Hi my friend,
How have you been? Are you feeling a little dizzy as we careen from one beautiful moment to a hideous one? There seems to be a serious disconnect between the onset of the holiday season and the season of such discontent. I don’t know about you, but my head is killing me.
Tapping into moments of gratitude is pretty easy for me; I keep feeling a ‘but’ coming on. But there have been so many mass shootings in the US that they average two a day! Two a day…Are we really bearing witness or just silently shaking our heads? But there are two wars being waged and innocent people are dying, dying, dying. How the hell are we to gather and be thankful without acknowledging that this is an incendiary time – sort of feels like the world is just itching for a fight. Climate change, gentrification, prejudice in epic proportion, etc…we are dancing in a marathon with no steps and lousy music.
I feel a bit exposed in a way I haven’t felt before. I am Jewish, it’s in my DNA. My sister and I are part of the cohort of second generation Holocaust survivors. There are vibrations that course through the blood – guilt and gratitude, fear and faith, self-consciousness and self-righteousness. These days there’s a chronic pain that can’t be assuaged and a disbelief that’s impossible to reconcile. How have we not absorbed the reality that we can hurt each other or help each other – a binary choice, with only one positive outcome. And still people choose wrongly. I have no answer; we are destroying each other – which seems inconceivable considering that we’re all walking each other home (thank you Rumi).
And yet – Paul and Vic fly in from Toronto on Thursday, so we can be together for Thanksgiving a couple of days late. Camp K will have a full house and thankfully, we all do well together. I am going to immerse myself in cooking and preparing and will find grace in delighting in the small moments…I will find moments. And, my dear friend, I am grateful for you, and wish you more magical moments than you can count…