to name our makom, with honesty.

Since all of this began, I have been trying to remember what I teach and teach myself - remind myself - to use the practices I share with students.

Feeling increasingly unmoored, I came back to that question: what is my makom? Where am I in this moment?

There are so many ways one could answer that. But in order to get more grounded, I leaned towards the very literal. Where am I in time right now?

I always find so much nurturing wisdom in the Jewish calendar, so I often start there. The Hebrew month, the cycle of holidays, the moon’s stage. All are meaningful locators. 

When the scariness of all of this began, we were in the Hebrew month of Cheshvan. Mar Cheshvan. The “bitter” month because of its absence of holidays. Yep. That bitterness checked out. The nature of that month, in a way, gave me permission to feel horrible about what had just hit my life. I was very scared and angry, and during Cheshvan I sat in that. That’s where I was, and I allowed that to be. 

But we soon moved into Kislev, and with the coming new month of Hanukkah, I started to feel more defiance and a bit more courageous - which is what Kislev gifted me. An invitation to look for light everywhere, in secret and bold places. And I began to notice it and record it and share it, so I might encourage myself to lean more and more in its direction. Looking for light buoyed my heart and reconnected me to others and the world outside my home’s door.

With the start of 2025, all I felt was winter. Gray, cold winter. 

That was my makom.

A few years ago, author Katherine May published a beautiful book that changed my relationship to winter. In her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times,  she talks about her own personal struggles and her use of the concept of ‘wintering’ as a spiritual tool to retreat in order to heal and gather strength. 

Every winter, I return to that book and let May sanction my retreating during this season, but this year, its importance took on new depths. 

I really needed time to rest and retreat and withdraw a bit. I knew that if I didn’t, I would not find the strength to do what I had to do to heal.

My makom is winter right now. I’m sinking into winter.

And Irish poet and author David Whyte gave me further reassurance that retreating was permissible and important, as he writes in his book Consolations:

Hiding is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, he held bud of a future summer rose, the snowbound internal pulse of the hibernating bear. Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world...Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children, or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named...Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

I appreciated some time to hide.

But winter is also the preparation for what follows it, as author Jarod K. Andersen writes in his heartbreakingly beautiful book Something in the Woods Loves You:

The bare trees. The gray sky. The stillness of absent life.

These things are the surface of winter.

But winter isn’t an ending.

Winter is the deep breath before a song.

Yes. That is also true, and also what I needed to remember. That my rest and retreat is opening up space to gather the strength I need to move through these next steps, and they are also the precursor to renewal. I need that vision of the horizon as much as I need to see the ground under my feet.

And now we are in the Hebrew month of Shevat. That month of listening deeply, closely to the natural world so that we can begin to hear the sap rising underneath the cold bark of the trees. It is a month when new growth, new possibilities start to stir - even when we can’t see them. It is a time to plant seeds. And to trust that something new will bloom if we can be patient.

That’s where I am today. Opening to rest and retreat, and, at the same time, planting the seeds of what I am trusting will emerge in several months. 

Remembering that we move through arcs of time that give us space for different stages, different stopping points.

Feeling the Bitterness. Looking for Light. Retreating. Seeding. Trusting.