Israel's Augean Stable

Reporting from Tel Aviv:

On Thursday night Ibni and I dined outdoors at a Korean place and then walked the two miles or more to the protest site in central Tel Aviv. Shortly after we arrived, we joined in marching with the huge group of protesters as they began to make their way across the city. It was an extremely peaceful assemblage; the protestors (including babies and the elderly) seemed more determined and focused than angry. This morning the Times of Israel reported that last week there were not only more and larger protests across the country (and of course in Tel Aviv), but the police had retaliated in many cases (particularly in places where major road closures resulted). According to the Times, Thursday is to be not just a day of rage but also a day of paralysis. From where I sit, things should be ripe for a major explosion just about the time I leave on April 3 if not a day or two before, depending on the outcome of the final legislative vote on the current judicial reform proposal. I am aware of being here at a pivotal moment in Israel’s history, one that may be a tipping point regarding the country’s very existence never mind its unfolding political story. Ibni, his girlfriend, and their friends are disturbed to the bone by what’s going on and quite frankly admit as much. Each of them strikes me as feeling especially vulnerable because of their status as olim, although I’m not sure I understand why that is. As I write this, it occurs to me that my during my sojourn here last summer as well as on Friday morning (the day after I joined in the protest) I had dreams that, respectively, evinced the image/metaphor of the Augean stable. While I took the image to have personal meaning, it strikes me now that it might in a larger sense refer to Israel at this moment in time. I very much think so, in fact.

The Seven Fundamental Thoughts

 

The wonderful Irish poet John O’Donohue, who died in 2008, asked this question: “What are the seven thoughts that orient you, ground your foundation of meaning, and that you come back to over and over again?” He advises taking the time (over days, weeks) to list these seven thoughts and then to leave it alone for a few weeks after that. When you finally revisit the list, he recommends thinking now about seven thoughts that you've never even flirted with, that you don’t visit regularly, or are otherwise not married to. According to O’Donohue, once you've written both lists you can really see how, through such thoughts and non-thoughts, the world is actually constructed. He goes on to say that the mystery of thought is that it’s where otherness, strangeness, dislocation, intimacy, and belonging come home. It’s the biggest mirror we have.

I decided to take a preliminary stab at limning "my" seven fundamental thoughts. I intend to give myself plenty of time to finalize the list. Here’s a start:

Seven fundamental thoughts that structure and ground my foundation of meaning:

1.  “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” [Koan attributed to St. Thomas, writing in the Gnostic Gospels.]

2.  I am a strong person. I tap into this belief, one I've held since I was a very young child, often. It is key to my survival.

3.  A woman needs time, money, and a room of her own.

4.  A small good thing. This comes from the beautiful, poignant short story of the same name by Raymond Carver. I’ve known for a long time now that for every “small good thing” in my life that I pause to acknowledge and express gratitude for, I am adding another building block to the edifice of my happiness. Naming such moments is, for me, a form of prayer. 

5.  Sickness and death are inevitable.

6.  Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit. (Bidden or unbidden, God is present.) [I speak metaphorically of God here; not of whitemalegod.]

7.  Women have had a terrible time of it throughout history. I bear the wounds of this reality in my flesh and carry its injustice deep in my bones and DNA.

I think I’m going to let these sit for a time before I commit to them as the top “seven.” For the moment, however, they feel right (or are they merely self-serving?). Time will, hopefully, tell.

Am I a Falcon?

 

I Live my Life in Widening Circles

by Rainer Maria Rilke

English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Original Language German

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

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

I’ve loved this poem since I first read it many years ago. Recently, however, it has taken on an immediate, more personal significance. Last week I had an extremely vivid dream about a majestic peregrine falcon. This was not my habitual narrative dream, however. Rather, the dream consisted of a single image:

 A large, beautiful falcon is perched on top of the dead tree trunk that sits in the corner of my backyard. [This reflects waking life because last spring when I had to cut down this dead tree, I retained a part of the trunk for the benefit of the flora and fauna that thrive in decomposing plant matter. What’s left stands about 10’ tall.] Below the falcon’s regal perch, there are a variety of native birds situated on the little shelves created by furls of the tree’s peeling bark. They are singing and chirping. The birds below are clearly the falcon’s royal subjects.

 Then, yesterday, the following occurred:

I stepped into my study and, out of the large windows looking out at my backyard, I saw my dream falcon standing on the ground directly in my line of sight. We locked eyes for almost a minute before I stepped gently outside to try to get a better look at him. At that, the great bird spread its wings—its wingspan was immense!—and took flight. Only when he ascended could I see the grey squirrel clutched in his talons. With a profound sense of wonder I watched him fly away with his prey.

You can only imagine that I dropped everything I was about to do at that moment and pulled out the numerous heavy tomes that make up my symbols dictionary collection. In so doing I went down the rabbit hole into the abundant and fascinating symbolism attached to this remarkable bird. For the sake of brevity, I will highlight only a little of what I learned:

• The attributes associated with the falcon are beauty, strength, majesty, and light.
• The peregrine falcon, which travels far and wide on its expansive wings, is symbolic of the wanderer into the unconscious. He (for he is an animus symbol) crosses the great water into the unconscious.
• The falcon is, mythically, a messenger and sojourner between the earthly and the unearthly.
• The power and strength of the falcon can be marshaled in the service of almost any discipline.

If my dream falcon and yesterday’s incarnate falcon signify anything, then I am a falcon. If so, I had better start connecting with my inner falcon so that I can learn to access and harness his supernal powers.

                                                                    My Mother's Hospice

 

 

In March 2021, after my mother had a stroke that left her largely incapacitated, my husband and I moved her into our home in lieu of a care facility. She remained in palliative care until the last few weeks when we provided active hospice care, culminating in her death here at home in March 2022. Here’s what I hoped for her, provided to her, and received from her during her year-long stay:

• To keep her here and out of the hospital or a facility.
• To quickly (!!) renovate our home to accommodate her new physical needs. 
• To arrange for in-home physician palliative care.
• To retain (after some trial and error) the best caretaker in the world, Rachel, to assist me.
• To make her as comfortable as humanly possible.
• To make her happy. To make us both happy.
• To keep her at the center of our home life, in the living room, ensconced in the uniquely feminine recliner we bought especially for her. Here she sat (when she wasn’t sleeping), looking out at the trees, the sky, the regular dog-walkers (who she timed obsessively), and the children playing in the street.
• To find television series or movies that she enjoyed—not always easy because she was discerning in inconsistent ways!
• To sit with her on the back deck in clement weather where she became an avid, first-time bird watcher. We made sure the keep the feeders full for her viewing pleasure.
• To arrange for in-home haircuts.
• When the time came, to move a hospital bed into her bedroom.
• To sit next to her and hold her hand.
• To have authentic heart-to-heart talks.
• To comfort her in her recent widowhood for my Dad died in January 2020.
• To keep her free from COVID.
• To receive the unexpected gift of her unconditional validation and blessing—daily.
• To lie next to her in bed, talking, until she fell asleep.
• To keep her pain-free.
• To prepare her favorite foods—a challenge because she was a meat-eater in a vegan home. I did my best!
• To ensure we never ran out of rugelach, her morning and afternoon snack, from the kosher French bakery across the street.
• To manage her numerous daily telephone calls (she had impaired dexterity and could not manipulate her iPhone) with her adoring children, other family members, and her old friends.
• To host family as they came from near and far to visit her.
• To discuss frankly with her what she might expect with regard to her steady decline and poor prognosis, the dying process and, ultimately, death.
• To provide her the tender mothering at the end of her life that she did not receive at the beginning.
• To midwife her death.

If it appears that I did most of the giving here that would be a grave misconception. The fact of the matter is that I will spend the remainder of my days unpacking the gifts she bestowed upon me during those numinous twelve months when she was in my safekeeping.

The Turning

           

                                                                                                                      

The season has turned, not without a groan, and it is now officially Winter. I had a sound if dreamless sleep last night, a small good thing. I thought it was important to succumb fully to the darkness of the longest night of the year and, Morpheus be blessed, I did just that. Having consciously prepared this year for the turning of the season and the light, I feel fortified to face what the next three months may bring—the gifts and the challenges alike.  I sense that in this year's visit to the seasonal underworld I will find new wells of creativity but also confront ever-darkening shadows as the virus brings on its most pervasive and lethal surge yet. Even with the vaccination effort underway, it is going to be a winter of largely unmitigated death and destruction. Moreover, we are faced with twenty-nine more days of Trump’s final, wild spin into madness and fascist desperation until Biden is sworn in as President on January 20. Between the plague and politics (really, the same thing anymore), this winter will test us to an unprecedented degree. In the meantime, I continue to hold the tension of opposites in my family with regard to my mother’s need for care and my siblings' and my wildly divergent strategies for avoiding--or not as the case may be--the plague. I am resigned to the fact that this “holding the tension” will continue to be my primary task in the wintry underworld to which we have all just descended. I can only hope that Demeter above will howl for our salvation and start early and determinedly her efforts to return us in Spring to a world where the virus has been suppressed effectively and where we can experience rebirth--our own and the planet's. Well, one can certainly hope for such a brave new world.  

As I look out the windows on three sides of my studio, the weather is a study in opposites. It’s cold and blustery, and the clouds have just shifted in parts of the sky to reveal a vivid blue dome where an hour ago it was a low, vaulted, steel ceiling. Meanwhile, although the darker, denser cloud masses are racing rapidly across the firmament and seemingly off stage, they still dominate the skyline in one direction. Given this celestial duality, the lighting is extraordinary: on the sunlit side of my view, the shadows of the tree limbs dancing in the wind cast stark and eerily shifting shadows on the neighboring houses and the grass. From another view, the bare trees standing under still-leaden skies remain cloaked in their heavy grey cloud-mantles. Through this meteorological prism, I can see that today, this first day of winter, the Cailleach has begun her wintry peregrinations. 

To end, a poem from that sensual mystic, D.H. Lawrence:

Fatality

No one, not even God, can put back a leaf on to a tree once it has fallen off.

And no one, not God or Christ nor any other

can put back a human life into connection with the cosmos

once the connection has been broken

and the person has become finally self-centered.

 

Death alone, through the long processes of disintegration

can melt the detached life through the dark Hades at the root of the tree

into the circulating sap, once more, of the tree of life.