וּמִבְּשָׂרִי, אֶחֱזֶה אֱלוֹה “Umivsari Echeze Bo”

וּמִבְּשָׂרִי, אֶחֱזֶה אֱלוֹהַּ

“ And when after my skin this is destroyed, then without my flesh shall I see God”

Job 19:26

Looking out on the landscape below

Some thousand feet up in the tropical rain forest

All the way to the blue coast line

In the distance

I feel the benign soft hand of mother nature Laying out the

green forest canopy like a carpet For my eyes to glide down

Beckoning me into her arms

In a lush embrace.

No wonder the ancients worshipper her

Afraid too, of her fierce rage.

But today she is calm

The rain clouds, despite the humidity

Allow for a tepid warmth

Protecting us from the fierce Caribbean sun.

Then the sky gods arrived

And later, the Old Testament

With justice and mercy

And all manners of reasoning,

And the price to pay was all manner of demythologizing,

Allowing for the illusion of the beginnings and.. the ends of

time Where the final reckoning might take place

And the payoff for sin or redemption.

As if the psychic projections of mankind needed this sense

Of right and wrong,

But with it, the tyrant god mirroring the tyrant king.

And so

We inherit this psychic embryology

Projecting good and right on the divine

And bad and evil onto the devil

A split psyche with its public persona and private

darkness within.

But looking down today

It feels good to embrace her once again

Free from the social, religious and cultural constraints

Free from the traffic and noise,

Free from the expectations of work, family and social order.

For a few minutes.

Yet fixing and healing must be done The work must continue

The “tikkun” will take place willy-nilly And it must begin here and now

Within me.

How to deal with the darkness within

The wounds of the past bearing heavily on the present.

How to become more compassionate

More open

More willing to tolerate and suffer

Not to be triggered

Not to be afraid

Not to see work as an escape from the inner task at hand.

How to stop projecting it all on the sky god or the devil

How to stop projecting the wounds of the past onto the divine

How to own the inner demons

These questions remain

Here today.

Yea “I went to the woods” alright

But Waldon Pond is no longer accessible

There is no time

Everything is accelerating

Living is a cyber whirlwind

And just keeping up is breathtaking.

So, let me enjoy her warmth and lush carpet of green

Beckoning me today

A moment of respite

In an aging mind

Becoming stuck in routine

To avoid the ultimate questions

We all face

And realizing how fragile this all is This time

This place

In me

To resist the constant sense of failure Morally,

intellectually and socially For just this moment.