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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.

No One’s Far From This Tree

March 23, 2020 in City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Spirit Matters

Yesterday I called Apple with a few questions about my new Macbook Pro. The rep offered some helpful solutions, and then we began comparing notes about our new O-Corona lives, hers in Kentucky, mine in one of the US hubs of the virus.

At first it was light and breezy but as is almost always true in Life in the Time of COVID-19, the dynamic quickly deepened. She was shocked by how how completely the City That Never Sleeps had shut down and by my casual assumption that I had contracted the virus. Her greatest fear, she confided, was that she’d also contract it. Then she began to sob.

Actually, she said. My greatest fear is that I’ll have to give birth while we’re all still quarantined. She went on to say she had just discovered she was pregnant, which she’d been trying to do for the last five years. There was a pause, in which we both realized just how far we’d conversationally traveled outside the parameters of a standard Applecare call. Then I took a breath.

Ok, I said. We’re going to pray together. So we did–for our health and the health of everyone we loved, which in my case was and always will be everyone. For the spirit in her body who had the temerity to incarnate into the world now. And for all the corporations and institutions to recognize and honor our humanity. After we hung up, I received the standard Applecare survey. Was I satisfied with the quality of the call? Yes, yes, I was.

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