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Traveling Where We Dare Not Travel

April 10, 2020 in Country Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

This post addresses lofty stuff, but I ask that you hang in with me if you have the available bandwidth.

I woke thinking about my college thesis. I concentrated in gender studies at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges–basically about as 90s identity politics as you can get. My thesis was about the theory of praxis–in particular, the marriage of theory and action in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as it could be applied to Marge Piercy’s brilliant utopian/dystopian 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time.

Wildly on the edge of its own time, the book acknowledged the multiverse and envisioned a potential 2137 in which people lived in communal villages free from capitalism and the blistering restrictions of contemporary gender and racial coding as well as biological nuclear families. It seemed like a softball to receive departmental honors, if I’m going to be honest. But I made a fatal strategic error.

In the oral defense of my thesis, I was asked whether I endorsed the murderous measures that the time-traveling protagonist–a Puerto Rican woman living on the poverty level in her 1970s timeline–had taken in order to rise up against the oppressive mid-20th institutions that literally were caging her and her brethren. Of course, I said. There are times when violence is required–when the peaceful thing to do is dismantle your oppressors by any means necessary.

No prize for me–in retrospect it’s hilarious I thought a Quaker college would reward such a stance–but as I woke thinking about the robber barons committing mass genocide to line their pockets with more bucks and ensure their rule, I flashed fondly on the 22-year-old I was.

“It” of Wrinkle in Time (another crucial interdimensional travel book

There may indeed be a multiverse–as an intuitive I believe this more and more–but in every timeline I can see, I agree with that girl.

After all, who among us has not, in the last few weeks, wished what we never thought we could wish on another human being? Even vaguely alluding to such a thing breaks the law, and yet every moral law I heed has been broken every day of our reality TV dictator’s rule.

Matzo, Solidarity, Love: Pesach 5778

April 8, 2020 in Country Matters, Essays, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

“Dance of Miriam,” Marc Chagal

I started to write this informative chatty post about the role plagues play in the Passover story, in which when Jews survived against all odds. About how Miriam, from whom I take my Jewish name, led women to safety. And about how this week in so many faiths is about rebirth, realignment, re-rising. It’s all true.

But really I’m floored.

It’s Passover and I’m alone. I don’t usually mind being alone, even during this COVID-19 Crisis. I’ve called myself a child of the universe since I was 8 and realized that the sparkly warmth I always felt was the love of the universe holding and helping me through all kinds of unseen and unexpected obstacles. That it was okay that no one around me could love my sooth-saying, larger-than-life self. That it was okay that other Jews couldn’t accept this tall, blond child of an Ashkenazi secular Jew and a tall blond woman of Sioux and Scottish descent. Because the universe had my back.

The universe for whom God or even G-d is a perfectly handy nickname.

But on Passover things got sad every year. Everyone else would disappear from school for what seemed like the Jewish Thanksgiving and I would feel the full extent of that space yawning between me and everyone and everything else–even my ancestral traditions. And today I am sadder than I’ve ever been.

Yes, this is a day to honor our will to survive and thrive. But I’m flattened by the death count. By the viral load palpable in the air. By our dwindling resources. By those still not respecting social-distancing as others suffer and sacrifice so much.

So today is both sad and hopeful. Many of us will survive as Jews survived those plagues all those centuries ago. Some of us will even rise to build a better world, a finer day. But on this night of Passover, instead of sharing a seder via Zoom or some other doggedly cheerful activity, I am letting my reikitty baby me. Because broken hearts need to be heeded when you can’t yet heal them. Chag Pesach Sameach.

To schedule a reading about how to better serve yourself and others in this time of great need and great change, book here. No one is turned away due to lack of funds.

The Space We Still Share

April 6, 2020 in City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Spirit Matters

Friends, we are all struggling no matter where we are. But I’m having a hard time with tone-deafness.

For the people in less-afflicted areas, I’m glad for your nature communion. Sorry you’re tiring of TV offerings and snack options and that your trip was cancelled. Mildly amused by memes about how your hygiene and health routines are suffering. Even glad for those who are embracing this time as an opportunity for “radical self care.”* But speaking as a New Yorker I can’t walk a block without stumbling over a homespun sidewalk memorial for a neighbor who was just felled or an ambulance whisking someone else away.

So many people I know are sick, people I love and admire in my immediate world. It all hurts, even the deaths of the people you didn’t especially care for. And then of course there’s the terror of your personal welfare. The fear of the many unemployed. The fear of our deplorably unprotected essential workers. Most New Yorkers have no safe outdoor space whatsoever and for those of us who don’t have a second home or family we can run to, what is happening in real time is unfathomable. Because for many of us there is no other place.

Either we were raised here or this city welcomed us outcasts and it was here that we finally found a home. We loved that we were all crowded together–in it together–even when we complained, and now that has been ripped from us though we’re still all crowded in the same place. Only now it’s not “crowded.” It’s “caged.” And I’m relatively lucky as a New Yorker. I have enough food in my fridge, savings to get me through a few more months, framily support.

I am not saying anyone should feel guilty, it’s a useless emotion. I am saying we should be careful about what we put out there. Especially while so many of us are sick and dying and grieving and losing everything we thought shored us.

Don’t abstract this trauma. Don’t expect “good vibes only” when some of us legitimately feel a roaring black hole of loss and rage and fear. Don’t expect us to be available for business as usual while our entire worlds are tumbling down around our heads.

I send love and I feel yours too. But we are all going to have to take it up a notch in terms of how we compassionately and consciously hear and tell our stories–me included. A new etiquette is required–a new social contract for these no-contact times–and we’re just going to have to fumble our way through. Patience is the new praxis.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy