Not too long ago I was schmoozing with a friend, a much more experienced outdoors woman than I, about beautiful places she had been with a pack on her back. At some point she said the name "Ventana Wilderness," and suddenly I was absolutely flooded by a kind of a sense-memory from decades before of being high up on a mountainside looking down on a field of lupine. I hadn't even carried a backpack that day -- I had driven to that particular outlook in a car. Still, all these years later, sitting in my friend's living room, I could remember being in that place in a way that was so physical I swear I was actually re-feeling the particular chill of that air, which was somehow extra-transparent in the long view from the mountainside down to the ocean, the sunlight which was intensely yellow-gold, even though, I believe, it was early in the day when I was up there, the magnified sounds of wind and circling birds. All of it arose intensely in my memory, just from hearing my friend say the name "Ventana Wilderness." And I found myself thinking, "I bet this is how some people feel about the natural world all the time."
So since then, living as I do in a place every bit as compelling as the Big Sur coast, I've been noticing how I fail to notice the color of the light, the texture of the air, the sounds in what I lazily call "silence." Or, even if I am noticing them, I notice how I fail to be moved, as I was that day when I was camping in Big Sur and drove up that long switchback road to look for the field of lupine. I don't blame myself--those big openings of the heart and senses are, I believe, a gift, not something one can command. But I do notice these days how sometimes my perceptions are a bit damped-down, so that I am able to be unmoved by even pretty grand vistas.
On the other hand I am capable, if I decide to, of staring for a fairly long time at just about any square foot of weeds and grass in our yard and being fully awestruck by the vast variety of life there, the energy with which the plants compete for access to the sunlight, the insistence on continuity, even in deep January, evidenced by tiny new shoots of hot green appearing between the limp brown grasses. I can be stunned, moved just about to tears, by the ability of compost to compost -- what an amazing phenomenon! I especially love the winter landscape because it is easier to see these gorgeous things, since I am not distracted by the noise of big foliage and flowers all over the place.
I've been thinking lately about our capacity to view the world through the lens of our choice, the ways that we frame landscapes of immense complexity and describe them to ourselves and each other. All of us live on the same planet, and, at some level, we all see it all. Yes, there are the vagaries of our personal experiences, but we all have a lot of common knowledge about the range of what there is to experience. None of us has stood in every beautiful place, but we have all stood somewhere lovely. None of us has suffered every suffering, but we have all experienced some. None of us has enjoyed every satisfaction that there is to enjoy, but we have all had pleasures. We all look up at the same night sky. None of us knows every human being, but all of us know many. All of us have had moments of awe and moments of despair, even if they have been different moments for each of us. At some level we all experience the same world. But we each describe it so differently!
For some it is a vail of tears. For others it is a Garden of Eden. For some it is a broken machine in need of repair. For others it is a Great Mother holding us in Her embrace. For some it is a fascinating array of physical phenomena begging to be catalogued. For others it is only incidentally physical at all. For Shakespeare it is a stage. For the Sfat Emet it is an anteroom before a bigger and better world to come. It matters how we look at the world. The lens we choose -- and I do believe that for each of us it is a choice, a personal, creative act --has a lot to do with how we feel in our daily lives, our self-esteem, how we order our priorities, how we respond to crises, how we move in society, what we enjoy, what we dread.
One of the tasks of a religious tradition is to offer us a lens, a frame with which to view and describe this vast world in which we live. Not that we should oversimplify religions, which are themselves fairly vast landscapes. In Jewish tradition, one can find sources which offer each of the descriptions I've listed above and a host of others as well. We need only to look at our own community to notice how different people are drawn to different ways that Judaism gives us to view the world. And to notice how mystified we can all be that our friends and neighbors somehow fail to hold the obvious, correct lens before their eyes and consequently see things in such weird and absurd ways!
This being the deep winter, the month of Shevat, it seems an apt time to look through the mystical lens. Like many of us, I have been exposed to bits and pieces of kabbalah. We live in a time and a place in which the mystical tradition is being offered to us in various forms which are more or less accessible. One basic but endless thing that could be said about Jewish (and, I expect, any) mysticism is that it asks us to view our world as layered. Specifically, it tells us that there is some sort of connection, some kind of bridge (which might be variously described as four worlds or ten sefirot) between our immediate and concrete experience and Something (called by some mystics "Nothing") very large and unified and beyond the scope of our senses. It encourages us to look very deeply at that square foot of ground at our feet, or the human being standing before us (or in the mirror), to sense potentialities beyond the obvious. It encourages us to seek connection with that greater potentiality, even while at the same time it discourages us by saying that it is very difficult to make these connections. It further says that this greater potentiality can only barely and incidentally be described, and most of that only by resort to poetry, metaphor and parable.
The central metaphor of Tu B'shevat is that there is a tree in the cold ground of a winter garden. We hope very much that it will survive to bud and leaf and fruit for another season. And the first sign of life happens deep within, invisible, when the sap begins to rise inside the trunk. Life can mean many things, for that tree and for us. It can be physical survival, deeply to be craved. It can be growth into full potential, living out the possibilities encoded in one's physical or metaphorical DNA. It can be participation in the cycle of growth, death, decay and forming the nutrient base for the next living thing. And it can be participation in that enormous thing we can only describe poetically, perhaps as the Tree of Life whose roots are in heaven and whose fruits reach down to earth.
This month, when the foliage has died back and the branches are exposed,we might want to be especially conscious of the lens through which we view our world and our lives. The month of Shevat invites us to look carefully and to look deeply. It encourages us to try to see beyond the obvious, to nourish our ability to sense connections, both between the phenomena of the evident landscape and with the hard-to-describe oneness beyond.
All of us are looking at the same Tree. But none of us sees quite the same thing as anyone else. We can choose a tight frame which inhibits meaning and truncates delight. Or we can choose to look through as expansive a lens as possible, one which enables us to sense much of the richness and intensity of the landscape in which we live. Happy Tu B'shevat, my dear community!
© 2004 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 09/09/2004 (rge)