This Spring semester has been really rough.  Teaching into the evening I have been getting up later and going to bed later and not seeing a lot of sun.  The result has been struggling with depression and several week long periods of anxiety.    I was struggling with anxiety a couple weeks ago while I was on campus getting ready for teaching my evening class and talking via text to my friend Drew, and was trying to describe to him how it feels when you know the anxiety is just waiting to happen.  The picture and the words below are a result of that conversation.

Sitting here trying to make it through my day: struggling with the anxiety, feeling the pain in my chest, the breathing becoming shallow.  And I say, “There’s a storm sitting right on the horizon of my mind.”

And he says, “Ride the storm,” a soft smile on his lips.

He doesn’t try to talk me down, or tell me that it will be OK, he doesn’t even try to make me laugh in the hope that it will ‘get me out of that mood.’  Rather he sits with me, holding me in his presence if not his arms, and prepares to ride the storm with me.

Does he really know what he’s saying?

At the center of the storm I can feel the winds building. 

Soon waves will crash against mountains and turn them into sand.

The winds will pick up the sand, rending skin and sinew from bone.

Barren wastes left of my soul, a husk of what it should be.

As the storms build and slowly retreat, not really gone but waiting to roll in again, I look around expecting to be alone once again.

Who could survive the pain, the anger, the irrationality that lives within those storms?

But there he is.

Love in his eyes, gentle and kind, not requiring anything, just there.

Who knew?

Even writing about the storms makes them move closer again.  The next storm may be worse.  I never know.

And I know I will live, I have always known that.

#BlogElul 7: Be

Be the change you want to see in the world.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Be all that you can be!

Doing is not always being.  We all know people who do all the right things; follow all the tenants of their faith, are law abiding in civil society; and yet there is something that doesn't feel right.  It’s as if all that doing has not penetrated into their souls.

Yesterday’s word was DO, and I read several posts that referenced na’aseh v'nishmah, "We will do and we will obey." That doing the mitszot often comes first and then the understanding and being will follow.  But that doesn't always happen.  There are times when we do things, and either they have never spoken to our heart, or we do them by rote after all this time and the meaning behind them is lost.  Doing isn't enough.  There’s has to be a purpose, a being to our being.  

#BlogElul 6: Do

What do you do when your brain won’t let you do what you need to do?

There are things that I have to do today.  I woke up this morning determined to do things.  I was out the door before 9 to start doing all those things that I needed to get done.  Up to the college campus to see if I could talk to the department chair about teaching in the Fall.  Back down the hill to my mom’s house to help her as she is laid up after her foot surgery.  Then I would be able to get signs up for tutoring to see about getting private students.  Stop at the store and do the shopping while putting up signs and then home to work on my Babka. 

Just walking out the door I could feel the anxiety building up in me.  It’s hard to describe what a full blown anxiety attack is like.  I have often tried, and the best I have come up with is it’s a lot like what I understand a migraine headache is like, but in the brain rather the physical headache pain.  Every new sound, every new thought, every new sensory input makes me feel more and more flustered and frustrated.

There are times when we want to do it all, we have out lists ready of all the things that we want/need to get done.  But that may not be what is needed of us that day.  I still feel the anxiety in me right now, but I know that right now I need to slow down and not try to do too much.

#BlogElul 5: Know

Knowing is something that I feel safe with.  What do I know?  What don’t I know?  What can I know?  What do I need to know?

Having spent the majority of my life in academia, knowing and knowledge has been central to how I see and interact with the world.  Some of my earliest and fondest memories are about being taught, over many years, how to look words up in the dictionary. 

My parents did not baby-talk to me when I was young, so I was often confronted with words that I didn’t know or understand.  At first my parents would define them for me, but as I got older I was told to, “Look it up in the dictionary.” 

“But I don’t know how to spell it,” would be my almost constant reply.  At first I would be given the first three or four letters, and then slowly I was taught how to sound it out and search in the dictionary.  Don’t give up if you can’t find the word right away.  Was that a ‘c’ or an ‘s’, and ‘i’ or an ‘e’, and yes there are annoying silent letters, like psychiatrist, or letters that don’t sound like you expect, like that phase that English goes through with ‘ph’. 

I will tell you right now, if it wasn’t for spell-check I would still be doomed to getting back papers that dripped with the blood of many dead pens at all the things I spelled wrong when I rushed too much.  But given time, even back in the dark days of handwritten papers, I knew how to look up words. 

Learning was not just important, but vital, to my sense of being.

                   I have always wanted to KNOW all that can be KNOWN.

That which is UNKNOWN to me fills me with the desire to KNOW more.

But there is that which is truly UNKNOWABLE, beyond all human KNOWLEDGE and understanding.

That last bit is what has often been scary to me.  I think that, really without knowing it, I had for a long time believed in the ‘God of the Gaps’ idea.  That if I kept working to know more and more I would know enough to get ahold of, to KNOW G*d.  This is the idea that we can find and prove G*d.   And if we can’t, then is there really a G*D?

But does this fit with the fact that we don’t even know the name of G*d?

I have read and heard many different translations of how G*d name him/her/itself in the burning bush, but I think the one I liked best was what I heard Dr. Avivah Zornberg give (http://www.onbeing.org/program/exodus-cargo-hidden-stories/96) :

Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, and literally it just means, I will be who I will be. …God is being evasive. God is saying, I'm not giving you a handle. You want a handle of some kind to hold on to, to say, "Now I've got him." That's a name. And instead he answers, "I am the very principle of becoming, of allowing the possible to happen."

And that led me on to words of Abraham Joshua Heschel:

to become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words...the tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. the world of things we perceive is but a veil. It’s flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable. It’s silence remains unbroken; no words can carry it away. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear--filling grandeur.
Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder.

To let go, and know that there are there in fact things that I will not know, cannot know, will never know, maybe not even when my spirit returns to the Eternal.

#BlogElul 4: Accept

I had an instant reaction when I read the word for today, “I accept nothing.” 

This feeling that accepting is somehow giving in.   

Then I stopped and took a breath and realized that while that may be my first, visceral reaction it is not completely true.  I do accept a lot of things.  Some of them I have learned I have to accept even though I don’t want to, and some I accept even though I shouldn't.

There is a prayer that we all know, and because of that we tend to blow off, but I had heard Krista Tippet’s show on Reinhold Niebuhr, which first aired back in 2005, and so for a long time I had been carrying around this interpretation based on how Paul Elie talked about it.

I had not realized that this was a prayer handed out to the troops in World War II, or even that Reinhold Niebuhr had written it.  And really it is such a deep prayer when you look at it. 

There are things that need to be fought against; all the injustices that are in the world that we need courage to stand up to.  But there are things that we can never change, and learning to accept, let alone accepting with serenity, is very hard.  And, as Niebuhr points out in this prayer, being able to tell the difference between what to accept and what to work to change is sometimes a tricky proposition.

So learning to accept, and knowing what to accept.  That I need help with.

#BlogElul 3: Bless

My mom had bunion surgery (big toe and "pinky" toe) on her right foot today.  I was trying to think, last night and all the way down to Los Angeles today how I could write about “Bless.”  As I was waiting for Mom to come out of recovery I was thinking about how hard it was for me when I had foot surgery, and how you don’t realize how good things are till you lose them for awhile.

Now, I want to make clear that I am not talking about that, “Well at least you aren't a blind, deaf, mute, paralyzed beggar in India… who are you to complain?”  I have heard people use that as a way of saying that it could be worse, but to me if you have to reach that low to make your life not that bad, then, my friend, it is that bad. 

What I am talking about is realizing the things that you have that you are blessed with that you take for granted.  Like when you have a head cold and you all of a sudden realize how much of a blessing it is to breathe through your nose.  When you have surgery on your feet, all of a sudden every step is a blessing.   This made me think of what I heard Rabbi Sharon Brous say in an interview with Kirsta Tippet that first aired back in 2007.

And what Heschel says to us is, 'Look at the presents, like figure out what you do have. Look at the world with awe and wonder, and the amazing miracle that your skin holds the blood inside your body.' You know, that nature works the way that it works, that the world is as extraordinary as it is 

The closest actual quote from Rabbi Herchel I could find was this:

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 
― Abraham Joshua Heschel

It's hard to remember sometimes, but Life is a blessing.  And we should remember to thank G*d every day for that blessing.  For the blessing of being alive, and breathing and walking.

#BlogElul 2: Act

Back in 2001/2002, right after I came back to California from Texas I was struggling with my Bi-Polar and ended up in the Hospital twice.  Neither of these were full hospitalizations, it was more like Adult Day Care for crazy people.  We would check in at 8:30, we did arts and crafts, got lunch, did meditation and had story, sorry learning time, and then we went home.

It was actually very good, St Joseph’s used Dialectic Behavior Therapy, which is designed for people with Borderline Personality Disorder, but as a variant of behavior modification is very good for a lot of different people.   

There are two things from then that have really stuck with me.  The first was that moods tend to feed themselves.  When you are depressed every fiber in you works to keep you depressed, and when you are manic you want nothing that might slow you down.  To counter this, you have to act as if you weren’t. 

When you are depressed; get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, get out of the house.  Act as you would if you weren’t depressed.  It may not work, but the more things you do to act not depressed, the better chance you have to get past the depression. 

Acting not manic is a little harder.  The big one there, for me, is when people tell me that they see me getting manic to take time to stop and breath.  A good friend used to tell me to, “take ten” when I get frantic.  I would go and sit and concentrate on just breathing for 10 minutes.  That is not one that is easy for me to do, but it helps break the runaway manic.

 There are times when I question everything; I think we all have those times.  When people tell me, "Just have faith," that tends to annoy me.  However, when someone tells me, "Try and see doing it makes the feeling follow," that feels more natural to me.