A Strong Move to the Heart

And from here where do I begin?

I was feeling tired.
Quite tired in fact.
Come 6 o'clock on some days, and I'd be gone-but-gone - I had a certain motion of imagination where I would curl up on a shelf right about shoulder height and go to sleep. That's where my soul slept, and my body suffered through until it could find a place to shut on down - dead and away bone tired.

So I got the number for a helping-healer type who began with grace to guide me through how it was that I could once again listen to my body. Amid twists and turns, openings and awakenings, dispatched an early hint at the goings on. And after time it became clear a voice inside without a doubt whispering "what am I doing with my life"? And then the search was on (or shall we say continued - there were early rumblings that I had swept under the psychic carpet.) I had to find a new road, because the old one was walking all over me.

It hits me in davening. I could really make an exciting jump. Here I've been camped out in Bat Ayin for a few months, but in some way my hopes have been camped out here a good while longer, and I know now the place in a way intimate. I've been tuned in to its business side for a few years and know that there's an opening up near the top...

I popped the idea to the Rosh Yeshiva and he heard the same poetry I heard. We danced and negotiated, and wrote it up, and signed, I left I.B.M. (fare well old friends!) and came on to Bat Ayin - Executive Director of a place with wild potential.

I've been now a couple months in the saddle, new worlds, growing in management, marketing, discipline, dreams, vision, hope, writing, believing...

All in all - a strong move to the heart.

For years I was blocked at the neck, but now my heart sings in earnest...

Teaser

How is it that when things really get interesting, I don't blog as much?

Anyway - reality all a movin'. Some things still a bit too young for the press.

Saw a quote yesterday from Abraham Maslow that grabbed me

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

So there we go. Such a thing has been guiding me for the past months. Listening to my emotions and inner movements. Re-examining assumptions. Becoming.

Stay tuned for the big news.

Snow and Fire

 
West Bank Covered in Snow - A Spiritual Fire Erupts 

Fantastic!

Been spending my evenings crying. Somehow the stoic disposition which I have spent years cultivating has not been the divestment of wild emotion that it was advertised to be, but really just a way of avoiding all of those things that were too messy to deal with. Well, they've delt with me, in the form of a chronic exhaustion, and I have to put myself through remedial school in how to be human. Mysterious tiredness upon examination reveals itself as a detachment of self from self, a running away.

Away I'll run no more!

Dragons beware!

I'm on the march!

Madmen

Amazing deep heartrending glorious light fantastic work to do
and here I am drawn in by chess and tastless cookies, biographies of madmen and internet wanderings.
Away!

What we Carry

Often thought that the things in my bags and pockets shed n light on somehow my essence, or at least paint a staccato picture of my inner world.

Wallet with it's credit cards, string of IDs over time, frequent flyer cards, a few different currencies
Bags with siddurim, pain killers, lots of water.
Shlepping back from the States with - favors - a Fender '67 Strat, three boxes of Bran Buds, and two packages of corn holders.
Celebrate, from time to time, that my pockets are no longer the place of lighters and cigarettes, contraband, and the means of its administration.
A box of a house packed in with holy books, vinyl records, a guitar I don't play, and too many computers.

Looking for an empty bag now, Ignorance by far the more valuable than knowledge.

Dynamic Tension at 90 kph

So out here in the Wild West Bank there's a culture of hitchhiking. A finger pointed down means local, a finger out means long distance. There's almost always someone on the road. Since I have a car, I usually stop. But something bothers me about it. Nothing in the culture; I think it's beautiful. It's not the danger of it either, not exactly. It's that as soon as I have a hitchhiker in my car, I'm tense. The best I can formulate is that I'm socially tense. I am keenly aware of the person in the car.

I picked up a young woman tonight (okay, so she was cute, that's mostly immaterial to the progression of our story.) I made a touch of small talk, and then the silence set in. I felt the tension, palpable. It has a similar flavor every time - nothing accidental, nothing really to do with who the other person is, clearly coming from me.

I decided to face it. I pulled out my psycho-spiritual tool bag. I acknowledged it, the tension, gave myself some sympathy, stepped outside it, then a new tool - sat in the tension in a light meditation of not knowing - active not knowing, real open ignorance, then consciousness of God's name, God's presence, in everything, in me, in the the young woman next to me, in this feeling, in this tension, all the time not knowing - not needing to know.

A realization - when someone gets in your car in the West Bank, for all of the assumed nonchalance of it, they are offering you a deep trust. It creates a bond, a deep bond, a trust of life. But really - they don't know you. You're just a guy driving a car. There's a connection and no connection, a bond and no bond, a trust and a strangeness. The conversations that happen in a car seldom get to the level of intimacy that has to be present for the person to step through the door and sit down. That's the tension.

I was so excited, I told the young woman.

Now that I'm writing about it, I think it might also be the weirdness in a lot of perfunctory relationships. The salespeople in stores, the guys handing out flyers in the street. They all have eyes, souls, and the flitting relationships are an ill-fitting mask for the deep currents that underlie all human contact. It's just more pronounced in a closed car in the Wild West Bank.