HAVE YOU LOOKED OUTSIDE TODAY?

 In the late 1700’s there was a rabbi known as Rebbe Nachman of Breslov.  One day he saw one of his followers rush by and according to the story, the Rebbe said to the man:

“Have you looked up at the sky this morning?” 
The man replied: “No, Rebbe, I haven’t had the time.  I gotta get to the market”
“Believe me, in fifty years everything you see here today will be gone. There will another market —with other horses, other wagons, different people. I won’t be here then and neither will you. So what’s so important that you don’t have time to look at the sky?!”
(The Empty Chair, p. 14)

Taking the time to recognize and appreciate the beauties of the natural world around us is important – in fact, crucial -- to our wholeness and health.   It is something that religions – from the days when Neanderthals put flowers in the graves until now – have always acknowledged. 

For example, soon it will be the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.  It’s a harvest festival and, in remembrance of the bounty of the earth and the days when people worked in the field, Jews eat in a temporary hut outside which is beautifully decorated with fruits and vegetables.  Each person brings the branches and fruit from 4 different trees into the synagogue and waves them as blessings are recited.

In many churches around the world Sunday, October 7th, animals – cats, dogs, birds, rabbits camels, yaks, whatever, will be brought into the church to receive a blessing.   It is based on the teachings of the 13^th century Italian monk, Saint Francis of Assisi who loved and cared for animals.   Furthermore, Assisi in his Canticle of the Creatures wrote of “brother sun, sister moon, sister water, brother fire, and “our Sister Mother Earth, who sustains us and governs us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”

Many of the religious role models of traditions had an affinity to nature. Buddha became enlightened under a tree and held up a lotus flower. Jesus was born in the warmth of an animal manger and taught with the imagery of seeds, trees, flowers, bushes.  Moses was drawn out of the water of a river and marveled at a bush burning with light.  Muhammed knew the ways of the desert and meditated in the stillness of a cave  Hindu sanyasins wander along sacred rivers and through forests.  All of them recognized their intimate connection to nature. 

There’s something vital to our lives when we’re connected to nature.  Something that quenches a spiritual thirst.  So we need to take the time to appreciate the natural world around us.  But we need to do more than that.  We must also care for it so that it is around for future generations as well.  Unfortunately, we as a species have been doing great harm to the natural world we live in.  We seem to lose and forget – in our daily lives and our societal lives – our connection to the natural world.  We need to remember the words purportedly (though not) of the Native American Chief Seattle:

“This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.  All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

I wish us beautiful days like today and hope that we will make the time to appreciate them.  And I wish that we will all do what we can to foster and protect the beauty of nature.

REFLECTIONS ON REFLECTIONS

It is September.  Summer seems long ago.  If I were still at the beach or camping, would it still feel like summer?  The answer, I know, is no – even if my teacher's life was as lazy as in mid-summer, it wouldn’t be the same and I know it.  The crickets at night sound different.  The breeze feels less like a reprieve from the heat and more like a gentle message from the winter reminding me of what’s to come.  The trees haven’t changed yet.  They’re still green but it’s a different green then summer green.  It’s not new, tender green, it’s a green that’s been around for awhile, older, experienced.  Does it know that it will fade?  Does it know that soon it will change and die? The light is different too.  A duskier, huskier ripe heaviness of autumn light is beginning to slant and glow as it reflects off the trees and bushes. 

I think it’s the light that has changed the most and changes me.  I feel like a plant leaning towards the sun.  My body wants to soak up as much sun-energy as I can to use during the light starved days of winter.  In some real ways that’s what summer does for us: stores energy.  People often complain that teachers – and students – are lucky because we get to take the summer off.  We are.  What they may not realize is how much we really need that time to recharge our psychic batteries.  Recreation time allows us to re-create ourselves so that we have the energy we need during the school year.  By June we are depleted and need that time again.

Shabbat does that on a weekly basis.  From Friday evening to Saturday evening we have a period of rest: a time set aside during which one is not supposed to work, run errands, get distracted by everyday life.  It’s a time for spiritual re-creation, for reflection like a spiritual summer every 7 days.  And, interestingly enough, it’s marked off at the beginning and the end by light: the light of candles.

At this time of the year Jews will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world.  It is a time set aside to celebrate the life force around us, to marvel and to reflect on the sweetness of life.  Just as the beginning of a new school year, when you are refreshed and rejuvenated is a good time to ponder on who we are and what is around us, so is Rosh HaShanah

A Hasidic rabbi, Nachman of Bratslau, wrote this following prayer in the late 1700’s:

Master of the universe, grant me the ability to be alone; may it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grass – among all living things – and there may I be alone and enter into prayer, to talk to the One to whom I belong.  May I express there everything in my heart, and may all the foliage of the field – all grass, trees and plants – awake at my coming, to send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer so that my prayer and speech are made whole through the life and spirit of all growing things, which are made as one by their transcendent Source.

Students often ask me what I think G-d is.  My answer is I don't know.  But I believe I see reflections of G-d every day in every way.  It is in these changes of the seasons and the changes in a person.  That life-energy force that transformed a one-celled water creature into my baby, then into a boy who became a thinking, shaving teenager, is an awesome power.  One day, hopefully, that transforming life force will change my son into a father and finally a shrinking old man with few teeth but many memories.  That changeable energy, that transforming life force that enlivens him is, to me, G-d. 

I used to run a nursery school and some of the things I miss about it are the seasonal projects.  In the fall children made artwork out of collected seedpods and leaves.  In the spring we had caterpillars that built cocoons then became butterflies.  We put fertilized eggs into incubators and watched them change each day until they emerged as cute fluffy chicks (and later became big smelly chickens!)  Those projects reminded us of the wonder-full power of transformation that I call G-d.

When I look at the trees I see G-d.  Roots spreading deep below the surface reaching tentacles down for nutrients that then get sucked up into the farthest highest branches. Leaves waving in the wind and at this time of the year glowing with the reflected light from the slanted sun.  In the winter new growth will begin when the light changes yet again and the sap flows.   These amazing energy exchanges are part of what I call G-d.

The science teacher tells me at the copy machine about a theory that we choose our spouses because their smell is different then our own to better ensure variety in our gene pool.  That to me is the work of G-d.  Particle-wave theory, muons or undersea crystalline structures, are also the handiwork of G-d.  Not because I don’t understand it – but because the more I do understand the intricacies of this world around us, the more in awe of it all I am.

When I think about Moses at a burning bush, the Buddha under a tree,
Jesus at a river, Muhammed in a cave, or Lao Tzu in the mountains, I do believe they have had an experience with that nature-force called G–d.  But I also believe it can happen to anyone of us who sits on the edge of the ocean at night and watches the moon and stars or a group of people who either through song and dance or calm quietude feel the spirit of G-d alight upon them.

G-d can be embodied in each one of us as well. In the Christian experience this creative force becomes personalized in the life and death of Jesus who by sharing human experience, sharing human pain and overcoming human death understands what we go through.  Hindus recognize the divine in each one of us by bowing and saying namaste.  Quakers see a divine light in each one of us.  And the Sufi mystic, Rumi, likened the divine in us to the breath through a flute.  They both make beautiful sound.

I believe G-d is in those moments – sometimes brief – when there is abundant love and kindness.  An old Jewish saying says that the Shekinah, the spirit of G-d is there when a husband and wife embrace.  I think it was there in those times that my mother had her arm around me and read to me, as it is when I have my arms around my children.  It is there when someone helps a stranger, or an orphan or anyone in need.

Does this make me a pantheist, one who sees G-d in everything?  Yes.  And furthermore, I believe in miracles, because the word miracle comes from the same root word as the word mirror does – the Latin word to wonder.  And as I see life’s creative energy reflected in everything in & around me, I do wonder and marvel.

I go to synagogue and I celebrate all of the Jewish holidays.  Both our sons had Bar Mitzvahs.  But for me, the vehicle of Judaism is just that.  It is a way – not the way.  It is a language with a grammar and a vocabulary I can use to communicate, but it’s not the only language.  And like any language, it has its limitations.  We use analogies or metaphors for speaking about G-d in Judaism.  But they are just metaphors and they aren’t the only ones that work and they don’t show the whole picture. 

As we start this new year, as we get into our year's busy schedules and the stresses of work, social lives, errands, responsibilities, set aside some time – each day and each week -- to get in touch with that creative energy force inside of you and outside of you.  Whether you do it alone or with others, through prayer or meditation, with music or with silence, at a communal place or in the woods, be in touch with that spirit.  Whether you call it nature, G-d, Shekinah, Jesus, the divine light, chakra energy, chi, Allah, the Force or simply love and goodness be in touch with that which makes life wondrously beautiful and creative.  Nurture it, share it, and be nurtured by it.  To be aware of and tapped into cosmic energy is like a light bulb using electricity.  If each one of us takes the time to be fed by and to feed the spark of creative energy inside of us, the potent force would be truly awesome.

SPIRITUAL DOWNSIZING: ROSH HA SHANAH AND YOM KIPPUR 2012

One of the many things I did this summer was begin the process of downsizing.  I helped friends who – after living in their houses for 34 years, raising 3 kids, and collecting a lot of stuff – move to a much smaller place.  That’s the stage of life my friends and I are now at!  Watching how difficult it was for them, emotionally and time consuming, I decided to start the process myself.  I went through and threw out a lot of the files, boxes, and stuff in our own house as I rearranged rooms and got rid of clutter.  Each piece of paper brought back memories and required a decision: do I need this car maintenance receipt from 1996?  No. Do I want to save the picture book story my son made when he was 3 ½? Yes.  What about the letter a student wrote me in 2001 or 1978?  Yes!

The downsizing process is an interesting one.  Because it’s an opportunity to revisit who I’ve been, what I’ve done, what was and is no longer important to me, what was and still is important to me.  What I choose to keep and what I throw out becomes a tangible record of who I am and what I value.  And I’ve become aware that whatever I save now, when I’m dead and gone, my children will have to go through. Some of what they find will surprise them, some of it will remind them, some of it they wonder why did I ever save that, some of it they will be so pleased to find, or find again.  But it will be a record of what was important to their mama.  

A 50 year old friend told me the other day about the piano in her living room.  She’d had it since she was a child and had taken piano lessons every week when she was growing up.  But shortly after her mother died last year, my friend sold the piano.  Because she realized that it represented her mother’s wishes for who she was, not her own.

This time period, the 10 days between the Jewish Holy days of Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur, is sort of like the spiritual equivalent to ‘downsizing.’ It’s an opportunity to go through your psychological and spiritual house, and evaluate: What’s the unnecessary clutter?  What do I need to get rid of?  What do I want to keep?  What do I want to change?  Who am I?  What do I really value?  What is the legacy of a life I want to leave?

In fact, there are some very explicit rituals associated with both Rosh Ha Shanah and Yom Kippur that express this as metaphor.  On the afternoon of the first day of Rosh HaShanah, yesterday, people performed Tashlich.  They went to a body of water and threw in crumbs of bread they put in their pocket, representing one’s sins.  It’s a way to clear out the psychic, spiritual, emotional ‘schmutz’ (Schmutz is a wonderful Yiddish word meaning, according to the Urban dictionary, “Random, icky stuff that ends up on you or something else.”  And that’s what this ritual encourages us to get rid of – the random, icky stuff that ends up on us or someone else because of us.

During these days between R & Y we have to do a self-evaluation and approach those we have harmed to ask for forgiveness.  There’s something very important about this work.  As a fellow Jew, Jesus, recognized, there is a strong connection between the power of forgiveness and the power of healing.  So we need to examine ourselves and see where we’ve messed up.  And then we need to do something about it.  In Judaism, you can’t ask G-d or a rabbi to forgive you for something you’ve done to another person.  You have to speak directly to the person you’ve harmed.  Unless you own up, responsibly, and deal with that directly, you will remain spiritually crippled.

The day of Yom Kippur is in every way a symbolic day of death.  People wear white, the colour Jews are buried in, they refrain from all earthly pleasures, and they face G-d with the hope that their name will be inscribed in the book of life.  People who face death, either because of an illness or old age, often find that what is important to them changes.  Given the opportunities, they often let go of the pursuits and resentments they have lived with, and seek something else.  In his book, Healing Into Life and Death, about helping those who are dying to come to terms with their lives, Buddhist Stephen Levine tells the story of Hazel, a bitter nasty "bitch-on-wheels" who makes everyone's life -- in the hospital and in her family -- miserable.   But at the end, when she connected to the pain of others she was transformed into a loving, forgiving woman.

A teaching colleague told the faculty on opening days of an informal study that was done on what people’s goals were and that they changed dramatically over time.  High school students defined success as meaning ‘good’ schools, ‘good’ jobs, lots of money.  Older people, those who were near the end of their careers and recognized they were going to die one day, wanted lives of significance.  As he said: “Their definitions included phrases like…having a meaningful impact in my field, earning the respect of my employees and family, building something that matters in the world, and leaving a legacy that will last after I'm gone.   Essentially, the word "success" had been replaced with the word "significance" as they grew older. So, shouldn't we focus less on being "successful" and more on how to lead lives of significance?”

Wouldn’t it be great if we could recognize the importance of that, make the kind of change Hazel and these older people did, long before we face the end?  That’s what Yom Kippur does!  It helps people – hopefully – see the value of lives of significance being lives of success.

I’m going to leave you now with one of the MANY pieces of paper that I came across in my files that I shall not only keep, but pass on to you.  It is something that my dear stepmother gave me many years ago.  It was written in 1904 by a school teacher, Mary Stewart in Colorado, and it goes like this:

The Collect

Keep us, o god, from pettiness.  Let us be large in thought, in word, in deed.

Let us be done with fault finding and leave off self-seeking

May we put away all pretense and meet each other face to face – without self pity and without prejudice.

May we never be hasty in judgement and always generous.

Let us take time for all things; make us to grow calm, serene, gentle.

Teach us to put into action our better impulses, straightforward and unafraid.

Grant that we may realize it is the little things that create differences, that in the big things of life we are at one.

And may we strive to touch and to know the great, common human heart of us all and, Oh Lord God, let us not forget to be kind!

Mary Stewart

1904, Colorado