To live in ignorance
to live in the dark
to live in the Absence
To accept my inadequacy and yet see You
and be present to You in the darkness
Your feeling Presence
in the coursing of time
now another calendar year
by which I mark the passage of my failure allowing it to
gently wash over me like a light cotton wisp
Maybe we need do nothing
for powerless we are over ourselves, over politics and
world events despite intimacy of imagery on our TV, the
forces of nature and history overwhelm us like our own
rage and intolerance.
Maybe just maybe
being present to the flux of time is sufficient now that I
cannot change the world nor even myself those ingrained
defects of character that persist and haunt me like a
plague or a recurrent infection.
Just to be present Shabbat comes in and leaves witness
to it all the horror and the majesty
Another year
hard to believe
a step closer to my mortality
being "gathered to the fathers"
I think of my ancestors a lot recently
how deeply I am connected organically to them lying in
rotting graves and crematoria despite my knowing nothing
of them.
As time flows through me it changes
it experiences itself differently
like water flowing thought a machine
a distillery maybe
neither better or worse for the chemistry, just different
If I am, were able to remove the moral and the piety from
the equation what is left is just water, just me,
experiencing it all, the flux of time.
and maybe that will be sufficient to say I have lived
adequately without judgement day for that too requires an
enduring of sorts albeit different the suffering of being and
being present to others and self.
the toleration of the inner critic the sense of inadequacy
that pervades all and the knowing of how fragile it all
remains.
This too is an endurance.
