Grief (Netzach)

Twenty years ago today I was standing beside the hospital bed my father was about to die in. He was not awake but he was breathing. And then he wasn’t. I was standing there looking at him. And then I wasn’t. Within moments of his last breath I found myself on the hospital floor, just across the hall from the entrance to his room. I was curled up with my grandfather. We were holding each other, we were crying, we were shaking, we were unable to contain ourselves. 

In the shock of losing my father, I reached out towards him and held his father as close as I could. In the shock of losing his son, my grandfather reached out towards him and held his son as close as he could too. We sat there like that, on the hospital floor, holding each other as close as possible until we each stopped shaking, until we had each shed the first round of our tears, until we each could breathe with a little more ease. 

That first wave of grief stayed with me for a very long time. For years I could call it up immediately, project myself right back to that hospital floor, call up the exact feelings and bodily sensations that took me over in that moment. Over time those feelings made their way through and eventually out of my body. I am no longer as close to that manifestation of my grief. In the twenty years since my father died my grief has shifted and changed, it has moved through cycles and it has taken many forms. 

Sometimes, even to this day, it shows up in that debilitating form, bringing me right back to that moment of loss, calling up the full depth of emotion that overcame me in that moment: flooding my eyes with tears, filling my throat with bile, sending blood rushing up and down my body, speeding up my heart rate, tying my stomach in knots, shortening my breath to the point that I am gasping, that I am shaking, that I am wailing and flailing, until all of the built up energy releases from my body and I collapse as a puddle on the floor.  

Other times my grief is somber, a deep sadness, a wave of lethargy washing over me, slowing my movements, dampening my color pallet, adding weight to my limbs and chest and head, as I sink into nothingness. In those moments I have learned to accept the invitation into slowness. I have learned that my body needs to allow the sadness in, that I need to let myself be still, that I need to let myself cry, that I need to let myself just be sad.

There are also are the times that my grief has been motivational, a driving force of desire to live out my life, to not “waste time” perseverating, to get out of my own way, to live up to the person my father knew I could be, the person I see myself as, the version of myself that I aspire towards. In those moments I need to remember to check in with myself, to be sure that the motivation doesn’t turn into obsession, that the drive to be doing isn’t masking an avoidance of feeling. 

And then there are days like today - which happens to be the twentieth anniversary of his death - when I wake up feeling clear and solid, missing him but also knowing that he is here with me, sad that he has not been able to enjoy this life with me but grateful for who he was, for what he continues to be for me. On days like today my grief manifests as joy and ease - qualities that my father sometimes had and always aspired towards. On days like today my grief manifests as wholeness, as a sense that I am fully connected, not just to my father, but to everything. On days like today my grief reminds me that I don’t have to force things, that I don’t have to try so hard, that I don’t have to be right, or do better, or even be good, that all I have to do is live and feel connected. 

In this way I understand grief to be a kind of time machine, a mechanism through which I can connect not only with the past that my father ties me to, but the future in which the essence of who he was will be remembered not only by those who remember him, but by those who will remember me. 

In our grief we remember the people we loved. We remember who they were, we remember what they valued, how they lived, what they taught us. In remembering them we connect ourselves to the past in which they lived, the past that led to their lives and to ours. And in remembering them we also take them in as part of us, we carry them on past the years that they lived into the future that they will continue to influence, through us and through those who will come after.

Equilibrium (Tiferet)

A lifelong relationship with insomnia has taught me two things about sleep: that sleep is not to be taken for granted, and that eventually, sleep will return - maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but someday… 

It is not an entirely comforting thought while in the throes of a sleepless night. The knowledge that sleep will return does very little to alleviate the tossing and turning, the physical discomfort, the emotional distress. It is rare while inside the experience of sleeplessness to see the other side, to remember the string of nights when sleep came with ease, to believe that falling asleep is something I know how to do, to imagine that I will ever fall asleep again. 

Sleeplessness is an experience of extreme body dysregulation. I know that I am tired. I know that sleep will not come. And yet, I continue to try to fall asleep. I have strategies that I’ve developed throughout the years: I listen to music, I listen to an audio book, I read, I massage my temples, I breathe deeply, wrap myself around a slew of pillows. When those don’t work I take a shower in an attempt to reset myself, to bring myself back into balance, to find some kind of equilibrium in my body. 

The water usually helps with the reset. Water is healing. Water allows me to release some of the tension that’s built up in my body from whatever it is that is at the heart of this particular bout of sleeplessness. After a shower my body can relax which is usually enough to get my mind to relax, to allow sleep to come over me. 

But on those rare nights when even the healing water of a shower cannot help me, I eventually come to realize - or is it accept? - that the distress in my body will not succumb to overtures of appeasement. On those nights the only thing left to do is confront the cause of my sleeplessness. And so I sit up in my bed, muster up all the courage I possess, gather up a nice big pillow, and scream, as loud as I can, from the deepest parts of my soul, directly into it. I scream and wail as long and as loud as I can, past the point where the tears come, past the point where the pitch of my voice changes, past the point where my breath can even keep up with the screaming. I scream and scream until eventually, my body beyond the point of complete exhaustion, I pass out in my pile of pillows. 

And here is the rub: it is on those nights that I have had some of the best sleeps of my life. There is something about the emotional clearing that the screaming and crying bring. It is a complete release of the emotional tension that had been building up, that had sent my body into the experience of sleeplessness in the first place.  

In late August of 2011 hurricane Irene traveled from the Caribbean all the way up the east coast and brought storms as far north and west as the Catskill mountains, where I was running a summer camp. The storms knocked out our electricity and kept our whole camp community held up in the strongest building we had at camp. By nightfall the storm had cleared and I went outside to make sure the campers could all be sent back to their cabins. When I walked outside I looked up and saw a night sky covered with more stars than I had ever seen in my life. A combination of no light pollution and the strong winds of the hurricane blowing away every wisp of cloud and dust left the clearest and most beautiful sky I would ever encounter. 

This is what it feels like in my body after a good scream and cry. The force of my emotional release knocks out the noise pollution of my incessant self-critical thought patterns, clears out the clouds of unprocessed emotional distress, and lifts the high pressure tension that winds me up, that tightens the muscles across my body. It is a return to an equilibrium that I rarely experience. 

When reflecting on these nights I think about Newton’s third law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The intensity of my insomnia has to be met by an equally intense practice of emotional release. It is an experience of coming to equilibrium through touching the edges, through allowing myself to be in the extremes.

Integrity (Gevurah)

I have spent a lot of time in my life building things that would not last, that were not meant to last, or rather, that were meant to last for only a specific period of time. Much of this building occurred in the decade that I ran outdoor education programs on a hundred acre plot of woods in the catskill mountains. 

Some of this time-bound building was literal, as in the physical building of temporary structures. Each April as the cold weather began to break and the snow melted, I would return to the mountains with my team and we would build or rebuild the campsites and obstacle courses that our campers and school groups would use for the coming season. Our obstacles were low-tech, built by lashing logs together with twine. Many of these structures were not built to last through the winter but needed to be strong enough to hold the three hundred plus teenagers who would pass through our courses throughout the spring and summer. 

There was one obstacle that needed particular attention. It consisted of one giant log attached at each end to a tree about fifteen feet up in the air and a second log that hung from the first - attached by a thick rope on each end. The second log formed a sort of swinging bridge and hung over a small creek that ran between the two trees. The objective for the group was to cross the creek by going over the swinging log. Because this log would be supporting our campers, it was imperative that the structure be sturdy. For the first two years of running this program this obstacle would not last the winter and each spring we would build it anew. 

Then, in the third year, one of our team members who had a background in structural engineering became determined to build this obstacle in a manner that would be able to last not just one but several winters. We used only the same materials - logs and twine - but this time, we were extra meticulous with our lashing. We made sure that each row of twine was exactly aligned, was neat and clean with no bunching up. We added extra rows to reinforce our work. We took our time and we made each tie neat and pretty. We knew that it would not last forever. We knew that because we used twine to hold it together it would have a shorter life expectancy than if we used nails or bolts. But we also knew that it had the structural integrity it would need to last as long as we needed it to, and likely quite a bit longer. 

But obstacle construction was only one kind of temporary building I did during those years. Every three days my team and I would welcome a new school group full of about thirty campers into our program and begin the process of building relationships and connections. The relationships between our staff and the campers was a key part of the program. If the campers didn’t believe that the staff would keep their word, follow through on their promises, and be capable of supporting them in this new environment, they would never put their guards down enough to learn and grow. Our staff excelled at this: sharing stories to form connections, coming up with inside jokes for the group to bond over, being trustworthy  and approachable role models that were excited about getting into the deep personal conversations that the campers were quietly yearning for.

Some of these relationships and connections might only last for the three days that the campers were on the program, some campers would stay in touch with our staff over social media, and a few campers would return to our longer programs and join our ongoing community. But none of that could be known while those relationships were being built and the staff found ways to show up to each camper with curiosity, openness, and honesty. They had to hold the values of our community in every interaction. They had to be people of integrity.

It strikes me that we use the same word to describe these two different things: the integrity of a structure and the integrity of a person. When we talk about the integrity of a structure we are referring not only to its strength, but to the confidence we have that it will retain its form under pressure. When we talk about the integrity of a person perhaps we are referring to the same thing. Perhaps we are saying that a person’s strength can be found in their ability to be true to their word and the values they hold, in their ability to maintain their form, to be who they say they will be. And perhaps when we are talking about integrity as a characteristic we are talking about the level of confidence we have in a person’s ability to continue to hold form, to continue to act out their values, to continue to be who they say they will be, not only when things are going well but also when they are under pressure. 

Integrity asks us to turn our body into a container for the values we hold, it requires that we consistently live out and live up to those values and ways of being that are core to the person we want to be. Integrity is the bridge between how we see ourselves and who we end up being in the world. It invites us to show up to any task be it big or small, central to our life or peripheral, short term or ongoing, as our full selves, with our values intact, true to our word, and able to hold our form in the face of whatever might meet us.

Two years after we stopped running these outdoor education programs I went with my brother to visit the property and walk our old obstacle course. When we got to the hanging log we found that the logs had started rotting in the middle, likely from many winters of snow and water accumulation. But the lashing we had done eight years earlier to attach the log across the top was as strong as it had ever been. We stood there for a while, marveled at the strength of our work, and took a few pictures. In the end, we decided that it was time to take the obstacle down. We were no longer running these programs and with the wood rotting we didn’t want to risk anyone getting hurt. The structure had maintained its integrity for eight long years, we wanted to make sure that we did as well.

Open Heart (Chesed)

One of the symptoms of keeping an open heart is that I need to carry tissues wherever I go. “Your father is a crier” I remember hearing my mother say. I think she wanted to reassure me that when I saw my father tearing up I need not worry, there wasn’t anything wrong, he was just an emotionally expressive man. His father was the same, and it was very clear from an early age that I would be too. 

As a child, my tears would come at quite inconvenient moments: while trying to speak in front of my classmates, while trying to stand up for myself when in trouble with a teacher, while trying to explain the emotions I was feeling to my parents. They were tears of embarrassment, of emotional overwhelm, tears that showed up because I was a sensitive child who was learning to regulate a very finely tuned nervous system. 

In my teenage years, as I began to open my heart beyond my own experiences and towards the world that was unfolding around me, my emotional life turned its attention towards social and political issues of justice and humanity. My tears were now activated by the strife and suffering I was becoming aware of. My open heart led me to take up an activist stance against racism, capitalism, and militarism. The sensitive child became a serious adolescent. No longer embarrassed about speaking up in class, no longer shy to stand up for things I believed in, my open heart gave me righteousness, gave me courage, gave me clarity around with whom I would stand and with which values I would center myself. 

My open heart continued to guide me into adulthood and was central to the choices I would make: to continue centering the values of love and justice, to dedicate my time and energy to social and political causes, to pursue work that was aligned with those values and maintain a clarity around what compromises I would and would not make. 

Eventually my open heart would lead me to the primary guiding principle of my life: that nobody is disposable, that every single one of us human beings has the same inherent value, and that any assumption that holds one person’s value over another is an assumption that needs to be challenged. 

This principle, that demands that we see all of humanity as one big community, perhaps even one singular organism on this planet has had two significant implications in my life. The first is that it demands that my heart open not only to the people with whom I find resonance, shared values, and common cause, but also to the plight of the people with whom I do not agree, the people who actively oppose all that I stand for, even the people who in their rhetoric, assumptions, and actions seek to undermine my own and other people’s existence. It does not ask me to accept their claims, legitimize their beliefs, or hold my tongue in the face of ideas I think are dangerous. But it does demand that I not throw these people away, even if they do not feel the same about me.

I have to admit that this is sometimes a challenge, that there are times that I would prefer to close my heart, to draw a hard line around who’s humanity I want to consider, to do some good old disposing of my own. But when it comes down to it, the choice to keep my heart open, the sense of clarity and emotional regulation that comes with being in integrity with this value, continues to outweigh the momentary comfort that sinking into my righteous indignation would give me.

The second implication of keeping my heart so open is that my tears now show up in the strangest of places: essentially anytime I see people working together. I will cry while watching a sporting event, not because of an outcome, but if I see a particular moment of a team coming together to cheer each other on. I will cry while watching an action movie when the music is just right and the team is coming together to take on a common foe. 

But I also cry at the opposite: when I see people not able to come together, not able to put aside their differences for the sake of something bigger than themselves. My open heart breaks when I see people continuing to cause each other harm because they cannot put down the hurt that they feel. And my open heart allows me to sit in the paradox of their competing realities, it allows me to sit with each of these people, to empathize with each of their perspectives, to have compassion for each of their stories, to cry with each of them for the pain that they feel.

I am a crier, like my father before me, like his father before him. It is a side effect of keeping an open heart, and it is one that I wear as a badge of honor.

Welcome to D'var Sefira

Welcome to a new writing project. In an effort to bring a regular writing practice back into my life I have decided to take some inspiration from a practice I was invited into eight years ago, which has consistently been amongst the most meaningful in my life. In that practice, that takes place during the Omer (a 49 day period in the spring between the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot) we are asked each day to reflect on a pairing of sefirot (a set divine characteristics in the Jewish mystical tradition). Through eight years of engaging with that practice in a shared google doc alongside an ever changing and also constant community, we have come to see the depth that these sefirot carry in the many different interpretations of these ancient characteristics we have found ourselves responding to.

The sefirot I will be working with in this new practice are known as the lower sefirot, the ones that are mapped on to the body below the neck. They are: Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkhut/Shechinah. Each week, I will choose an interpretation of one of these sefirot and write on what comes up for me when reflecting on the week through the lens of that characteristic/value.