Your Life, Your story

All of us walking this earth have lived a different story. We have met different people who have either inspired love in us or inspired fear in us. People who live a life of courage and honesty or people who trample others in their quest for money and power. People who have helped us up or put us down. People who made us laugh or made us cry. Each one of us has traveled our own path and therefore has our own individual story to tell. The story of our life. Based on our very own experiences. These experiences and meetings of people will be the reason we have our views and our opinions. If we have met people of a certain race or religion or nationality or occupation, who have made a positive impact on us we will feel favorable towards anyone who resembles them and if someone hurt us we will very likely feel unfavorable, more specifically if many hurt us. How could we even think of telling someone else their experiences were wrong. They lived their story, yet it doesn’t have to end there. We can search out the good. We can remind ourselves that hurt people hurt people. The cycle has to end somewhere, why not with me? Why not with you? Perhaps we can respect each person’s personal experiences yet still hope to heal the negative ones. Getting into someone’s face and telling them their experiences don’t matter is hardly helpful. We need to listen to each other better to really understand the pain and the fear if we want to get past it. We need to love and to forgive and to hope and to dream and to create a more peaceful and safe world for everyone. Perhaps you start with you, and I will start with me. Be the one to inspire love and courage and listen with an open heart to those in pain. 

Isolated together

What we are seeing is how connected  we all are. In just a short time this virus has, by no effort at all, spread to all four corners of the world. Do you realize what that means? You can literally change the entire world by one interaction. Imagine that!!!

We are living through some extraordinary times now. The awareness we have is so different, we can feel the changes in the air. This may one day be known as the great clarifier. The things that we love and are grateful for and the things we  miss are becoming clear. The things we don’t have place in our hearts for are also becoming clear. That which makes us feel happy and peaceful and that which doesn’t. I do believe we are all learning about our own values and our own hearts and minds. We see what is wonderful in our lives and relationships and we see what is broken. Some of those relationships are beyond repair and now, without our distractions that is becoming clear, and many are fixable and thank G-d we have the time to fix it. Some things have to be put in the past and left there so we can live now with less weight on our hearts. Let’s imagine that we will be in this situation for a few months. We will need to make our lives meaningful and full from our own homes. We have an opportunity to grow that which you cherish and let go of all that you don’t. We all need to heal from different experiences we’ve lived through and now is such a great time to work on that. We can do all of the home projects we’ve been putting off, have all of those important and difficult conversations we’ve been avoiding. Time out of your routine allows your thoughts to be different as well. The uncomfortable thoughts that we avoid by just going about life, are no longer avoidable. Let’s look at our hopes and fears, our dreams and our nightmares and see what is really there, keeping us from feeling whole. This is such a great time to take a good look at the direction of our lives and realign it with the future we always imagined. Perhaps at this time you can learn something new. Something you’ve always wanted to do but never had the time. Perhaps we can use this time to feel connected through our hearts and minds and efforts to our friends and families and communities. We have been seeing people connect through music out their windows and on their computers. I know that our souls are all connected to G-d and to each other. The isolation we feel is when we are not connected to our own soul, and in turn can’t feel the connections of our souls.  So many of us have lost the connection to who we really are. We have been worn down by our challenges. We are surviving on autopilot but not really living. Take the time to connect to your own soul and to G-d for in that connection is the whole world. This connection is found through love and joy and kindness and patience and faith and forgiveness, not through fear and shame and judgement for that will always isolate you. The connections we have go so far beyond the physical that the walls of our home cannot divide us. We were all wounded separately but perhaps we can heal together.  Let’s use this time to build a more beautiful life for ourselves, our families and friends and let that spill over everywhere. When this time passes, we will talk about the dark time before, when we were so divided and we forgot the good humanity is capable of. G-d put us all in this world together and we all have different jobs to do, so let’s stop fighting and start opening our hearts and minds to each other. Lets get rid of what we don’t want in our lives and cherish what we do want. Let’s stop surviving and start living. 

The Burning Bush

This is a hard one for me. It’s more written in frustration after hearing another story of a brave woman who is doing her best to protect her kids and herself from an abusive father/ex-husband. I fully accept that G-d gives us challenges so intense that it takes our breath away. What I find tragic and unacceptable is that people make it harder. We are not victims of our circumstances, we are survivors of our circumstances, yet sometimes we are your victims. Victims of slander, of pity, of judgement, of communities who don’t know the truth but assume they do. I am privileged to hear so many heartbreaking stories and I hope someone will read this and recognize the consequences of that type of behavior. 

We do what we have to in order to survive this life. We find comfort and enjoyment wherever we can and we hope you don’t judge us to harshly for we are not you. We use whatever means possible to get through what you don’t even imagine our lives are. We turn to books or to music or to food or to drink or to hours of mind numbing screen time. We are currently surviving. We survive sickness or abuse or divorce or loss of jobs and friends and family and community. Whatever we are going through, it’s harder then we imagined and we are actually surprised we got out of bed today. We are all being tested and challenged and broken and healed. We are quiet in our deepest pains and fears and bite our tongues when you think you know. What good will it do trying to reason with people who know what’s best for you but don’t know who you are. Why waste an ounce of our precious energy trying to explain the way we cope when you don’t care what it is we are living through. You are not the one drying our tears, you don’t even want to recognize the tears. This life we all get to live is our journey set out to us by G-d to reach a destination only He knows. So why judge us that our path is not your path, that our way is not your way? If it makes you uncomfortable just move aside. Don’t be part of the problem. The ones who sit on their thrones in judgement and gather in the hen house clucking their “heartfelt” concerns for our wellbeing. Recognize that you are not given the vision of G-d to know what is in our lives and in our hearts and minds. Give us the dignity of honest support and love and friendship. Hold our hands and wipe our tears and silently bear witness to the struggle, or sit in your place of judgement reminding us all that you don’t approve and you would do it differently. I know that you like to pretend that life is a math equation, sterile and logical and if you do the right thing, you will succeed, but in your heart you know that is a falsehood. But that makes you fearful so you perpetuate the lie and punish those who have the bad fortune of knowing the truth. Every so often you catch a glimpse of that truth in the life of someone you come across and it enrages you so much. The loss of control the chaos of it all, it challenges all of your beliefs and instead of recognizing it, you punish the one who made you feel that way. You take the person surviving the storm and you make it worse. You punish them and condemn them and turn their storm into a blizzard. You, the righteous, and upstanding citizen. The do gooder and the educator. Let me help you understand this. The people you are hurting are the burning bush. They are in the fire and still living. They are living their worst nightmares and still feeding their kids but you are telling them to clean their kitchen. They didn’t voluntarily walk into the fire, they were put there with no choice but to survive and that is exactly what they are doing. You cannot gaze into the bush and live like you did before. So please, either take off your shoes or walk away. 

Making the Pieces Glow

Next Year in Jerusalem

Many years ago, we were taken out of slavery and taught how to live as free people. We became a nation at that time. A strong vibrant and shining example of goodness and kindness and righteousness in this world, that doesn’t always appreciate it. But this is just a prelude to the ultimate redemption. This is learning to live with faith despite the pain we all endure. This is trusting that G-d is good and that all of our suffering is for a reason. The final redemption will be so different. It will be understanding why all of that was so necessary but now we are completely redeemed. Free from our fears, from our past, from our pain, free from our challenges, free from our sicknesses, free from our guilt, and free to live without all of that. This is why we talk about it every year at the Seder. We started something and haven’t finished it yet. We started a journey of faith and growth and haven’t yet reached our destination. So let us check our map again every year and make sure we are still on the right path. The path that leads to “Next year in Jerusalem”. I am confident that we are on the right path, that G-d sees the good and that we will truly celebrate our ultimate redemption “This year in Jerusalem”

Have a beautiful and enjoyable Pesach. 

The Trachea Change

Every three months

We remove the lifeline and put in another. 

It’s necessary and seems so routine. 

But it feels like I might die

Every three months. 

I watch and hold his hand and look into his eyes because he can tell from my eyes if he is ok. 

So I lie, deep into my eyes. 

I watch and listen as he begins to deflate. 

The air escaping makes a gurgling sound. 

His chest falling and not rising. 

His eyes wide with fear looking into my lying eyes as I reassure him his next breath is coming. 

There is a calm frenzy getting the new one in and watching and hoping his chest will rise again. 

Cleaning the blood, making sure he is breathing well, cleaning more blood. 

When all is done, he drifts to sleep with the help of amazing drugs. 

I am still holding his hand looking at his eyes, 

so grateful that no one is looking at mine. 

Every three months. 

There Are No Words

It’s been a while since I wrote last. Generally, I write when I have something to say, but this time I am writing because I have nothing to say. My words have stopped working. Words are merely names we have given to feelings and emotions and things. They don’t begin to scratch the surface of the depth, the intensity, the fear, and the pain. A month and a half ago I almost lost my Yitzi, my heart, my soul, and my best friend. What words would even remotely work to describe that?  It is taking me a very long time to get past that. In the past, I have prepared for all sorts of emergencies, just in case something happens. I told myself-although we need to be prepared, thank G-d, we have never had an emergency. Now not only can I not say that but I know how one minute may mean all the difference in the world.  I fooled myself into thinking we are stable and are not in any imediate danger. So how can I possibly sleep? What if this time I don’t hear his machine’s alarm? How can I even think of traveling? Yitzi of course bounced back five minutes later. He has totally refocused on writing even more, learning even more, and telling the kids where they come from so they can see where they are going. He is so busy living in the best way possible, and I find that both amazing and slightly annoying.  He is thriving and I am not.

At the same time we have had a huge shift in our nurses. All of the nurses we had 4 months ago, left. One had a baby, one got an awesome job as a hospital administrator, three went back to school and the last was just working too many jobs. We have had some luck on getting new ones and will keep working at it until we are fully staffed. As you can imagine, or better yet, as I hope you cannot imagine, this has not made anything easier. The many nights I have stayed up just watching the man I love sleep- making sure he is still breathing and listening for any changes in the sounds of the flow of air- has made things even more challenging. It is  lonely to sit in silence just watching for hours on end. I can almost hear the sound of my heart breaking. If I ignore the tubes and the machines, I can fool myself into thinking nothing has changed, he is just sleeping.  I took a little break from anything public. No talks for two months, no traveling, and just focusing on my family. I thought this would be a good way to recharge and reassure the kids and find some sort of strength from somewhere so deep I am having a hard time locating it. I had hoped I could take the kids out on sundays, do things Yitzi used to do with them. The beach, the mountains, play games, ride horses, eat ice cream. But what I have done is stay up every weekend night and sleep all Sunday and cancel time after time on my kids. They know someone has to be nurse, but as they say, neither their father nor mother can do regular mommy and daddy things. I am so tired of disappointing them. Thankfully there are a few young men in the community that have been helping out the last few weekends and I actually got to take one daughter to the dentist but we have yet to make it to the horses. There are times when I wish we could lock the doors and hide from the world. Just hug the kids and focus on them. They want so much to be a regular family with privacy and routine. The younger three have really been struggling with the constant flow of people at all times. We tried implementing certain visiting hours. 

Monday through Thursday from 5pm and on is family time, but there has yet to be a day where it was enforced and that is my fault. I want Yitzi to be happy and he loves all of the visitors, and I have a really hard time saying no. But Yitzi has reminded me that he is a father and wants the kids to be happy and he will be happy if they are. So from here on we will be closing our door on occasion and perhaps telling you it’s not a good time. And hopefully soon the kids will feel 'normal' again.  

I am looking forward to a day when this trauma becomes the foundation to something positive that can be built on it, but for now, I am doing my best to practice what I preach.  Find things that bring some joy and some peace of mind. Be patient and kind to myself until I am able to stand a bit more firmly on my own two feet. And recognize that when things are not OK, its acceptable to not be OK (temporarily). I am looking forward to the day that I can once again smile from my heart.