Friday Dispatch: 🚂🔎🪴
11s, 7s, and 3s – oh my!
Friday greetings,
Hello, you. I’m so glad you’re here. Like, really. Before you read on, want to take a moment to breathe with me? Maybe place your right hand over your heart. Maybe close your eyes. Notice the sounds, the sensations, and what it’s like to pause. Notice your inhale and then notice your exhale. Take your time. Come back when you’re ready.
Aaaaaaaaah. Thank you.
So, I didn’t plan this, but somehow today’s Dispatch has turned into a series of lists. Read on for 7s, 3s, and of course 11s.
Shabbat Shalom and love,
Jena
The Little Engine That Wouldn't by Roz Chast
7 things on my mind 🚂
1. The groups I facilitated and the clients I met with this week reaffirmed the undeniable power of presence and the creative process. I’m always amazed and grateful. Did you know you can schedule a free chat if you’re curious about working with me?
2. The pressure of holding many disparate truths and realities at once requires a treasure trove of practices for staying grounded rather than spinning off into overthinking and getting mired by paralysis.
3. My first term at AJR is wrapping up. Yesterday I finished drafting a final essay for my Jewish Studies independent study, and I had so much fun writing it! It’s called Be Here Now – Daf Yomi Style, and focuses on the memoir If All the Seas Were Ink by Ilana Kurshan. If you’d like to read it, just ask & I’ll share!
4. I’m figuring out the next steps for continuing my Hebrew studies, getting loans to pay for my next AJR class, and weighing whether to launch a GoFundMe, as I did last year, to return to the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem this summer.
5. If you’re feeling the seemingly constant toggling between the global and the personal, you’re not alone. What we write, sing, create, feel, embrace, explore, and grapple with – it all matters. Be good to yourself.
6. One thing I hear over and over: No one feels like what they’re doing is enough. I like to revisit this treasured story anytime I start down that rabbit hole.
7. I think I can… I think I can… but do I want to?! 🚂
3 Things That Help Me Focus 🔎
1. Talking it out with someone who can listen and help me identify what I like to call my Most Important Thing(s).
2. Remembering there's nothing wrong with me by connecting with others.
3. Some simple and gentle structure and accountability.
If these resonate, join me for FIND YOUR FOCUS, four weeks of co-working sessions bookended by 1:1 coaching calls with me.
I’m very excited to be offering this new opportunity!
The cost is $250 for all six sessions (payable in one or two installments). Learn more and register on my website: https://www.jenaschwartz.com/focus
11s: “keeping living things alive” 🪴
1. A few nights ago, we watched a horse in labor on TikTok. I’m thinking of the different ways I could say this: We watched a foal getting born. A foal being birthed. A horse giving birth. A miracle.
2. Oh, she worked so hard. While her two human helpers – a couple who own Saratoga Glen Farm – pulled on the foal’s legs, she snorted and whinnied, craning her neck to see what they were doing. She collapsed with exhaustion and stood up again with great effort, only to fall again in a heavy heap on her side.
3. Finally her baby came out, a beautiful, lanky, awkward baby horse with a warm, dark brown coat and a long white forehead. The woman rubbed its body with her bare hand, then reached over to the mama. The horse mama licked her wet hand a few times and then the woman held it up to the foal’s nostrils. It was breathtaking to witness.
4. It had started pouring during the birth; you could hear the rain pounding the tin roof. After they got the foal cleaned up and placed her near the mama’s head, the wife started sharing name suggestions that were coming through from viewers: “Raindrop,” “Rain,” and “Confetti.”
5. I learned that a colt is a male baby horse and a filly is a female baby horse. Rain/Raindrop/Confetti was a filly.
6. This morning, I hummed Ariel Root Wolpe’s Waking Up Nigun while watering the houseplants. It was the simplest kind of contentment, carrying them one at a time to the kitchen sink, checking on their overall health, giving them a good soak, and then returning them to their respective window perches. By late May or early June, they can go back out to their happy place on the sunporch:
7. The phrase “keeping living things alive” floated to mind. My very next thought was darker – or maybe not dark so much as aware, that keeping something alive is not always possible. My heart held that thought as I continued watering.
8. Just as I was almost finished, a pothos stem snagged and the pot slipped into the sink, pink porcelain cracking. Damn! I kept the broken parts so I could get the right size replacement. This one had been a 50th birthday gift from my oldest stepchild. What mattered, I told myself, was that the plant itself was ok. Its container could be replaced.
9. When I set out for a morning walk, the grey sky showed no signs of shifting. By the time I got back home, patches of blue. Later, sun streaming in, plants basking.
10. What other living thing am I keeping alive? Is love a living thing? Is tradition a living thing? Are values alive? I say yes, when they are embodied, enacted, made corporeal and evident in our days.
11. Attuning to nature inside and outside helps me remember that I – we – are also nature. How we water and care for ourselves and each other, how we tend to what is coming into being, and how we tend to what is dying are sacred tasks. What songs we sing, what we notice, and how we show up are daily choices. This week, ending one day with the marvel of birth and beginning another with the gift of keeping living things alive, pointed me back to the simple fact that care takes many forms. It is always just here, waiting for us to make it our own.
