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Cross Country
Travelogue #11 |
| Goldie: It is like one is becoming the land......each day city-jaded senses are growing
roots to the magnificent earth. Flashback. First trip to Israel, I am staying with a niece of the then president of Tadiran, Israel's nuclear development corporation, she is a founder of the Society for the Preservation of Nature, etc. (forget exact name of org). Another cousin joins us, one of the Founder's of Peace Now. They listen to my collegiate tour bus itinerary and exclaim: "ee-ef-shar!" (Not possible!) With the affection for one's youth inspired by important memoriess, they described their regular public school hikes around the land. ‘To live with the land, one must know it", they exclaimed. "To understand this land, you must walk it, hike, climb it!" So I dropped off the tour to explore with them, see the land through their own senses.....fragrant etrog groves, ancient ruins, caves (perspectives...."we'll hide here or here if attacked), .....magnificent children of the land. And why were most of us not raised as children of the land? With the earth for a classroom, why be confined each year to a room with some 30 children? Could we envision lives linked differently to the land? Could our youth and our lives rotate like crops onto farms and forests and inner cities as volunteers? What if sabbatical years were incorporated into our lifestyle and work site expectations with options containing learning, experiencing, contemplating and mitzvah-making carefully rolled together? As I write we are entering what the Navoho called "the land of the sleeping rainbow"...pink and yellow strips are emerging in the huge rockfaces, doing their own version of midlife and ageing....dunes of mountain-turned to silt-lie wrinkling at each base...time out.........be back later. One email list I'm on has a fascinating discussion on mitzvot vs meditation. Last night I clipped all of it out from several weeks postings to read as a coherent unit. Mitzvot as Sacred Acts of Consciousness" is the topic I have chosen to teach at Kallah (large festival of Jewish spirituality to which we are headed in Oregon.) An earlier choice of title was "Mizvot as Sacred STATES of Consciousness"....the title's evolution speaks directly to the controversy. A more secular friend writes that our journals reflect we are living through a totally Jewish lens.....why not try other lenses he asks? It's like asking a horse to live through the lens of a fish. Another dear one asks "why isn't it enough to use one's intellect, why emphasize feeling or spirit?" Another questions taking time from study of Talmud and Torah to "hedonistically" tour the land. A year ago someone wrote to us "Thank you for the prayers, but have you seen my alps?" signed God. At a recent meeting a woman came to ask, "Why in my totally tikkun olam focused life do I feel so depleted, so disconnected from God and myself? I give all I can, money, time, ideas, labor........I'm exhausted with giving, friends say Judaism is too focused on action, to try Buddhism or Hinduism, get into a contemplative community. A colleague at the table responds "Who told you it's supposed to feel good or rewarding? We just do it because it must be done." My heart sinks for the lovely mitzvah-nik who is burning out. For me it is precisely the interpenetration of contemplative, celebratory and mitzvahness that is recharging.....there is a synergy among the many spiritual practices of Judaism which, when practiced in balance, enhance the enchantment and sustainability of our lives. Like all practices, there is a time when each are distinct entities. When I started learning to paint...manipulating the brush, choosing colors, understanding perspective....each were separate skills.....today they are integrated within me, there is no labor allocated to each. Similarly a Jewish spiritual life begins with distinct categories of skill, knowledge, experience and over years becomes an integrated way of being. Often I find myself walking through life so utterly embedded in the One that with each step or eye-lash movement or rustle of a nearby bush and twitch of my cat's tail I feel the fabric of the universe responding to the tug. Lift your hands up when saying the washing of the hand blessing....can you feel the net of light particles lifting the fabric of the universe with you? So connected is this growing mystical consciousness that everything becomes a wholiness. Like an ant serving its function for the community, I often respond to mitzvah moments as one whose fullest purpose is attained through the doing. The finger points in every possible direction.....health comes with balance.We may have become top heavy, (in the head) we Jews, in the intellectualization of study and through the emphasis on the "doing" mitzvot - we find this in both orthodox and liberal Judaism (Barry and I have both been both). The pendulum has swung strongly so that we could get back into the rest of our bodies and souls. Now it is time to speak of balance. Remember with a pause and a breath, that mitzvot encompass not only tikkun olam, but also tikkun nefesh and tikkun haguf. Renewal of soul and renewal of body.......shabbat, shmirat ha guf (watching over one's body), kashrut (conscious eating practices), tephillah, k'vod hamet (care of a body after death)....and many more. Like the intermixing of artistic skills over time, increasingly I no longer elect to meditate now and do a mitzvah then. An imperfect yet perceptible cultivation feels underway. Soon one need no longer distinguish between the devekut (God intoxication) of private meditation and that in a mitzvah....the current of wholiness runs through it all and every moment of a life when one gets close to the balance. We Jews keep the mitzvot and midot associated with them "l'totafot beyn eynekhah", between our eyes....this is our third eye consciousness and perhaps if my experience is correct, the continuous meditative way of the mystic. Barry: .It's 7 a.m on a cloudy morning we find ourselves on rte 24 heading towards Capitol Reef National Park. Yesterday the ranger at the Arches had suggested this route, even though it was slower it would lead onto Rte 12 which described as being the most scenic road in America.That was an understatement. Approaching Capital Reef each curve in the road revealed radically different vistas..The mountainous formations change color from red to white to black to gold, to ribbons of color. Clouds gave way to bright blue sky. Even Goldie looked up periodically from her laptop to gasp at the changing terrain...and we were not yet on the stretch of road that was marked as scenic. We hiked for a couple of hours in Capital Reef (Called Capital because of the dome shaped mountains and Reef because the early explorers were sailors and the jagged rocks resemble reefs in areas). In one section of the park we hiked for about 2 miles on a "wash" a dry river bed which floods during rain driving rocks and silt towards the Colorado river...in sections only ll foot wide between sheer cliffs towering upward for 300 ft. Goldie declares this is exSTREAMly interesting. We then continue on Rt 12 through a section called the Grand-Staircase Escalante
National Monument. "What is that?" We wonder. We soon find out that it is a vast
area of wilderness, totaly uninhabited and at night one can look as far as the eye can see
from the mountaintop and not find any lights at all. As we climb the land falls away on
either side of the road, for several thousand feet, the vista is indescribable. Goldie
wipes away a tear - finding the view so overwhelming she is rendered pun-less. I ask her
if this compares to the Grand Canyon and she suggests that I may find the Grand Canyon an
anti-climax after this totally unexpected sight. The past few years at The Academy I slip out to Central Park with my classes at every
opportunity.....teaching methods of d'vekut and hitbodedut indoors ...absurd when
unnecessary! Bio-ethics under an oak tree, why not! Devorah the Judge had a teaching tree,
why not the rest of us? |
