Post It Notes from Heaven

There were no bits and pieces of flags in my yard this weekend...apparently my Angel got her hands on a raspberry gel pen and a yellow post-it note.  Because in the park this weekend, dogs and I turned the corner, stopping at a large grey boulder that Billy and Clutch say is the park's canine sign-in sheet. And there it was, just sitting there.

 

This seems like a timely thought as Elul winds down and the hard stuff, the opening of the soul, is right around the corner. This particular thought doesn't seem like much of a challenge anymore, I'm happy to forgive myself for just about anything these days. So I need to go back to the park and see what else she's got.

Moving My Shards into Elul

And so the wheels of introspection move forward.

On a walk along the towpath with the dogs this morning, I spotted a great blue heron on the path ahead of us, just perched on the ground by the side of the canal. Billy finally noticed and charged ahead.The bird let him get about three feet away and then hopped in one single laugh of air to a log in the middle of the water. Three feet away. As if she knew that Billy only steps into water to lie down for a combination drink and mud bath.

And around the bend, another heron sitting on a rock in the middle of the pond. And yellow coneflowers. A network of groundhog (or anaconda) tunnels. Giant sycamores wound in some kind of ivy, with their bark shards ringing the ground. And drops of rain just here and there. I noticed everything around me and I got the message: I am part of it all. Connected. And perhaps that means I don't have to fight with life so much, just fold in. Just go, as Jude says.

I came home to start a project that has been on my list for approximately four summers. It starts with this:

These boxes contain broken bottles and shards of china that I have dug out of trash heaps in ghost towns throughout the West, from the surf at Deadhorse Bay, and from a really good midden that we found just across the river when I was trying to coax Himself to take up walking. Leave it to him to look down and find an ivory cuphandle sticking up under his boot, which meant we had no choice but to run home for our trowels and gloves. Which meant he never did have to go for the walk and, now that I think of it, he probably planted all that stuff there the day before.


Where was I?

Oh yeah, sorting shards by color so that I can enter them into The Permanent Record by making a mosaic on an old cafe table. I felt for the memory in each piece. And I felt the women who had tossed them into the trash. The one who put her mother's cobalt blue platter back in her china cabinet after Thanksgiving, the one who dusted ivory porcelain cups on a piece of lace on the shelf over the piano, the one who always hated the ochre vase her mother-in-law gave her and was SO happy when the cat knocked it over.

The woman who perhaps loved this:

Then there was my own collection of shards-to-be.

I used to have my little girls throw our broken ceramics into the field over the fence, planting shards for the archaelogists of the future. Just like all the other women?  Now, I save them for this project and today, I took a hammer to them...and folded them into the boxes with their ancestors.

 All one. All connected.

A Month of Introspection and Itching

That's what began this week in the Jewish calendar.

The month of Elul is the last month of the year. It slides right into the Jewish New Year and the entire holiday package known as the High Holy Days or the Days of Awe. Like the secular new year, Rosh Hashanah ("Head of the Year") involves both celebration and transformation.

Unlike the secular new year, Judaism gives you about 30 days to warm up. You get the entire month of Elul to look inward, to see who you have become and how far off your path you have wandered. Many rituals facilitate this introspective assessment. They increase in intensity as the holidays draw closer, spiraling you near and nearer to your Truths.

On Rosh Hashanah, you invite those truths, good and bad, to creep into your awareness. For 10 days, you look hard at them. Then, on Yom Kippur, you flood yourself with Your Self. You acknowledge it all, move nakedly to ask others to forgive you, move compassionately to forgive (especially yourself). And then, as the sun sets, you feel cleansed, renewed...and ready to start yet another year of marching off track. 

This year, Opening Day of the spiritual pre-season that is Elul coincided with the one-year anniversary of my total knee replacement. I have been wildly grateful for my return to long walks with the dogs, for the hiking adventures now on my calendar, and especially for the glorious absence of searing pain in my joints. This anniversary renewed my sense of physical power, which I then aimed at the weeds covering our front porch. For nearly three hours, I yanked and pulled till I turned into a sweaty mess. Hah, I sneer at sweat!  With the back of my hand, I just wiped it clean off my arms, off my brow, off the back of my neck. My new knee makes me Mighty. Invincible...

...but apparently not immune to poison ivy.

Its not like I didn't know it was there at the start. Himself saw it and refused to go out there unless I got him a biohazard suit from the Centers for Disease Control. Me?  I was just so enamored of my strength that I consciously decided not to change clothes. Even if the clothes were shorts, a tank top and...oy, I can hardly bear to type it...flip flops.

Yes, I sneer at toxic plant life!  And I continued to sneer for the next two days. Which is exactly how long it takes for those first bumps to appear. They quickly turn into vicious lesions that pop up on wrists then toes, on fingers then neck, like some dermatologic whac-a-mole. One week later and I am still on fire. I am even scratching my skin in my sleep.

You're probably wondering what all this has to do with Elul. Let's just say that a person who wears flip-flops into a poison ivy patch probably should start the process of transformation by reviewing the chapter on humility.