High Holy Days Writings

Andrew Ramer hosted another gathering at CSZ to listen to words and look at images of the journey towards forgiveness, and then write our own words or draw our own images. We had three writing periods, and much of what I wrote was whining about my own mishegoss about being lazy.

Here are a few bits that seemed to be worth sharing.

I am often struck by the line in our machsor that says we have sinned against God "as long as we cannot be hopeful." It takes hope to imagine that I can change for the better. It takes hope to even recognize the glints of good that I currently have. It takes an act of hope to remember the unity of God and humanity and to remember that I am a part of humanity.
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So how do I kindly and gently, and with curiosity and humor, recognize all the recalcitrant parts of myself, and persuade us that we're all on the same team? That we'll accomplish more and be happier if we achieve consensus and act mindfully much of the time? Perfection is neither possible nor desirable, but some improvement and awareness are both possible and good.

I'd like to have compassion for myself when I get stuck in an unskillful place, and recognize that it is only where I happen to be right now, and that I can be in a totally different place a breath and a smile from now.

Hope can return when I use the tools that I know work - journaling, mneditating, taking a walk, stretching. Just even remembering to breathe with awareness. I can notice that each breath is a new one, but/and that I'm inhaling many molecules that originated in the stars and have been breathed before by many, many people over the millenia since they were created.

As I breathe, I can remember that I am a living organism, a sentient being who lives and grows and changes every moment. And that I am also part of the webs of life that are my shul, neighborhood, city, state, country, hemisphere, and planet.
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I want to write a poem with such beautiful images of heaven on earth that reading it would lift anyone's heart, would give hope to the most depressed and despairing person, would bring a smile or a tear to any face. I want to write a picture so beautiful that it creates in all who read it a yearning to be better, a yearning to live in hope, and the recognition that this beauty is here and now, right here, right now.

Free Hugs?

August was a particularly full month for me: my aunt Virginia passed away and I flew to Washington State to attend her funeral mass; I completed my first 6-day silent meditation retreat in San Rafael; and I compiled and sang in the interment service for the mother of my sweetie Jan. Now that I'm between editing issues of the synagogue newsletter, have nearly completed my preparations for the High Holy Days, and have mostly put together my workshop on state government issues for tomorrow night, I have a touch of bandwidth for a blog entry or two.

What I wanted to write about was something I experienced last weekend. Jan and I went shopping Sunday morning. We were saturated with the weeklong coverage of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and were deliberately avoiding watching any more about it.

On our way into Fry's electronics superstore, we encountered a woman with a handmade sign that offered "FREE HUGS." Jan and I looked at each other and decided to accept her offer. As we entered the store, however, my inner cynic started wondering why she was doing that. Our best guess then was that she was participating in a psych experiment to determine if there were any commonalities among people who accepted or rejected her offer. I sure hoped that she wasn't trying to spread some contagious disease or plant listening or homing devices.

It wasn't until the next day that I got it. I was walking by a florist shop in downtown San Francisco that had spread flowers on the sidewalk and had a sign that offered free roses in observance of 9/11. Of course! Sunday was September 11th itself. The woman was distributing hugs as her way of sharing comfort on the anniversary of that major national trauma.

The Queen and Her Throne

I learned the other day that Queen Elizabeth II has a personal, white leather toilet seat that travels with her wherever she goes. A week before that, I wrote the following:

When I moved downstairs after living a quarter of a century in the same flat, my whole life was disrupted. There were walls of boxes everywhere, and there were no coverings on the windows. My bedroom was functional, and I could sit on my couch and watch TV, but the rest of the place was chaos.

After a week or so, I had a handyman in to mount my stuff on the walls - the paper towel rack in the kitchen, the reading lamp in the bedroom, and pictures everywhere. But what really made me feel at home was when he mounted my wooden toilet seat on the new toilet, and my wooden TP holder where I could reach it. When the queen is comfy on her throne, all is well in her realm.

Small Town, Isn't It?

Someone called my name as I was waiting on my yoga mat to begin my second "Gentle Yoga" class in the Castro. It was Sherrie Sawyer, whom I had just seen last week at an SFOP (San Francisco Organizing Project) meeting to work on encouraging the state legislature to extend existing taxes, and not solve the current deficit entirely by cutting much-needed government services to the poor and middle class.

I approached her after the class and asked her to join me for lunch, which she did. We went to a crepery in the same block, one that I had been meaning to try for some time, and were joined there by the teacher of the class. We had a great chat over lunch and learned that we were both inactive members of the California Bar. We also talked about how each of us had become involved in community organizing, and what we were each working on at the moment. Inasmuch as it was raining, and she mentioned that she had brought a car, I asked where she was headed and she dropped me off in Noe Valley on her way home.

I did the two chores I had planned, at the drugstore and Radio Shack, and then ran into Lisa Larges, a dear friend of mine, who was on her way to Radio Shack with her friend Beth, to do some chores of her own. I was in no particular hurry, and wanted to chat with Lisa a bit, so I went back into the store with them and helped Lisa (who is blind) by reading info from the packaging to her. Then we visited two other stores that were on my way home, and I heroically managed to avoid buying anything else. Then I peeled off towards my home while they headed in the other direction.

I love bumping into friends while out and about. It's like a gift from the universe. I seem to hear it saying: "I know you need to see others but aren't good at calling or writing them to arrange a get-together, so I'll help you get started and drop some folks in your lap. But don't get used to it."

Peanut Butter and Me

In our last writing group, we were asked to write something on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I wrote two rather different things - first, what naturally came into my mind, and the second more consciously addressing the assigned topic.

PBJ To Go

I was in the midst of a nervous breakdown when I finally dragged myself off to recorder camp in 2003. My appetite had been AWOL for several months already, but a flare of panic attacks completely paralyzed me when it was time to leave for camp. I was reduced to watching the home and garden station on TV long into the night - I couldn't sleep, either. The next day I reached my psychiatrist on the phone, and she encouraged me out the door.

But I still wasn't up to socializing. One experience in the cafeteria proved to me that the lingering idea that I ought to be interested in food wasn't enough to justify my going to the loud dining room with too many people and too many decisions.

So I stayed in my room at mealtimes and got a friend to bring me whatever she could carry away with her: single-serving packets of butter, peanut butter, and jelly, plus pieces of bread, and fruit salad in a plastic cup. I used my swiss army knife to spread the toppings on the bread, and read the Swiss Family Robinson to calm my nerves and help ease the food down.

By the end of the week, I'm pleased to report, the new medication had taken effect and my appetite returned.
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My History of Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Peanut butter is a funny substance. I don't know why it became common to take that particular nut and grind it into a paste. Perhaps there were so many of them? Perhaps so it could be used as an ingredient in various recipes? Don't know. But there it is, and combined with the grain in bread, peanut butter makes a complete and nourishing protein.

So generations of mothers have made peanut butter sandwiches for their children's lunches. Now, I do know something about sandwiches. The Earl of Sandwich apprently got the idea of putting food betwen slices of bread so he could eat meat without leaving the gambling table.

Anway, peanut butter is commonly paired with banana, or grape jelly, or strawberry jam. I like to add a little butter or margarine to help the peanut butter slide down my throat. Apricot or peach jam goes as well with peanut butter as strawberry jam. And honey goes very well with banana and peanut butter. But be sure you put it directly on the bread, not on top of the peanut butter or bananas, or it will flow right out of the sandwich, and probably onto you.

New Writings

for a writing group of older lesbians that I recently joined:

I have always dreamed of having a library of my own, with built-in bookcases and a ladder. Last year, I moved downstairs into a new flat and had my carpenter friend build it for me. The room has a ten-foot ceiling, and he put four bookcases side by side, built them up to the ceiling, bolted them to each other and the wall, and installed a custom-built sliding library ladder. I bought a fancy recliner and placed it with the ceilling light falling over my shoulder, and my view out the window to the street in front of the house.

Even though I gave away a quarter of my books before the move, I still have too many of them to fit on the shelves in a single layer. This excess makes it less satisfying than I'd hoped, and has helped me neglect putting all the books in order. I did separate fiction from non-fiction, and Judaica has its own shelves, and science fiction is partly sorted out, but there it stays. Mostly because I read very few dead tree books these days. I read on my ipod touch and Kindle nearly all the time.

But also because the books are my friends; I don't so much need to read them as to simply know that they are there. Childrens' literature and juvenile sci fi are talismans of a simpler time in my life, and they were there to take me away from new cities and new homes, and let me rest and gather myself in worlds where everything worked out in the end.

I cannot, to this day, leave the house without something to read. As my mother used to say, "when I'm alone, I'm in bad company." I need to always have a book with me, to lure my mind from dark alleys and self-absorption into other worlds, other places, and the possibility of change.

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I spent last weekend at the Bishop's Ranch, an Episcopal retreat center outside of Healdsburg. It includes an old ranch house, and is surrounded by dairy farms. This I know both because someone told me so, and because of the cow stench that is painfully evident when the wind is wrong.

The place is beautifully situated on a hilltop with a sweeping view of the valley below and Mount Helena in the distance. Birds of all sorts frequent the skies - I saw big black raptors of some sort, and heard woodpeckers and hummingbirds that I could identify by their sounds.

There were also huge black bumblebees that noisily haunted a wisteria-covered walkway between my cottage and the main buildings. When I first became aware of their buzzing, it felt ominous, like I was about to become the victim in a sci fi movie; I worried that I would be bitten. But then it became clear to me that they weren't interested in me at all, just the flowers. So their menace melted away.

Little lizards skittered across the paths, and there were trees that bloomed with bougainvillia-colored flowers.

When the cow stench was in abeyance, just breathing the air of that quiet, hallowed place brought me peace.

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As a young girl, I used to hate the color pink. It was too girly, precious, and feminine, and it too easily showed stains and dirt. I was quite the tomboy, and pink conflicted with my self-image. Blue was my favorite color then, the boys' color, the color of strength and activity, and school notebooks and gym clothes.

When I was in law school, a mentor told me that pink blouses would look good with the blue clothes that I usually wore. I tried it, and they did. Then I started wearing purples, and lilacs, and burgundies. I'm a fairly butch lesbian, so my favorite pink blouse is flannel and plaid, but it is pink.

This past weekend I was at a music camp that featured a lot of ukulele playing. I had played uke as a little girl, before my hands got big enough for guitar. The last couple of years, one of my recorder teachers has been playing ukulele at recorder camp during open mike nights. And I started wanting a uke again. But the ones I looked at in music stores either sounded awful or cost more than I wanted to pay. In the camp store this weekend, though, my fancy was tickled by cheap, plastic-covered ukuleles in a rainbow of colors that actually sounded pretty good. After I tuned and fiddled around with one - while other campers said how well its color coordinated with my flannel shirt, I bought it.

It's pink.

Opening Night

So it's been over a week since my show, Dykes on Broadway, premiered at Hillside Community Church in El Cerrito. I didn't write it or anything, but I do have a leading role in this one-act lesbian musical comedy. A second act has been written, but not yet produced. Anyway, we're booked for two more shows in San Francisco in June, at CounterPULSE, a performance space at 9th and Mission.

Certainly the premiere was a success - the space was sold out; the audience laughed a lot, and gave us a standing ovation at the conclusion. Two videos and many photos were taken, and I've seen half of one of the videos and most of the photos. The fact that I can bear to watch myself in them all may say more about my growth in self-acceptance than the quality of my performance, but I also got a lot of rave reviews from friends and strangers alike. If I say so myself, I do know how to project my voice and I have excellent diction when I remember.

I blanked momentarily on part of a line, but made up a word for the blank and moved on. So my memory was basically up to the task, to my great relief.

My nerves also managed fairly well. I get most anxious in the period immediately before a public performance. I distracted myself from it for most of the time by reminding my castmates to take deep breaths when they seemed frazzled, and in demonstrating the technique I managed to take several good breaths for myself. Then, when I just had to be alone, I found a swing out in the backyard of the church and worked a sudoku puzzle to the accompaniment of birdsong and managed quite nicely.

After the show, I was brimming with adrenaline. Fortunately, there was a dance afterwards in the same space, and I worked the adrenaline off by dancing on and off the floor. Then exhaustion set in, and memory problems of another sort - I left my jacket in two different restaurants and my purse in someone else's home during the 24-hour period surrounding the show. Got everything back safely, though.

Now I'm trying to dig into other areas - editing the synagogue newsletter, getting my income tax information to the accountant, getting back into yoga classes, and working on my nutrition and budget. In the meanwhile, though, I'll be out of town this coming weekend at a women's music camp called WoMaMu, which I'm finally attending after much urging from a pal at work. Haven't played guitar in a long time. Wonder how long I can play before my fingertips get sore.

And in my spare time, whenever I don't have an appointment in the morning, I delight in turning over in bed and going back to sleep until 10 or 11 am.