January 2009

Cannon Beach, OR, USA

things that are hard

Things that are hard:

Owning/running/living above your own bookstore.

Things I’ve been told:

That has nothing to do with your degree.

Things I love:

Words like rigmarole and happenstance.

Things I know:

Love.

Things I want:

To do something that matters to just one person.

Things that are easy:

Breathing (usually), petting cats, doing the dishes, smiling.

A Discipline

I make my bed
everyday.

Exhibit "A" is for "Awe"

Worldwide, observers of Judaism are celebrating the "Days of Awe," the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is a time of introspection, prayer and good deeds. The shofar, a ram's horn, is blown at the end of each service of Rosh Hashanah and is considered a wake up call. Rabbi Maimonides, the great Spanish Torah scholar, described the shofar as saying "Awake, you sleepers, from your slumber ... examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your Creator." Notably, Maimonides is also known as "Rambam," a virtual onomatopoeia in reference to this quote.


So why am I bothering to write about the Days of Awe, the shofar, Jewish philosophers and onomatopoeias? Well, mostly because inter-religious dialogue remains a theme in my life and work, and because I find Judaism so rich in wisdom, ritual and challenge. And because I believe in an awesome God, so finding myself in the midst of what practicing Jews call the Days of Awe sparks my interest and wonder. Ah yes, wonder. I am curious always about the many ways the Divine finds expression in our lives, and the many rituals and prayers believers of various faiths practice in an effort to articulate the Divine encounter.


Maimonides' words about the call of the shofar strike me as pertinent to the human condition. Wake up! Look at yourself! Are you the human being that you want to be in the world? How simultaneously beautiful and horrifying it is that Judaism brings this front and center each year with Rosh Hashanah. Beautiful, that the faith instructs its followers to turn inward and give an honest, hard look at the life each is living. Horrifying, that each year Jews must come before God and their community with all their dirt and failures. I mean, in theory, Christians only believe in one judgment day in the end times, not a yearly examination of one's self in the world. Perhaps the season of Lent is somewhat akin to this time of inner reflection, but I continue to be struck by the dramatic task of redefining one's self in one's relationships on a yearly basis. How profound, how daunting, how brutal.


I can honestly say that I am not the human being that I want to be in the world. Exhibit A: Tonight I made the misjudgment that I am gifted with the ability to art & craft, and I attempted to make candles. I collected the leftover wax from my candles that have lost their wicks and put them all in a pot on the kitchen stove. I put the burner on high. I went into the next room and began futzing around, something I truly am gifted at, only to be called by the panic of the smoke alarm back to the kitchen. The wax was on fire! How something that surrounds flame is suddenly flammable is beyond me. Again, I'm gifted in futzing around, not physics. Or the art of putting out fires, apparently. I lifted the pot off the burner (plus one for using logic!) and blew on the flames (minus ten for being an idiot!). This of course brought the flames to flare up even higher, and let me just say that I am god damned lucky to still have eyebrows. My next plan of attack was to put the pot of ignited wax into the kitchen sink and turn on the faucet. I cannot tell you why, but this caused the flames to flare up to the ceiling and the fire continued to blaze. At this point, the incessant smoke alarm was more mocking me than saving my life, and I grabbed my phone to call 9-1-1. I think I dialed right, but I don't know because the phone wasn't ringing and I think I dropped it when the flames in the kitchen subsided. Dark smoke filled my apartment--not just the kitchen--but the actual fire had stopped. Thank God! I believe I followed this moment with some actual logic, such as opening windows and calling my roommate to tell her I almost killed everyone in our building and can she please come home right now because oh my god I almost burned down the apartment! I was shaking. My hand got burnt.

Photo courtesy of http://ritard.tumblr.com/

This is one of those distinctive moments in a young woman's life. My kitchen is on fire, I'm home alone, and all I can think is that there's no parent to call for help, no adult that can assume responsibility for this disaster and save me ... I am my own adult. This is a devastating realization. This realization almost makes me want a husband to kill spiders for me and solve the problem of the kitchen-sink-on-fire.


I am not the human being that I want to be in the world. I have the sense that the shofar calls to wake us up from our delirium, from the false world we build up around ourselves. Wake up! Look at yourself! Look at that part of yourself, Kelly, that you are not comfortable confronting. The part of you that wants to be saved, that wants the adult to step in and take over, the part that is passive, dependent, immobile, paralyzed by fear. Wake up! Wake up and smell the smoke filling your apartment. Well, it may not have been graceful or logical, but (thank you Jesus!) the apartment is intact, nothing was actually damaged, and I am not harmed. I am awake to the fact that I am my own adult. And as the Days of Awe fall away and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, approaches, I can decide what kind of adult I want to be in the world. Probably the kind that owns a fire extinguisher.

A Vast and Fruitful Loneliness

"Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five short minutes."

--Etty Hillesum

RESOURCE:

An Interrupted Life: the Journal of a Young Jewish Woman, 1941-1943

Henna and the Art of Matrimoning

My dear friends are to be married this coming weekend and I am so blessed as to be part of the preparations. This included a bridal gathering last Sunday for teatime British style, complete with tea cookies and cakes (there was a small pie called a "Bridesmaid") as well as some decadent Indian sweets. I was given a box to bring home as a party favor and spent the rest of the evening tasting the varicolored sugary goodnesses with my roommate. Sweet!

The main event of this tea party was to have the women close to the bride decorated with henna tattoos. The bride, Nina, is half East Indian and will be donning a special made sari at the ceremony. She herself will be decorated in henna art up her arms and legs. I at first assumed this was in reference to Hinduism's predominance in India and a way for Nina to embrace this part of her cultural heritage. However, as it turns out, bridal henna is a ritual in several religious traditions. There is even reference to ceremonial henna in both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. This marks my cultural expansions and learnings for the week ...
Above I've included an image of the henna tattoos I received at Nina's party. Natasha from Kent was the artist and she has crazy tattoo skills. She mentioned that she'd done over one hundred hands last week! While painting me with the all-natural plant paste (it was dispensed from what looked like a cake frosting tube in small, dark fecal-esque lines), I asked Natasha what the significance of the design was. She said none, that she'd just made it up. It was awesome watching her work her creative magic over all our arms, each of us presenting hands with our age or youth, soft and dry, a rainbow of complexions. None of us received the same design from Natasha, and yet the honor of coming together to be adorned in honor of Nina and Joe's wedding was touchingly unitive.

The stains supposedly last two weeks and will be their near darkest this weekend at the wedding. I've been walking through my regular week routine with hands that invite glances and comments, and tell the story of ritual, celebration and love. But I must admit that after three days of henna hands I have come to wonder a few things about the meaning of it all. And I mean that in the loosest sense. To what extent is this white lady committing cultural appropriation? Certainly there is no harm in honoring the heritage of a bride and partaking in the ceremonial adornment. I believe the significance will be felt fully at the wedding. In the meantime, I fear that I am rocking some quasi-offensive hand gear. It's mostly my whiteness that brings me pause, but admittedly it is also my Christianness.

I once took a spirituality course that touched upon the question of meditation and yoga as a Christian practice. A guest speaker visited us and we prayed the Lord's Prayer with coinciding yoga postures. Aside from feeling like a child in a school concert that performs hand motions to corresponding song lyrics (skid-a-marink a dink a dink), I felt a little adulterous. Here I was moving through the sun salutation with my body and the Our Father with my words. It was confusing. We repeated this several times and it did begin to feel less uncomfortable, but the questions remained. Traditionally, yogic practice is preparation for prayer. It is prayer. So perhaps there's greater error in doing yoga as an exercise regimen than as a prayer exercise. Regardless, the union of East and West in this white Seattleite feels always a bit dishonest and forced. Which then leaves me with one practical and boiled-down version of all these questions: Do I wear my cross with my henna?

My Harshest Critic

Oh, the expectation and guilt of (not) blogging. I've wanted to make this canvas much more alive with my presence on the page, especially since I have completed school and am often bored as of late. There is not one decent excuse for not updating Our Fodder on a bran-fueled regular basis. And so therein lies the problem. In an habitual and tired attempt at self-sabotage, I've simply stood in the way of articulating my own life, and for damn good reason.


Life these days lacks action or passion, and is quite frankly vacant. Not that thoughts aren't swirling around in my dream and waking lives, but I am encountering a tendency towards pettiness that is unbecoming, if not downright stupid. My mind wanders to such spiritually uninspiring topics as television's The Bachelorette and sometimes settles on the most unhelpful insights therein--for example, that because Ali chose Roberto that means that Chris L. must necessarily be available for me to ride off into the sunset with ... sadly, that's a waking thought. At the opposite extreme of this sort of hollow pettiness, my consciousness tumbles down convoluted paths of fabricated worry. Exhibit A: "Was I impolite with the grocery clerk? Am I impolite in general? What sort of word is impolite? Does my roommate find me impolite? Oh dear ... and what must her cat think!" This typically results in me interrogating the cat once I get home from the store, to no avail.


Ultimately, I need to chill the (insert your favorite four-letter word here) out and stop obsessing about reality television and the unknowable opinions of a certain long-haired feline. I need to stop obsessing about not having anything worthy to write about. How lovely it would be if I could bring my mind to rest on something lasting, how spiritual, really. Rather, I shall work to direct it towards streams of greater depth, streams that hopefully yield some sort of contribution to society, or more realistically, bring my mind to think think think 'til my thinker is sore! Then perhaps there will be silence.


RESOURCES:
My pathetically narrow noggin.