Enough
To the left, backlit with noon sun, a climb to the bell tower.
The emptiness of my days makes it impossible to get any sense of duration. I wake with the sun and practice, eat, walk, write, and practice again, worn out from circles of paths over stairs and ladders and archways before it is yet eight. The mornings are so silent. So still, so utterly unmoved. I can say, on day 7 now, that these impossibly fragile, soundless mornings are, by far, the hardest part. I wake full of dreams, my mind wild. An uncomfortable longing waits for me at my desk. Greeting it, I take someone else's pen from the drawer (stolen without remorse, it is, oddly now, pure regret in my fingers) and write letters in the first hours of daylight, like some other woman in some other time. I fill pages with prayers made of fear and fantasy, and set them carefully back in my desk drawer. A mala I made of knots in twine tickles my wrist, and I take it off, looking at it. Then I begin, whispering, the first of 108 lines, hearing the others waking, making breakfast, taking turns in theshower. They are practicing, too, other arts, other mantras, othergestures. We are all here to do something we must do, I suppose.
It is inadequate, this heart, this body, this church, this city, these mountains, to contain the spirit. Observing my own practice, I feel cheap, fraudulent, incapable of reaching anything divine. My tools look plastic and rigged, barely functional. I can remember the sensation, if illusion, of a heart laid bare in the presence of holiness - how amazing! - and I feel guilty, in a way, because I don't exactly want to revisit that. It is agony, total agony, to glimpse a fraction of the distance between what I am and what God is. I have known a bit of relief, at sensing oneness and grace, but the soothing presence of love and gratitude doesn't really, fully, come for me unless that horrifying gap is revealed first, which is a drag, to say the least. A teacher said to me recently, "you seem to require intense suffering in order to see the miraculous. How much greater will it be when your eyes open without so much pain."
Practice makes sense to me for learning to gently pry myself open without the trauma of truth's sledgehammer. I often think of the story of Moses climbing Mt. Sinai, asking to see the face of God. And how God, mercifully, declined, as it would have killed Moses dead. Instead he covered Moses' face with his hand as he passed, letting him open his eyes to glimpse the tail end of his glory, and the vision of that light lit Moses for days. If I practice well, might I summon enough of that light to share? I'm not asking to glow like a night light - but perhaps not to need such expensive toner.
The other night I had the opportunity to watch the original Passion of Joan of Arc, by Ingrid Bergman. Joan's face, too, was lit with the glory of God, and, frankly, it was beyond spooky. This is important to remember: continuous communion with God does not necessarily make a person better adapted for compatibility with other human beings. Monks and other devotees go live alone in caves for a reason. I must assume that communion with God makes the Earth and its inhabitants seem distracting, at best, but more likely, it makes them intolerable. The trouble I have is that, at long last, following years of therapy, I finally do not want to leave the world! I don't want to die, not even in the brillance of God's face, nor do I wish to estrange myself from the depth of fleshy, human experience. To me, this indicates that I am neither called to the heavens nor the Earth, that I will walk a middle way. My longing for the divine, for the infinite, is nonetheless present with me, and I feel inept to address this with my stupid, childish, rudimentary practices. Graciously, my half-assed devotion is revealed as such because of its one redeeming quality: namely, sincerity. A Hassidic story I learned this Pesach has been a comfort to me.
The story goes that the great rabbi Baal Shem-Tov loved his people. Whenever he sensed they were in danger, he would go to a secret place in the woods, light a special fire, and say a special prayer. Then, without fail, his people would be saved. When his successor, Magid Mizhirichi, came to lead the people, he would also go to the secret place in the woods. "Dear God," he would say, "I don't know how to light the special fire, but I know the special prayer. Please let it be enough to hear me." And it was enough. When Magid passed on, he was succeeded by the Rabbi Moshe-leib of Sasov, and whenever his people needed him, he would go to the secret place in the woods. "Dear God," he would say, "I don't know how to make the special fire, I don't know how to say the special prayer, but I know this secret place in the woods. Please hear me." And it was enough. Rabbi Moshe was succeeded by Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn, and when Isreal prayed, he could only bow his head. "Dear God," he would pray, "I don't know how to make the special fire. I don't know how to say the special prayer. I don't even know the secret place in the woods. All I know is the story. Please hear me." And it was enough.
The glass above my studio looks like watermelon tourmaline quartz, a heart-healer.
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