The One Quest-ion

"What would be the
Loving way to Be with
myself right now?"

That is the question.
That is always the question.
The question to answer
(the question to hear),
again & again.
Lovingly.
Shema.

Could my purpose in life
be simply to love myself?
My mission, my fate & destiny,
my tikkuun and my struggle.

Loving myself is Teshuva --
returning to self,
returning to my community (all
creatures, beings, things of the earth & beyond),
returning to God.
'Cause all is One.
Loving All.
Echad.

50th Birthday

To celebrate my 50^th birthday I don’t have a party, an affair, or even a day at the spa. I burn 126 journals. Mine. All of them. Actually I recycle them. My plan was to burn them. All day long in a huge bonfire in the Rabbi’s yard. With great and meaningful ritual, my soul-sisters and I would dance around the flames, releasing all my mistakes and flaws into the vast unknown to be blessed by God and Goddess then magically transformed. But, what can I say, people were busy.

“Very toxic, burning all that paper,” the Rabbi’s husband said.

Oy, was he right, I thought. Not good for me and my chemical sensitivities.

I let it go.

Recycling 126 journals is not that easy. I’m a conscientious recycler, and most of my journals are bound with those sharp, pointy, bended, endlessly spiraling wires. I remove every single one of them. It takes weeks. My fingers start to bleed. The manual labor alone voraciously consumes time. Armed with only an old-fashioned wooden kitchen spoon, I eventually learn to plunge its handle deep into the coiling wire binding and twist and shove till the pages are unbound. But what really makes me slow down and pause are the bits of dreams, struggles, and revelations that sneak into my line of vision and demand to be read. Oh, and the complaining. There are parts of me I read that I am ashamed to claim as my own.

I’ve never been a journal-hider.

No little key for me.

1991.

Women and Children First Bookstore on Clark Street in Chicago.

My first journal writing workshop.

Maureen, the teacher, sounds a Tibetan singing bowl then proceeds to devote a good chunk of the opening session to where to keep your journals so you feel safe enough to write anything.

“I keep mine locked in the trunk of my car,” one woman claims.

I sit in the circle listening and know instinctively that this is an important issue; I include this discussion in all the journaling classes I have taught since then. Yet, I never hide my journals. It strikes me as curious at this first class: I feel I have nothing to conceal, from my husband, from my children. I feel lucky, blessed even.

Now I realize, I just wasn’t writing very deeply, living very deeply at that point in my life. Now, at 50, reading glimpses of where my writing and life have taken me since then, I blush. What if I die? Right now. In the present moment. Do I want my kids to have to go through all this stuff? Maybe my grandmothers were right. “Don’t tell! Don’t tell! Don’t tell!” Plus my story isn’t really here. My complaints and struggles are. And many of my dreams. But so much is missing.

So I let it go.

Every trash day for weeks, I add reams of white unlined paper with black scrawl into the giant, blue, lidded bin on wheels. My writing mixes with smelly tuna cans the cat has licked clean, flattened egg cartons, empty bottles of juice. Every Thursday night I wheel the concoction down the dirt driveway to the gravel road we call Eighteen, a lucky, life-giving number according to Hebraic kabbalistic calculations. Early every Friday morning, the groaning of the Waste Management truck heaving, lifting, and dumping my writing into its maw, wakes me up.

I roll over, take the lid off my pen, and write.

Dream: Oh Happy Day

I shoot myself in the head
in a small rowboat.
My body simply falls away.
It is all an illusion.

wake feeling lucid. happy. light.
A Course in Miracles is working.
I am in lesson 3.

One...
Nothing I see in this room (on this street,
from this window, in this place) means anything.
two...
I have given everything I see in this room
(on this street, from this window, in this place)
all the meaning that it has for me.
three...
I do not understand anything I see in this room
(on this street, from this window, in this place).
GO....

The Pete Seeger song,
The Water is Wide,
hums through my head.

The water is wide, I cannot cross over,
Neither have I wings to fly,
Give me a boat that can carry two,
And both shall row - my love and I.

Oh happy day.