Back to Love
Dear Friends,
After the movers had filled the little house with boxes, the four of us found ourselves on a grassy nook in the back, where a willow gently shades the place I imagine taking my morning coffee in the years to come. I plopped my achy body to the earth and returned to the willow of my youth at my grandmother's house down the road, where she had planted a tree for each of her grandchildren. The oldest Ayla, the willow was hers, full grown, towering over the new boughs of her little cousins. When I came to check out the house, I didn’t take note of the willow, but now planted anew, I smile at the fates who have written stories of youths beneath willows, for me, and for my children.
The last weeks have been some of the hardest of our families’ years together. Uprootedness got to us. Families like ecosystems, invasive forces beginning their affections with the greatest feeler of the group, passing through ‘til every being is touched, through connective tissues, veins, blood, vapor, vibration, anger and tears shared just the same as gifts back and forth. We are processing the transitions of life each with our own skills and limitations in weathering such storms, how to let forth the tumult within, in words, screams, the means which enable release. We have listened to Burt and Ernie sing “wheels on the bus” ten thousand times. Ara calms immediately and I move to meditations on the wheel of life that turns round and round, always circumstances anew and the mystery of spirit operating from within just the same.
In pondering prayer and communion, I have come to notice the vastness that can separate the two postures. Prayer, sometimes offered when we are most outside ourselves, lost, disturbed, full of anger or bitterness, please please help me move me come into me. Communion, when peace occupies us in the simplest tasks, watering the garden, the page of a book, the kiss of lovers returned to each other and there is no wanting save the pleasures of desire. Are we not always swaying between these breaths? Reminding ourselves to begin the little ceremony again, each act of the day, 100 blessings.
Just in the last days the morning air is tinged with a cool that heralds the approach of the new season. Our swim days once infinite are dying away swiftly. My Elul research has led me to philosophies of animacy, from Indigineous wisdom to Bachelard and Schopenhauer, and I am listening to the messages of the wind with different attunements. The wound at the core of all the social sins of this moment may very well be the notion of a separated self, divorced from the land she lives upon, moving through a dead world. Traditions of animacy, Hebraic and Indigineous, remind us that human beings were created last, all the other beings, the elementals are our teachers.
Rumi and I make the final pilgrimage upstate with the most important cargo in the back, the instruments: ouds, guitars, violins, percussion gourds from Mali, tiny bells from India and brooms that approximate the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. We are splitting sunflower seeds listening to blues, and I ask her if the sunflower plant has anything to teach her while she chews. She says stop that weird talking Baba. At the front of the new house there are two trees, guardian protective spirits. I saw them and signed the lease, didn’t need to see inside at all. On a page this week, I learned that it was customary to plant twin trees outside the house of young lovers, to bless the home they’ll build together. Like the angels atop the ark, their wings shading the place of presence. When things are not well in the world, they turn away from each other. And then they return to face each other again. Back to love. Back to prayer. Back to communion. Face to face like water, the heart of one human being to another (Proverbs 27:19).
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman