three seasons in one

I'm pleased to report that the fluctuations and vagaries of my spirit and soul have conveniently corresponded to the months on the calendar this summer.

June was all festivalia and flights of fancy. I danced on more than one huge lawn, swam naked in more than one body of water, and found myself being courted by more than one eligible bachelor. I had a peaceful, easy feeling that snowballed right up until the end of the month, when it went splat and melted in the July heat.

July saw me break up with the man I was dating (which, let's be honest, was a welcome relief), return from my herbal apprenticeship backpacking trip covered in mosquito bites, and gain back some of the weight I'd lost. Turns out I can't just cross my fingers and hope that an unhealthy pattern will somehow heal itself. The work still has to be done and I'm still the one who has to do it.

On the road home from the mountains I picked up a dead bird on the side of the highway, and once home discovered that it was a perfectly intact owl. I wouldn't have gotten a gift like that if I wasn't worthy of it . . . so essentially, I'm in trouble now. The last weekend in July I participated in a fire ceremony that spun me out into the deep recesses of my shadow: disconnected, alienated, alone.

And almost immediately across the border into August, a shift: this time, a roller-coaster ride along the spiral of life. I officiated my oldest friend's wedding; spent a week on the road with my father; served as a kind of doula at my friend's birth; and got word that another friend and teacher, a true luminary, has died. Niall and Rivka's baby dropped into this world like a sheer miracle just a few days before Frank Cook, legendary plant teacher and wisdom holder, passed out of it, well before his time. I'm still stewing in the many hard and breathtaking truths of these past few weeks, as I rest here on the cusp of a journey to the world's strangest neon desert bacchanal.

But I notice an awareness, a lightness in me that I have never known before. A sense of being quietly awe-struck, holding a reverence for the meaningful meaninglessness and the meaningless meaningfulness of life, the world and everything. Some veil has lifted and I find myself viscerally aware of my power to choose at every moment, and the possibility of landing, over and over again, in the present. I am smiling into the mystery and in so doing find a tenderness, a forgiveness for myself that is entirely new. Facing darkness enables me to allow light in, as it turns out, and this bemusing and wondrous reality is the seed of my practice now.

Onward, into the dust . . .

spoils of the weekend

It's Sunday afternoon and my dining room table is overflowing with apples, blackberries, figs, tomatoes, calendula flowers, and seaweed. The apples, a bit bug-bitten and bruised, will eventually emerge as sweet and leathery rings from the dehydrator, a perfect snack. The blackberries stained my fingers purple, and there's a streak of tomato juice and seeds drying out on my cutting board. The figs are just perfect. And the seaweed was a trade for three or so hours of my enthusiastic saleswomanship at the Grand Lake farmer's market yesterday, hawking my friend and teacher Trish's mineral-rich wares from the sea.

The calendula flowers? Harvested in front of my friend David's apartment in Berkeley, before we drove up to a farm in Sebastopol this morning for a four-hour plant medicine class. We got there a bit early so I got to spend some time plucking blackberries from the bramble and picking apples off the ground.

During the class I sat with a living stand of calendula flowers for a long time. It's a simple, strong plant that wakes with the sun and sleeps with the night, a renowned topical healer. I talked with it for a while. Just open yourself to the world and shine out your light, it said. Don't question your choices. Just live, love, give your healing gift, rest when the night comes.

Over my time out there today I felt myself slowly coming into a human pace; my frenetic heartbeat smoothed out. Getting in the car and driving back to Oakland felt like a contraction.

I live in this city because this is where my life is, my community, the people I choose to experience life alongside, and who have similarly chosen me. I live here because my work is here, because I learn so much from the urban-based eco-intelligentsia's discourse on the environment, the world scene, the self and the spirit. I live here because it's fun and interesting, with great music, varied cuisine, and sexy people.

But when it comes down to it, I use that word "live" pretty loosely. When I am in the city, I do many things, I grow, I learn, I enjoy, I work and I play. When I am on the earth, though, I live. What's the difference? The best way that I can describe it is to say that when I am close to nature, my heart feels like it can open up and smile with life. Here in the city, the rushing and the fear tend to close my heart, or even break it.

That sounds dramatic, I know. But last weekend I got to witness part of a birth; I was there for about six hours while my dear friend labored, and then I was there the next day when their beautiful, miraculous baby girl was just a few hours old. The experience brought me into a visceral awareness of our fundamental embodied-ness, our fundamental animal-ness. We are mammals! We're given life by the waters and the plants and the sunshine around us. Women's bodies even cycle with the moon, which cycles with the tides, which cycle with the seaweeds, which bring nourishment to the community. We're part of this earth and when we deny that, there is always pain, however subtle.

It is when I am out on the earth that I feel the pain of this exile, when subterranean longings surface and come into sharp focus.

When am I moving to the countryside, you might ask? Not anytime soon. For now, I remain compelled to seek love and fortune within the urban grid. So I continue to eat wild foods, learn the plants, practice listening to the world, slow down every day. And give thanks for all of the abundant blessings that grace my life, including the greatest blessing of life itself, each day no matter where I am.

*In memory of and in gratitude to Frank Cook, master plant teacher, who left this world too soon*

OMG girl, where have you been?

The truth is, I've been scared to write.

Lately I've spent a lot of time looking back at all my old stuff, grimacing, wondering how I could ever have thought any of it was any good at all. It's purple! It's self-important! It's predictable! All I've had for myself is a panoply of distaste.

But today I had lunch with a friend, actually an ex-lover. We sat in the sunshine and conversed in the way that only ex-lovers can converse -- sweet, ranging, full of recognition. She asked me if I've been writing and I said I hadn't, that I'd been stuck in self-critique. Snap out of it, she told me, you're a great writer. Just start writing again, so you get the hang of it.

It reminds me of being in high school at the always-dramatic Young Writer's Retreats, which took place every year up in Lake Arrowhead or some such place. Watch what happens when you get 100 high school students from L.A. with a penchant for angst together for four days of writing instruction! A pot-fueled hook-up fest, that's what. But I digress.

I'm reminded of something that one of the teachers said to us, one morning in that big bright lodge. She read to us from an essay that was actually entitled "Shitty First Drafts." Oh, were we titillated! But she pressed on because the message was important. "Don't think, write," she read. I remember feeling distinctly giddy upon hearing this, and I remember the way it affected my writing immediately: I was suddenly liberated to just put words down on the page now and worry later about how they looked, sounded or tasted. Just find your big block of stone first, and then you can carve it into whatever fanciful shape you choose. Amazing! There's no room for self-critique in such an approach; it's actually against the rules.

So I've decided to start a practice for myself of writing in this blog at least once a week. To prime the pump, keep the wheels greased, make sure the ol' hamster is running in the wheel. You know? Keep the words flowing out of the chute. And stop fretting so much about how the words land on the page, that the chute breaks down for six months at a time. Keep 'em coming.

So that's what I'm doing! That's my commitment. So please expect to hear from me a lot more often, and perhaps in more experimental forms. And if you don't, please feel free to come check on me, and even nag me a little (but only a little) if I'm gone too long. Deal? Thanks.

oh it has been such a long time

What's been going on? Where have I been? Everything's changed in my world since last we spoke. I've left my job at the law firm, taken a trip to Peru, unwound. It's been a season of healing. I haven't done much writing at all, which I do regret because the insights from this time have been myriad and rich - but it feels like a deep integration rather than some kind of transformational rollercoaster. I feel like I'm getting my land legs again - trusting my intuition, practicing only kindness towards myself. Spending lots of time in the kitchen, on the couch, outside. Thank Goddess.

I'm thinking about shaving my head, just to spare myself the experience of clumps of hair coming out into my hand every time I brush my fingers through my hair. But you know what? Hair loss is the most profound catalyst for change that I could have asked for. Here's what I'm realizing:

(1) The Universe does not hate me or want me to suffer. In some ways I have been making choices all my life that have been leading up to this experience.
(2) I now know what choices I need to make for my body to experience optimum wellness, and it's up to me to make them.
(3) It's never as bad as I think it is.
(4) Complaining, crying, and feeling like a victim *don't* grow hair.

The choices (see #2) are dietary and attitudinal ~ I'll spare you the gory details regarding the former. As to the latter, it is truly a mindblowing thing to see how I have this particular experience-frame, or thought-structure, or formula, and all my life I just plug in different variables into the formula for approximately the same result. Oh, woe is me, I am suffering from (_insert physical appearance issue here_) . . . nobody will ever love me! I am doomed to remain small, unseen, and unexpressed!

Um, no. Useful though that system may have once been, it yields only diminishing returns at this point. The butterfly, all dripping wet, inevitably nudges its way out of the chrysalis. So blindly I go, making one choice at a time, with only self-love as my guide through the unfolding present moment.

Say it with me: I am ok. I am ok! Feel that. It can be difficult to really let such a radical statement of self-acceptance into your body, but when you do, it's pure medicine from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head. That's where I want to live, so that's what I'm practicing. And I'm getting stronger all the time.

Last week I went with my mother to New York City. Being there, I admit, interfered somewhat with my faith in humanity. There are just so *many* of us! And we all want to consume what we want to consume, get what we want to get, realize the dream. We all walk around Manhattan dazed from too much light, noise, heat, linearity, from too many people. It's nearly impossible to avoid the endless cycle of purchasing and throwing away things in plastic containers in New York. With all that endless speed and aggression, all that disregard for geologic time, how do people even remember themselves to be human?

On Thursday my mother and I stood in the rain at the family gravesite, out at the Flushing Cemetary in Queens. I made a small ceremony over the beautiful box containing my grandmother's ashes. We prayed, my mother and I, for her spirit to pass with lightness and grace, to go home gently. Even such a troubled soul as she should be received by the earth for her rest. Even such an embittered lineage may be sweetened with a honey offering.

Kindness. Returning to the body. It is ok, everything is ok, I am ok. These truths arise in my field of vision again and again, like curious hummingbirds. I am learning that there is nothing to heal, after all; only a life to accept and to joyfully live. It's so easy!

to turn, turn will be our delight

After getting in line at 6:30 in the morning, and being, with my group of 7 dear friends, one of the very last people to make it into the sold-out showing of the inauguration at Oakland's Parkway theatre;

after watching President-Elect Obama emerge from the White House with President Bush, with just a few moments remaining of the latter's devastating possession of the title;

after squealing at Michelle's gold and the girls' vibrant blues and oranges, and at Jill Biden's Boots!;

after laughing at Rick Warren's flourish on Sasha's name, and shouting "except the gays!" every time he made some comment or another about equality and freedom;

after Aretha simply was the queen;

after Vice President Biden's swearing-in on the biggest Bible ever, thereby ending the reign of the true evil mastermind of the last eight, destructive years, now crippled and confined to a wheelchair;

and just before Michelle held out Lincoln's bible in her two gloved hands, to aid her husband Barack Hussein Obama in assuming the office of the Presidency of the United States America --

this is where I really lost it.

What came through for me, in this most beautiful adaptation of "Simple Gifts," was a sense so pure and so strong of the human heart. Rising above the joyful din of the day, the lilting music from the inaugural platform required no words to convey the simplest and most redolent of human longings -- to be good on this earth, to do good hard work and live in communion with others, to transcend separation.

Today we say goodbye to George W. Bush and the searing wounds he inflicted on the world, on our own nation and our national psyche. Our collective hemmorage would have been stanched today had Hillary taken the Oath of Office, or even, in some way, John McCain. But that Barack Obama assumes the mantle of the Presidency brings a great, earth-moving healing for us that we can only begin to grasp in our imaginations.

The first few lines of a new chapter were written today. None of us know how the story will continue to unfold, and I am personally certain that our fragmentation will persist until the masculine principle which pervades our politics, our commerce, our very way of being becomes balanced by the feminine. But I know, too, that a turning has occurred today. It is a softening, a re-membering of what has been frozen in a traumatized rift for decades and centuries. I weep today for the way that this inauguration, this President, opens the hearts of the people to one another again. We look into each other's eyes -- eyes set into brown faces, Muslim faces, queer faces -- and instead of snarling mistrust, we recognize in one another what lives within each of us. Heart, soul and spirit rising, yearning, reaching out to love. Eyes that watch the horizon, summoning in the simple gifts that are our birthright on this sacred earth.

I am so proud to be an American today.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

registering dissent

The death toll in Gaza nears 400 as I sit here, with hundreds more critically injured and something like 1,000 wounded. This is the most devastating violence that the Palestinians have seen in 40 years.

Even as I write those words, I hear my father's voice. He is there, as he always is, with his anger rising and his conclusion incontrovertible. Of course Israel has the right to bomb, strafe, kill! The Arab nations would rather see all Jews pushed out of the Middle East and Israel wiped out of existence! This tiny nation is surrounded by hostile forces! Of course it is within the bounds of normalcy for Israel to defend itself! That's what he's saying.

He's also saying, near-shouting by now, why does the international community always point its finger at Israel, when so much violence and destruction has been directed at Israel by the Arabs, since the moment of its founding? Someday the world will wake up, he says, and see how wronged the Israelis have been, and how righteously they acted.

And he shakes his head in seething disbelief at the Jewish anti-occupationists and anti-Zionists in Israel and America. Self-hating Jews -- how can they turn against their own State, their own family? How can they align themselves with neo-Nazis, racists, people who equate Israel with Jews and want to eradicate both from this earth?

My father's voice scorns the depictions of olive groves being uprooted to make way for settlements; he decries the liberal media's portrayal of the Palestinian situation as poetic, poignant, when, in his mind, Palestinians as a people must be contained to ensure the survival of the Jews. Palestinian bloodlust justifies bloodletting of Palestinians by Israelis.

This is his voice. It is strong in my mind. I have long wrestled with it.

I remember being in high school and feeling that it was very important to have a position on this issue, just like it was important to have a position about abortion, the rainforest, and the existence of God. So I took my father's position. I was Bat Mitzvah in Israel, after all, and I had family there. And how could the Jews, the intellectual Jews, the successful Jews, the contributing Jews do anything wrong!

In college I studied abroad in Israel, moving along a corridor from Beer Sheva to Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to Sinai, marvelling at the young soldiers who polished their rifles sitting next to me on the bus. My world there was mostly filled with white people, but I did meet and talk with some Israeli Arabs in a seaside town called Akko. At a music festival there, on the roof of an ancient fort, I heard Palestinian music and stood in a crowd of young men and women who called out 'aiwa' as the Greeks might call 'opah.' Mostly, though, I stayed within the contours of the myth of Israel as I had always understood it.

Some of my close friends are deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement. One friend is a human rights attorney in Israel who works for justice on behalf of displaced Palestinians, another is a Reconstructionist Rabbi who has developed an anti-occupation education curriculum for religious schools, another writes missives for Moveon.org.

Over the years, and because of these friends, I have read, thought about, questioned deeply, struggled with Israel's aggressive actions, its systemic dehumanization of a populace, its violation of the basic human rights to food, water, medical care, livelihood for thousands of people living in what amounts to many-hundred-square-mile ghettos that are appended to Israel proper. I have turned over and over in my mind the shattering contradictions, the impossibility of reconciling the dream of Israel with the nightmare of Palestine, the truth that Arab nations support the destruction of Israel and the truth that Israel supports the destruction of Palestine.

As deeply as this situation has pained me as I have learned more and more about it, as many movies as I have watched and articles I have read and analyses I have considered, I have never been able to betray my father by taking a non-Zionist stance. Instead, I have done the discursive equivalent of throwing up my hands: it's not a black and white situation, I can't take sides, it's just a tragic situation and me speaking out about it one way or the other won't do anything.

Whenever we discuss it, my father and I, I choose my words with the utmost care. My main concern in those moments is keeping a smile on his face, that slight satisfied upturn of the corners of his mouth when I align with his views. At home last week, my mother asked me what I think about the situation in Israel. I couldn't answer her. I was unable to speak, unable to formulate a reply that would satisfy the censors who stand watch at the gate of my own mind.

And now, faced with the unassailable truth of the situation in Gaza, I find myself still rendered silent. There is a part of me that is pleased, even, in the face of this massacre, that I am keeping the small smile on the face of my father and so many others whom I love, whose own love for Israel blinds them entirely. I find myself inside a room and leaning against a locked door, a door that I have slammed on the wailing masses outside, relieved to be safe inside the room. The show must go on. The Jews must go on, at all costs. Otherwise, what would be left of us? Were these walls to crumble, this door to come off its hinges and fall to the floor, what -- who -- would save us from annihilation? NO ONE! my father shouts. No one would save us, so we have to save ourselves. Be silent, then, and turn your face away from the horror that ensues.

But I cannot. I cannot turn my face away. I have to look, to recognize. Selfishly, for the sake of my own humanity, my own realness, I have to enter the naked truth of this sweeping destruction. I have to acknowledge what torments the Jews are inflicting on the Palestinians, and what torments the Arab establishment inflicts in return. I have to bear witness to the ways that these cousins wound themselves, over and over again, mortally.

And I have to register my own dissent to this violence; I have to speak, to say that this is not in my name, this is not the door that I want the people of my faith to pass through on our search for sanctuary in a deadly world. I cannot stand by and swallow this great misery as if it were simply a bitter medicine to precipitate healing. No. There is no healing, no peace that can come from this. I refuse to accept that this is for the good.

I say no to the massacre of Gaza.

My words here travel out into the nothingness, reaching a handful of people, bringing no salve to the bleeding wounds of the people of Gaza. Were this to reach my father, it would simply anger him. No change can be wrought from the saying of these words. I say them, nonetheless, because I must.

"I have come into this world to see this: the sword drop from men's hands even at the height of their arc of anger because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound" ~ Hafiz

revisiting

I've been at home with my parents for the last week, in L.A. It has been, essentially, a film festival -- I think we've watched 5 or 6 (or maybe 7) videos, plus a few on cable late at night by myself (including "But I'm a Cheerleader," and boy oh boy did Clea Duvall's andro to Natasha Lyonne's femme give me a scandalous little shiver there in my parent's den). I've been sleeping hours upon hours every night, reading the paper all morning. My mom bought me a pink shirt today after we went for Japanese food. I made some fantastic latkes the other night -- Susie Bright has a recipe blog, did you know that? It's called "Suzie the Homebreaker" and I highly recommend her latke recipe.

Another thing I've been doing is sorting through all my old journals and letters. They're all still here, in the drawers of my childhood desk. I seem to have saved absolutely everything -- every note ever passed my way in pre-calculus, every errant scribbling of mine from my teens and early twenties. Paging through it all, I'm struck mainly by the state of deathly insecurity in which I have spent so many years of my life. My college scrawlings oscillate between a fear so pervasive I was almost paralyzed, and hope for a stronger self to emerge.

It is amazing to read, and so sad, too -- I grieve all of that lost time. What was I so afraid of? Why was I so full of condemnation for myself, for my every move? What's excellent, I guess, is being able to see it all in retrospect, and to see how far I've travelled since those years. But the feelings then were mostly along the scalp-tingling fear spectrum -- fearing the worst in terms of my personality, my loveability, my capacity to succeed in the world. I remember, both from reading my diary entries and from all the associated images that have come rushing back, how I would end up so many days and nights cowering away from the specter of my own terribleness. No high could erase that creeping dread.

I wish I could go back and talk to my trapped, tormented 21-year-old self. I wish I could tell her to loosen her grip a little bit; that she really is smart and talented enough to be at that big school with all those math-smart people; that it's okay to feel attracted to other girls. I wish I could somehow transmit to her that she is a precious light, a vital player in the community of life, beloved on this earth. She didn't know any of that then, but life was calling to her, however faintly it echoed in the darkness, and I wish I could have held her shoulders and whispered in her ear to listen, listen.

As I said, though, it has me marvelling at the journey. We are space travellers but we are also always reaching deeper in, brushing back the dust and debris from the essential qualities that glow through time. It is beautiful, to have a record of all my yearnings, because through it there runs a line, a thread, a vein of gold. I saw it back then, as bleak as I felt, and I wrote about it. And now I am running alongside it, faster and faster, flying along on the dream that this thin strand will take me to my place, take me home.