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Bowing to What Is

7/25/2015

Two weeks ago at Ruach HaAretz, I led a class titled "The Faith-full Body," in which we explored several embodied practices found in multiple faith traditions--breathing, bowing, binding, and walking. Now I'm at the Body-Mind Centering Association conference in Portland Oregon, the annual gathering of my somatic community. Over the course of four days folks from all over the world who have studied Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) and related modalities share their passions and curiosities through classes, performances pieces, and embodied conversation.

Yesterday Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, originator of the BMC work taught us about the vestibular system --those tiny bones of the inner ear that register gravity, spatial orientation, and timing. To release these tiny bones within their matrix in the skull and then allow the whole body to follow is to feel Earth-connected and cosmically expanded at the same time. Hearing sharpens, judgment softens. The more than one hundred people in the room swayed, bowed, and toned together, then shared some of the stories, thoughts, and images that welled up in us during this simple, profound experience. The poem below emerged for me.

Today Tisha B'Av, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, marks the date on which, Jewish tradition teaches, the First and Second Jerusalem Temples were destroyed--the First by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the second by the Romans in 70 CE. The rabbinic sages teach that we lost the First Temple through blatant sinning -- turning away from Oneness, sexual impropriety, murder. But the Second Temple was lost through much subtler transgressions: people hated one another in their hearts, failed to respect the humanness of the other, and so lost the touchstone of community.

If only we could hear our humanness, our Divinity, not despite, but through our differences, our juicy individuality. That Eden, that Third Temple, is what I taste in my teacher's presence, and in the loving glow of this community--a community of embodied spirits. May this wisdom grow and spread speedily and soon and in our days....

Bowing to What Is
A vestibular map

Tiny passageways
lined with membrane
filled with fluid
teach us to be
astronauts of spirit

navigating stardust
kneeling in humility
and gratitude
upon a planet
built of awareness

wave upon wave--
surfaces summoned into existence
by whispers of desire
loved into materiality
exhaled without regret
thank you thank you thank you

brain uncoiled lays down
miles of track
among hills and valleys
of dark matter

all stories unfold
are told
side by side,
sacred siblings

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The Leonard Cycle

7/2/2015

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Here it is, just a few days after Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi's first Hebrew yahrzeit and the day before his Gregorian yahrzeit, July 3. I remember well where I was that day a year ago, when I got the news of his passing--visiting my brother and sister-in-law in Rochester, New York, about to leave for Ruach Ha-Aretz in Portland the next day (just as, this year, I'm about to leave for Ruach Ha'Aretz in Philadelphia tomorrow!) . Reb Zalman told me and Burt that he had once spent a year in Rochester, trying to get a Chabad yeshivah going. He used to go over to Brith Kodesh, he said, the large Reform congregation of which my brother, Joel, is now executive director, to play their imposing pipe organ. Brith Kodesh is in a different building now, much larger, grander, but they moved the massive pipe organ with them. So the organ Reb Zalman once played still graces their bima.

For some reason today is the day I happened to stumble upon a manila folder marked "To Be Transcribed," which contained a bunch of handwritten stuff dating back years that I meant to transfer to my computer. Among the papers in it were five poems written in the weeks after my father died, in February, 2010. I'm calling them "The Leonard Cycle." On the eve of leaving for Philadelphia for ALEPH's "Getting it Together" weekend, celebrating 25 years since a delegation of rabbis made a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, India to meet with the Dalai Lama, and Ruach Ha'Aretz next week, I want to dedicate this one of those poems, "Love sees the whole," to the memories of the fathers - my father, Leonard, Eliezer ben Shmuel Itzak; Reb Zalman, the tata and zayde of the Jewish Renewal movement; to Marilyn's father Joe, Shulamit's father Bill, Elizheva's father Rico, Merra's father Gershon, the fathers who died in Charleston--to all the fathers, who have left us to leap and stumble, sob and brim over with joy in this world, without them.

Love

sees the whole

in the part,

the wholeness

in the broken vessel;

hears the innate

harmony

of seeming random

voices;

activates the bonds

of life

even in the midst

of dying.

Love is the open space

before and behind the

closed door,

the stepping stones

awash in coursing waters,

the flood itself,

surging, awesome,

unstoppable.

Love is the ladder,

propped upon sky;

and love is the

climber, trusting,

rung by rung;

and love is the one

who steadies its feet,

planted in earth.

—Diane Elliot 3/16/10 Rosh Hodesh Nisan, z’man kheruteynu
(first of the Hebrew month of Nisan, "season of our freedom")

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The Embodied Soul

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Bowing to What Is

The Leonard Cycle

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