Mother Nature
Oct 9th, 2009
Sukkot in Israel is a hiker and camper's festival. God wasn’t kidding when he asked people to walk to Jerusalem in Temple times on this holiday. I'm not sure if He cared about the ten young bulls, two rams, and 12 lambs (well-done). But I'm pretty sure He wanted people to walk the land in what constitutes autumn here, which is this: moderation (as opposed to colorful.)
He made a damn fine Holy Land, too, and I'm guessing He wanted people to enjoy it when the moon was full and hung low in the sky like a huge piece of fruit, when the nights were cool and the sands were walkable barefoot, when the sun was strong but pleasant, when the breeze was always blowing but never hot or cold.
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The New Year's wishes fill my inbox (tomorrow, the Jewish Year 5770 begins…) and the apple crumble is cooling, but I'm not that ready, and I'm not that into it.
It's not that the well has been dry; au contraire, my friends. I have simply fallen in.
It's been more than a month (closer to two) since I've blogged. The reason can be distilled into one intense truth:
I will never have more time than I have…right…NOW. (Or, as my brother likes to say, later is later.)
…OK, two intense truths:
Energy is finite (yes, even yours) and what you choose to focus on is itself a powerful statement, with broad implications on the objects of both you attention and your inattention.
Or, if you will, a Carrie Bradshaw question: When you multitask, are you doing everything, or are you doing nothing?
I have always been a fan of the top ten list. I suppose it started with Casey Kasem's American Top 40 (Yes. I was around and not in nursery school at the time. OK?), the cleverest marketing device the pre-digital music world ever came up with. After which I graduated to Letterman, who used (uses?) the top ten list as a cool comedic framing device, which I enjoyed even more. Kids, this was all before Amazon's Listmania was even an executive web dream.
Of course, the top ten format is as old as the hills...actually, one specific hill called Sinai, where, tradition has it, God's Top Ten was revealed amidst much noisy weather, on this, the Shavuot festival. Whether He intended it as marketing or humor will depend, I suppose, on your general outlook.
I have always been troubled by what my mother calls time management. I’m sure other people call it that, too, but I heard it first when I was twelve, trying to get ready for school but repeatedly getting sidetracked for reasons hair-related. “Boy, do you have a problem with managing time,” she would say. I had no idea what she meant, of course, because time, as I knew, could not be managed, only experienced, or – perhaps– tamed and ridden, like a horse, or a wave. One of us was missing the point entirely. My relationship with time has only gotten more intense over the years...
This past Friday was another kind of Mother's Day: The flip side, the dark side, the impossible side, the side that haunts every mother's quiet moments until she chases the demons away. Friday was the "yahrzeit," or anniversary of death, of Koby Mandell. You may remember Koby from the news, because the story is a hard one to forget. Koby was the 8th grader who, along with his friend, had cut school one beautiful day in May, 2001, as the second Intifada was heating up, to go explore the valley and caves near their home in Tekoa, a West Bank settlement not far from Efrat. They were found in the pre-dawn hours the next day, bludgeoned to death with large rocks, mangled to the point of having to be positively identified by dental records. Koby was going to turn 14 a few weeks later, in June.
There is a familiar pit in my stomach that tells me I must put something down on paper. So to speak.
It's a pit that reminds me of other pits, that makes me 16 again, and 26, all the years joined by a common physiological sense of being carried by an idea or a feeling, literally hungry for something to write. Medical science will tell you that the pit is the work of the vagus nerve in my abdomen, which has translated the meandering chemicals of emotion from my brain into an ache of sorts.
This is all well and good but I think it's more about the weather.
So, you want people?
Let them in, but just so much past the door;
otherwise they will
either park on your soul
or
you
will end up wanting more.
Choose:
Which welcome mat position?
You lose yourself,
Or you simply lose.
The Social Well
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