I was challenged recently to make a cup of tea and look out the window while I drink it, fifteen minutes each day. And I've done it, more or less, for about a week now. I just came in from sitting outside on the steps outside my office door, a sheltered spot in the sun with the wind whooshing all around the trees above. Just sat (I'd already finished my third cup of tea for the morning…) and let my thoughts laze around the inside of my brain: a bit of world tzurres, a bit of family and friends, a bit of work, lots of thoughts about my little garden, noticing that I've not been feeling so well lately and now I'm feeling better, so enjoying the places in my body that aren't hurting. And a lot of another kind of thought, or is it sensation? Just noticing myself sitting on the stairs, feeling the sun, hearing the wind, just being inside my skin in one little place on the globe, watching myself think and feel, a pleasurable feeling of my own company, almost as if I had invited my self over for a visit and was glad she had come to spend this little bit of the morning with me.
The challenge had come because I had forgotten myself. Not that I wasn't talking about myself all the time -- complaining vociferously about how stressed and overloaded and demanded-upon I was, how crummy I felt, how I hated this and disagreed with that, how I had to be here and there, all at the same time, of course, not to even mention the world situation, which, besides causing mass death and destruction in multiple countries and threat worldwide, was also ruining my sleep and making me feel anxious and depressed and helpless. I was completely self-involved, but at the same time I had forgotten myself. I had neglected to attend to my own soul. So a wise person said to me, fix yourself a cup of tea and look out the window for fifteen minutes every day. And see if that doesn't change.
I have pinned up next to my computer a list of "49 Gates of Teshuvah -- 49 Ways to Return to G-d" based on teachings of Rabbi Nachman. They are full of that G-dash-D, but they are also full of "you." "Let nothing in the world discourage you." "When you feel confused, replace doubt with faith." "Pour out your heart to G-d, telling all that troubles you" The orthodox convention of writing "G-d" is meant to remind us yet again that God is not fully describable or knowable, that God is essentially a mystery, "l'ayla min kol birchata v'shirata," "beyond all blessings and songs." That's not at all to say that we don't experience God all the time -- just that we can't contain the wholeness of That which we experience. Still, there is another partner in any experience of the Divine Mystery, and that is our own selves, the "I" of "I and Thou." Sometimes my own self is as mysterious and distant and unfathomable to me as is God.
Each person is completely unique. You know how you can see a group of strangers at a party, or standing in line at the bank, and you can feel the essence of each person just by standing near them. You can tell who you would like to know better and who you would avoid, who you would trust and who not, who intrigues and who wears their whole story on their skin. Not that these impressions will necessarily turn out to be accurate, but you can sense that each person is a whole universe, a complete story, a one-of-a-kind adventure. Each head is as full as my own, each body is as rich with sensation as is mine. No two people have the same dreams or the same beliefs or the same memories. And yet our personal interiors are all woven into things which are collective as well, the world memory, the collective unconscious, cellular history, the long stream of the gene pool. It is all so complex and remarkable. We are all whole galaxies, whole histories, each our own, yet related, congruent, connected yet no two alike.
Years ago at Rosh Hashana, Ira Plotinsky shared with us the midrash which says (if I remember it accurately!) that there is an angel which walks before each one of us blowing a trumpet and announcing, "Here comes a human being!" And there is that other extraordinary statement, from Midrash B'reshit Rabbah, which says that the human soul is actually "the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters" on the first day of creation.
All of this is inside each one of us at all times, the primal, moving spirit of God and our own unique, personal selves, all twined together in wild, one-of-a-kind permutation. It's an inner Louvre, an inner Taj Mahal, an inner Himalaya, inner Gaudi, inner Watts Towers, all there for the price of a cup of tea and fifteen minutes!
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 04/03/2002 (rge)