Change (Netzach)

“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“If everything you think you know makes your life unbearable, would you change?”
― Tracy Chapman, Change

It was a beautiful day at the beach: clear skies, a warm but not overbearing sun, the air was moving but there was no strong wind to speak of. After a lovely nap, I got up from under my umbrella, approached the shore, and walked into the ocean. The water was fresh and cool, a perfect temperature for swimming. I made my way through the breaking waves, jumping the low ones, diving through the high ones until I reached the calmer water where I turned onto my back and let myself float, embracing the stillness in my body, bobbing slightly with the rhythm of the water. When I was ready to head back, I flipped over and rode a wave into the shore. Emerging from the water, I looked around for my umbrella but could not find it. At first I worried that it had fallen over or been blown away, but the wind was not that strong. I started walking up and down the beach and eventually I spotted it, nearly a hundred yards north of where I came out of the water. In the time I was floating on my back, the current had moved me nearly the length of a football field without me noticing that I had moved at all. 

I have experienced this phenomenon dozens of times in my life - both in the ocean and out of it. From my perspective I am staying exactly where I am, where I have always been, but the circumstances around me shift, change, and suddenly I look up and notice that I too have been moved, that I am, in fact, not where I started but somewhere very different. Sometimes the tide can be so strong that I can swim in the direction that I know is north but still when I look up, when I leave the water, I can find myself south of the place I started. Sometimes the shift in the landscape around me can be so dramatic, that I can think I am making decisions that are in line with my values, but when I look up, I notice that in this current context a choice that in a previous moment was in support of my values, no longer is. 

Change, as Octavia Butler reminds us, is the only lasting truth. It is the only constant. And yet, we humans are so resistant to it. We try so hard to hold on to things as we understand them to be that we can fall into a delusion, that we can find ourselves acting as though things are as they once were, and not as they currently are today. 

In order to keep up with the change that naturally occurs in the world outside of us, we have to continue changing our understanding of who we are, of how we need to move in order to navigate the changing environments we find ourselves in. But changing the way we do things, changing the way we see ourselves in the world can feel so threatening to who we understand ourselves to be. And so we resist changing. But since change is inevitable, when we try to stay the same we are simply relinquishing our agency in determining how we are going to change, we are letting the changing world change us.

If I know and accept that I will change, that I have to change, the question then becomes: how do I ensure that the changes I that I am making are in line with who I want to be, who I want to continue becoming? How do I change in ways that support my growth towards the person I aspire to be, towards the world I want to see? How do I ensure that when I change, those changes are in line with my values? And when the ground itself is changing how do I know if I’m being adaptive, responsive, or reactive? How do I know if I’m giving in, if I’m ceding ground that I need, or if I’m making a sound strategic choice that will help me in the long run? When in a turbulent moment, when the tide is strong, how do I know if I’m staying on course, or if I’m being moved in a direction I wouldn’t want to go? And if it’s not only that the tide is moving me but that there is also someone on the shore moving my umbrella, how do I determine which direction to move in? How do I navigate change when the signposts are moving too?

The first thing that I know to do is to get myself to a place where I can take a breath. It might take a minute. It might require waiting for the ground to stop shaking, or finding a place where the ground can offer a moment of steadiness even through the shaking. Once I am breathing deeply, I then lift my gaze, expand my field of vision, look for signposts that are further out, that may not be so easily moved. For me this means looking at the current moment in the widest historic lens that I have, it means taking the time to see clearly where we actually are and what is actually going on, it means centering myself in the values that I hold most dear, it means accepting that the strategies and approaches that worked for me in the past may not be the ones that will work for me now, and most of all it means finding other people that I trust so we can navigate this changing environment together.

Paradox (Tiferet)

Creating paradox with our very being is the spiritual imperative of these times.
- Norma Wong

There is a Jewish idea that truth can be found, not in any one person’s perspective, stance, or experience, but only in the space between our points of view. And in fact, the truth that lives between what you see and what I see cannot be fully known, but through discussion, through striving to see each other’s points of view, we might find our way to a closer understanding of that truth. We call this idea Machloket, or argument for the sake of heaven. It is a beautiful practice and it requires of us a few things that the conditioning of contemporary socialization does not prepare us for. 

It requires that we enter into these conversations wanting to listen and learn, not wanting to convince or win. It requires that we put down our righteousness, and center our curiosity. It requires that we release ourselves from the either/or binary, that we open ourselves up to the possibility that two contradictory things can be true at the same time - that, in fact, the only way to understand reality as it truly is, is to accept multiple, often contradictory truths. 

The good news is that even though our social conditioning incentivizes us to embrace an either/or paradigm where paradox is seen as wrong, where the idea of embracing paradox is meant to feel like an exercise of magical thinking or fantasy, we all have experiences of paradox to draw upon if we open ourselves up to see them. 

One of the most common, and perhaps hardest, experiences of paradox in the human condition is the choice to forgive. Forgiveness, especially of someone close to us, requires that we simultaneously hold the truth of our hurt with the truth of our love. It requires that we do not let either of those truths go, but that we look those truths in the face, hold them at the same time, and decide that we can accept them both as being true. We do not throw away the loved one that caused harm, and we do not excuse the harm either. We sit with it, we wrestle with it, and we heal through the choice to forgive, to accept the truth that this person is not one thing. 

Whenever I have to do the work of forgiveness, of choosing to remember that this person who hurt me is not only that one thing, the way that I get there is to remember that I am not one thing either. When I look inside myself I know that I am full of contradictions, full of truths that if I were to line them up outside of myself would certainly not pass a consistency test, that would often fall on opposite sides of an either/or binary. 

The either/or binary requires that we pretend that truth is simple, that it can be categorized, that all of who we are can be placed neatly on one side or another. And when we pretend that we can fit neatly into one side, one box, we end up cutting off parts of ourselves, we end up separating ourselves from our wholeness, we end up losing our ability to see things as they truly are, we end up living in delusion. 

Wholeness does not come through separation, truth is not found on one side, healing is not possible without accepting the reality that we are all full of contradiction. The challenges that we face in the world today can only be met if we each hold a little more loosely the attachment we have to being right, and instead center ourselves in the truth that we are all going to have to figure out how to live here together, in wholeness, in full embrace of the contradicting stories we’ve been told and the contradicting truths that we hold - both among each other and within ourselves. 

This, for me, has been the key to accepting as my mission the imperative of creating paradox with my very being.

Trust (Gevurah)

When the retreat leader asked for three volunteers who were comfortable with looking ridiculous and could be trusted to not cheat, my hand immediately went up. We were each asked to stand in a two foot square drawn in blue painters tape on the floor, close our eyes, and start marching in place. The retreat leader then put on music and told us to march in place, and no matter what else happened, to just keep marching. 

Almost as soon as the music started I could hear laughter breaking out amongst the larger group. I wasn’t sure what was happening, what other non-verbal instructions might have been given to the rest of the group. At one point I was certain that others had been asked to get up and start dancing around us. But I was focused on my task: march in place, and have fun. That meant letting my legs keep me moving in place while my upper body danced along to the music. At different moments I could feel myself leaning in one direction or another, so I made sure to account for that and recenter myself. 

Then the music stopped and we were told to open our eyes. When the other two volunteers opened their eyes, they seemed shocked to find themselves having strayed very far from their boxes. I, on the other hand, seemed to have shocked everyone else in the group by having spent the entire song not moving from my box. Multiple people expressed this shock by naming that I never stay in the box, and that they expected me to have strayed so far that they would have had to stop me from hitting a wall. But one of my friends, the group's dance leader, told me she was not surprised. “You’re very grounded in your body”, she said, “it makes sense that you were able to sense where you were in space, that you were able to feel yourself walking”. 

I don’t remember learning to walk. By the time I started making memories that I can still access I was already walking, running even. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of running. I was three years old, it was early in the morning, and I was running down the apartment hallway to my parents' rooms. If I sit still and close my eyes I can remember what it felt like in my three year old body to run. It was, perhaps, more of a rumble, my legs racing to keep up with my inertia. I was in that moment of development where running is easier than walking, where I didn’t quite have the body control to stop, where I would just run until there was something that stopped me. In this case my rumble ended with a flop into my parents bed. I flopped because I couldn't yet jump.

Jumping came a couple of months later, and that I do remember. My family was spending a week at a farmhouse in the country. Just across the street there was a field full of bales of hay. My best friend and I spent hours climbing, or getting placed, on top of a hay bale and jumping into the arms of an awaiting adult. I remember standing at the edge of the hay bale, feeling the knot in my gut as I got ready to leap into the air, to know that the surface beneath me would disappear, to trust that I would be caught. It was terrifying and it was exhilarating. When atop the hay bale I could feel the fear, feel that I didn’t want to jump, until eventually I would. Then, almost immediately upon being caught and returning to the ground, the exhilaration would take over and I wanted to jump again. 

I was getting to know my body. I was learning what it was capable of, what its limitations were. I was also learning what it felt like to trust. The adults standing below me were telling me that they would catch me when I jumped. The knot in my gut was my body working out the dissonance between the physical knowledge that the ground was too far away, that it was not safe to leave the stability of my hay bale, with the emotional knowledge that the person who said they were going to catch me would do it. Each time I chose to jump and was caught, my body was learning how to blend its own sensory perception with the information that these adults in my life could be trusted. 

A couple of years later, I learned that these adults also trusted me. I was walking with my father along the California coast. The waves of the Pacific Ocean were much larger and rougher than the Atlantic Ocean waves I was used to. Ahead of us was a formation of rocks that jutted out into the ocean past the rest of the coastline. I was immediately, and very predictably, drawn towards these rocks. They were wet and slippery and quite jagged. I remember the feel of these rocks. I remember what it felt like in my body to navigate the slipperiness, to take measure of my balance, to calculate where it felt safe to venture off to and when I needed to step back. 

At first my father stayed close, ready to catch me if I fell. But then, after a while, he let me go a little ways beyond his reach. Could he see me taking these measurements? Was he able to tell that I was starting to figure something out about how my body worked? Did he know that he could trust that I knew how to be safe? 

I think about that moment a lot. It is a significant moment in the story of how I learned to trust myself. Was some of that trust I developed in myself built off of a transference of his trust in me? I have always thought that it was. My father’s trust in me lives at the center of the trust that I have in myself. They are intertwined. His trust in me gave me the space to develop trust in myself, and that trust I built in myself was reinforced by the fact that one of the people that I trusted most, so demonstratively trusted me. 

I learned very early how to trust my body in space, how to read the visual and physical cues coming both from the external conditions around me as well as my internal senses of balance, strength, and capacity for keeping myself safe. I don’t think I fully understood the importance of these early experiences, the ways that they helped me develop a deep trust in myself for navigating not only the physical world around me but the intellectual, emotional, and social worlds as well. 

I was recently talking with a friend who asked me how I balance trusting myself with knowing that there are things that I don’t know, perspectives that I cannot have. What do I do, they asked, to ensure that trusting myself and my own perspective doesn’t slip into arrogance, into believing that I always know the answer, into assuming that my perspective is always right or better? How do I know when to trust myself and when I should be trusting someone else’s perspective?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot, about what trust is (trust of self, trust of others), about where it comes from, about what it can do for us. I know that trust must begin with trust in self, that only by trusting myself can I begin to truly trust others. If I place my trust in others before knowing how to trust myself then I am giving my self away, I am relinquishing my responsibility as a person in this world.

Ultimately I keep coming back to that day on the rocks by the ocean. I think the difference between trust in self and arrogance is that arrogance would look at those rocks and say, “I trust myself completely to be able to climb safely along all of those rocks and get to the very end”, and that true trust in self would say, “I trust myself completely to, every step along the way, be able to take the measure of my body’s strength, balance, and capacity to navigate the conditions of those rocks, and determine if I feel safe taking that next step”

Another way of putting it: trust in my ability to know my own capacity does not allow me to go climb those rocks, but to know which rocks not to climb. And it is my trust in my ability to know which rocks not to climb that allows me to feel safe and comfortable setting off to go climb the rocks. 

This is also what trusting myself looks and feels like in the intellectual, emotional, and social worlds. I don’t trust that I will always be right, or know the answer. I trust that I know where to look inside myself to determine what I know, what I don’t know, and what it feels like when I am up against things that I don’t know that I don’t know.

Community (Chesed)

Community is a shared playlist 
Community is singing together
                                                   dancing together
                                                                               laughing together
Community is inside jokes 
is knowing how to invite people into an inside joke
Community is inviting people in

Community is time in the company of people that I love and know are with me
Community is knowing there are people that are with me even if I haven’t talked with them in months
Community is knowing there are people that are with me even if I haven’t seen them in years
Community is knowing there are people that are with me even if I haven’t met them yet

Community is a practice of love
                                                      a practice of joy
Community is a practice of disagreement 
                                                                 of accountability

Community is blowing up fifty balloons at one o’clock in the morning to surprise and celebrate a friend
Community is staying up until two o’clock in the morning rigging those balloons so that they will fall from the ceiling when that friend opens the door of their room
Community is getting up at seven o’clock in the morning to film that friend opening that door and walking into a hallway full of balloons and friends

Community is sitting by a fire with people I know, love, and disagree with 
Community is engaging in our disagreement with love
Community is speaking my truth and listening to theirs 
Community is searching for the common values that bring us together
Community is dissecting the experiences and beliefs that led us to see things differently

Community is loving people that I don’t agree with
Community is not trying to change them
Community is holding them accountable when I think they are wrong
Community is being held accountable when I am wrong
Community is calling the people I love towards the better versions of themselves
Community is allowing myself to be called towards the better versions of myself

Community is holding people I love in their grief
Community is allowing myself to be held in mine
Community is witnessing people while they become undone
Community is allowing my becoming undone to be witnessed 

In community we love and disagree with each other
In community we choose curiosity and release righteousness
In community we hear each others’ truths and hold each other accountable to the truths that we know
In community we grieve and celebrate together 
                                                                             …often at the same time

The Space Between (Malkhut/Shechinah)

If I am here for anything, it seems that what I am here for is to wrestle in the space between: to stand in the grey areas, to make friends with the discomfort of not knowing, of not being sure, of holding both. If there is such a thing as truth, this is where it will be found - in the place of limbo, in the space between. 

There is an irony to this being the location of my purpose. There has always been something in me that wants, more than anything, to have certainty, to be able to know something is absolutely true. I have a deep and perhaps insatiable yearning to know where I stand, to have arrived, to get to finally stand on the solid ground of a truth that will not change, a knowing that is finite, concrete, unmoving. 

And yet, where I find myself landing, time and again, is in a place where the only truth that makes sense is one that holds uncertainty, one that makes space for all the things that I do not and cannot know, one that exists as paradox. 

When I was in graduate school I was introduced to the work of the artist and educator Maxine Greene. She wrote about the idea of becoming, of being on the way with questions still unanswered, of being… not yet. Something about her work struck a chord with me, though at first it was a dissonant chord. My initial reaction to hearing her speak about the beauty of continuing to discover who she was well into her elder years was one of exasperation. Sill discovering who she was… Not there yet! 

In my early twenties, I was doing so much work to figure out who I was, to land in the knowing of what I was here for. I wanted nothing more than to arrive in the life that was for me, to arrive in the me that I was meant to be. I felt so close to knowing who I was, narrowing in so precisely on what it was that I was here for, on what my life’s work was meant to be. I had such clear knowings at that time in my life that being confronted with the notion that those knowings might change, might evolve, might be wrong, was a disruption I was not ready to embrace. 

But it stuck with me. It was a powerful enough sentiment that even though the note was discordant, I could tell that it was one to hold on to, that there was something in it that was already speaking to me, if perhaps a part of me that was hanging out in the background, not yet ready to drive the ship of my life. 

The place where this chord struck was the part of me that was already familiar with the space between, that already had spent some time in the land of limbo, that already was wrestling with the very idea of certainty and a singular notion of truth. It turned out that her words, and work, and example, were exactly the thing I needed to give that part of me permission to continue exploring, to continue questioning the things I thought I knew, to continue imagining beyond the scope of where the me who knew, was willing to look. 

I credit that part of me, and the influence she had on it, with my ability to navigate the hard moments that were waiting around the corner. This part of me that was strengthened by her words, became the part of me that could find comfort in that place we call limbo, that could stand strongly in the midst of the unknown, that embraced and learned to relish the mysteries that we will never understand, that came to accept paradox as the only way to experience reality. 

Today when I reflect on the space between, on the gift that standing in that space offers, I think first about my relationship to conflict, about my understanding of conflict as being a manifestation of the fiction that we are separate from each other, about the paradoxical way that conflict can feed the myth of separation and also debunk it. 

The version of me that found discordance in Maxine Greene’s perspective was also a version of me that was not very comfortable with conflict. My certainty did not play well with the discomfort of truly taking in other perspectives, with embracing the humility required to imagine that I might, perhaps, be wrong. That version of me tended towards avoiding conflict in the same way I avoided the unknown. That part of me was wrapped up in being right, in centering my righteousness, in exaggerating the fiction of separation by creating clear distinctions between myself and the people with whom I did not agree, by holding tightly to the truth of my perspective, and to its obviousness, its infallibility. 

It was through spending time in the space between, spending time getting comfortable in the discomfort of the unknown, that I began letting go of my attachment to the rightness of my perspectives, that I built in myself the ability to imagine a place beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, that I came to value the truth of connection over the attachment I had to my perspective being the truth. It is through that process of sitting together in the discomfort of the space between, that we can come to see separation we believe to be between us as a myth, as truly non-existent. And it is through that process that I have seen conflict used as an opportunity to bring us closer, to dissolve that myth of our separation. 

Steadiness (Yesod)

Steadiness comes from being held by the earth, by the water, by a community, a friend, a lover. 

Steadiness comes from being held by myself: a hand on my gut, a hand on my heart. 

Steadiness comes when my heart and my gut are aligned with my mind and my body. 

Steadiness comes with noticing the shaking of my body, from not stopping it but allowing it to continue, from breathing into the discomfort that comes with that lack of control. 

Steadiness comes from my breath, from deep down in my body, below my gut; from sitting up straight, from engaging my core, from feeling the strength at my center. 

Steadiness comes when I feel at one with myself.

Steadiness comest from the deep knowing that before I believe in any of the socially constructed realities that I find myself swimming inside of, I believe that I belong to the earth, I believe that I am of the water, I believe that when the air from the sky fills my lungs the very essence of life is simultaneously captured and reborn in each of those moments.

Sometimes my steadiness is so strong that it can become the ground that others walk on. Sometimes, when it’s at its strongest, it can become the ground I walk on myself. And every once in a while, when I am at my very most steady, I can allow myself to release control completely, not to fall into another’s arms, not to rely on their steadiness, but to float with them, blending ground and air, spinning together, creating a centrifugal force in which I can simultaneously be held in place and in motion. 

I was twelve or thirteen when I learned that steadiness can come from being in motion. My friend Libby and I had just stepped into the cool air of a summer night in the mountains, a perfect foil for the thick air and loud music of the Friday night dance party - a weekly tradition at our summer camp. Standing at one end of a large soccer field, we looked up at the stars and just started spinning. After a few minutes we started spinning across the field. It was not a race, it was simple, joyous, the most innocent version of childhood play. 

We found it so exhilarating that we turned it into our own Friday night tradition. Each week we would take a break from dancing and spin ourselves dizzy. Inevitably, somewhere between half and three quarters of the way across the field we would veer off course and end up collapsing on the ground, the earth spinning below our backs, the sky rolling in circles above us. 

Or perhaps it felt the other way around. Perhaps we, in those moments, understood what it truly meant to be upside down, stuck to the surface of a planet, rolling its way through space. Perhaps in those moments we were free from the story of up and down. Perhaps those moments were the closest I ever came to knowing what it is like to be one with the earth. To feel so steady on the ground while everything around me was spinning and rolling, tumbling and turning. 

Perhaps that physical sensation prepared me for the emotional turbulence that has come for us all in these last years. Perhaps it is because I know what it is to be stuck to the surface of a planet and look out into the vastness of the space it is hurtling through, dispelled from the notion of which way is supposed to be up, that I can stand today, on that same earth, while story after story that I was supposed to believe, crumbles and disintegrates before my very eyes, and know that the steadiness of the earth upon which I stand is not going anywhere.

Awe (Hod)

“For me the entire universe was created”

“I am but dust and ash”

- Rabbi Simcha Bunam Bonhart of Przysucha

A couple of years ago I was listening to a podcast about heartbreak. They were talking about the physical pain that manifests in our bodies and the difficulty that some of us have in getting over heartbreak. At one point the guest said that one of the ways that the body heals from heartbreak is through the experience of awe. 

In thinking back on my own experiences of heartbreak I found resonance in this idea. I noticed that whenever my heart is aching, my immediate impulse - once I’ve finished numbing myself by eating lots of ice cream and watching several days worth of not great movies - is to get myself outside, away from the constructed world, away from the things I am used to. 

I go to the desert with its vast open skies, dry air, and stunning landscapes of rock, brush, and the occasional bright flower. I go to the forest with its rays of light dancing through the trees, lush canopy that feels like a warm intimate embrace, and earthy aromas that smell like life itself. I go to the ocean who’s waves roll and roar in constant motion and with such force that it brings my nervous system into alignment with its natural steady rhythm. And in each of these places, the primary feeling I experience is awe. 

In trying to describe it, I struggle to determine where in my body the experience of awe occurs. I feel it in my stomach, an almost lurching forward from the deepest parts of my core, as though there is something in there that is yearning to get out. I feel it in my heart, a radiance of heat surging, pulsing, flaring up, as if the physical container of my ribcage is too small to hold the amount of energy my heart is longing to produce, to release. I feel it in my throat and lungs, an irregular expansion that leaves me short of breath and full of pure clean air at the very same time, that has me coughing out toxins I did not know were there. I feel it in my eyes, softened by the wide expanse and life size scale of the natural world, a deep heaviness wells up as tears that are a thousand years old seep forward to clear the way for crisper more focused vision. I feel it in my skin, tingly and vibrant, awake, alive, alert, but also relaxed. And I feel it in the part of me that lives outside the physical boundary of my body, a blurring of the separation between my skin and the world beyond it, a sense of connection and oneness with the air, the trees, the ground, and the water. 

What is healing about the experience of awe is that it isn’t about making me feel better, it is about making me feel connected. One of the things that I think we forget in our good/bad binary way of thinking, of naming experiences, is that our emotional lives are way too complex for good and bad. Awe allows me to feel profound relief at how very insignificant I am. It allows me to feel freedom in the beauty and wonder of a world my mind will never fully understand. It brings forward in me a confidence that is at once emanating from the core of my being and completely disconnected from any notion I may have about a thing called self. 

Rabbi Bunam of Przysucha walked around with two slips of paper in his pockets. On one he wrote, “for me the entire universe was created”. On the other he wrote, “I am but dust and ash”. His practice was to pull out and read the one he needed to bring balance to the thing that he, in that moment, was feeling. I too have a practice around these phrases. I like to look at them together, to take them in as one. They are, to me, a written version of the experience of awe, of a truth that I know in my body when standing at the edge of the ocean under the bright full moon: that my insignificance to the roaring of the ocean or the cosmic rhythm of the moon is only matched by the profound privilege I have at getting to experience the awesome beauty of both. 

The experience of awe knocks me straight into presence, releases me from the habits and patterns I find myself stuck in, and dispels me of any story I might have constructed that would otherwise serve to solidify those habits and patterns. Awe is the visceral, full body experience that does for me the thing that the words in Rabbi Bunam’s pockets seek to evoke: remind me that the full experience of being alive is so much more than whatever temporary emotional state I find myself in, be it heartbreak, triumph, or anything in between. And with the clarity that comes from stepping into presence, I am able to show up to whatever moment I find myself in with the the fullness of my being.