Friday Dispatch: Not Staged or Neat, Just Real

An hour of listening and reflection at week's end

Friday greetings,

It’s 7:01 as I sit down in my home office to write this Dispatch. The sun is rising through the window to my right after two days of cold, wet weather. The birds are out in force, although “birds” and “force” don’t sit well together in my ears. (Birds – life, song, resilience, resourcefulness, ingenuity, care, detail. Force – unimaginative, harm, power, myopic. Also sometimes generative, necessary? Interesting. My mind also calls up the force required to give birth, or the force firefighters must employ to save a person in a burning building. One word, many facets.)

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So, that paragraph took five minutes to write. My brain is still coming online this morning.

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Chalupa is on the other side of the door borking. She has been unsettled since we got up about 90 minutes ago. Spring fever? Bone addiction? It’s like when a baby is fussy and you try everything. The only thing I know for sure would quell her would be going “bye-bye in the car” and we are not doing that right now.

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This week, I wrote intentions in my journal. I wrote a poem, printed and mod-podged it into a card, and stuck it in a mailbox. I made a collage for a milestone birthday next week. I spent time with my parents and my spouse.

Come to think of it, I lived this Rilke poem:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Sometimes, I watch as the red-tailed hawks circle over the fields, catching currents of air and no doubt seeing what I don’t – the big picture. I am sometimes a tiny critter, here on the ground, seeing only the trees, the grasses, the little pathways I follow each day.

The chickadees’ call snaps me out of my reverie: FEE-bee. FEE-bee. FEE-bee.

I snap a picture with my phone. It’s not staged or neat, just real. Here comes the sun.

I note that Chalupa has quieted down. She must have finally gone back to sleep. The c-a-r ride will happen later this morning when I take her to the groomer.

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It’s 7:23 now. I notice how I have begun to settle into the quiet and the stillness. My breath deepens. This week, I got on my yoga mat a couple of times. Erratic practice is still practice. I look at the watercolor my friend Miv sent me for my birthday back in January – moonlit birch trees in snow-covered woods. It soothes me, both the shadowy purples and blues and the reminder of friendship across space and time.

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We are moving in a couple of months, buying a house 30 miles south of here. There, too, my home office will have an eastern window, though it will be on the second floor. What will I write in that room?

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Now it’s 7:31 and the sun is getting a bit higher, almost clearing the row of bushes between our house and the one next door. I am hopeful that we will meet and like our new neighbors. M.J. is growing all kinds of starts in egg cartons – lettuce, beets, snow peas, tomatoes, in anticipation of building raised beds in our small fenced-in yard as soon as we get the keys. What else will we grow during this next chapter of life?

My kids are both on the verge of their next adventures, one applying for jobs and the other off to college in the fall. What will they discover as their circles continue to widen and reach across the world?

To live, to really live, oh!

To love, to really love. Oh!

So tender and courageous, and perhaps one and the same. We do the best we can with the time we have. What more is there?

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I shake my head slightly at my own predictability. I might as well rename my Substack “Deep Thoughts.” Sometimes I do feel like a character in an SNL skit. Who doesn’t?

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The Israel-Hamas war looms at all times. I keep thinking of these words from Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute (SLI) where I will be studying in July:

“There are two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, and there are 14 million people and counting between the river and the sea, and they’re not going anywhere, and their fates are intertwined. Israelis and Palestinians are inextricably connected; their peace, their rights, their safety, and their security are dependent on one another. The problem is that conversations about peace tend to ignore this basic and prosaic reality.”

Kurtzer later reminds us of our “basic responsibility to peacemaking.” [link]

This week, I also listened to the Living with Contradiction episode of TEXTing, a podcast from SLI hosted by Elana Stein Hain. This observation stayed with me: “We live with dissonance that can be constructive and daunting.”

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Now it’s 8:02, a full hour since I sat down to write to you this morning. Time to wrap it up, roll out my yoga mat, and say hello to muscles, breath, and bones.

Shabbat shalom and love,

Jena

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