As a teenager I explored New York City, often walking for miles in the city on my own. I fell in love with it and made it my own. Often the churches were left open, especially the Catholic churches, and I would often go in and sit down. I remember basking in the beauty of the light, the peacefulness, the smell of incense, and the utter contrast to the busy world outside. During my high school years I would often accompany a girlfriend to Mass, especially High Mass on Christmas Eve. In contrast, my family never went to shul, not even for the High Holydays. I remember once going to shul on Yom Kippur with a friend and seeing the men in their socks, but any beauty in that experience didn't penetrate my psyche. My first two years of college I continued to go to church with my girlfriends, sometimes Catholic and sometimes Greek Orthodox. I never once considered converting, and yet these church experiences satisfied something in me -- the need for ritual, beauty, community. The last two years of college I continued my studies of Spanish language and literature, and along with the territory came a familiarity with Catholicism. I wrote my senior thesis on a Spanish catholic writer: Love and Death in the Work of Miguel de Unamuno. The imagery was a patent answer to all that I yearned for, both emotionally and spiritually.
Right after college I went to live in Spain, where I continued to find solace in the cool, quiet, empty churches. It was around this time that a desire to translate some of the folk poetry and songs of the Sephardim began to take root. I was doing translation work at the time, but I was maddeningly frustrated by the elegant simplicity and purity of these Sephardic ballads. So much would be lost in translation, I just couldn't bring myself to lose the essential beauty of the original. It's the translator's dilemma, and I felt it deeply, even tragically. This struggle followed me to Paris a few years later where I would spend long hours in the Spanish library and wrestle with the stark beauty of the original and my paltry talent as a poet in English. I finally laid it all to rest, telling myself that I would tackle it again when I was an old woman and for sure a better poet. But those Sephardic poems, the secular expressions of Jews living in 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th century Spain had found their way into my heart in a way that no other Jewish creative expression had.
Many years passed. I got married and moved back to the States and started having babies. The body and spirit got integrated with the experience of childbirth and the miracles of pregnancy, breastfeeding and the purity of love a mother and infant can share. I was exposed a little to Native American culture, and found in the ceremonial dances of the Kashaya at Stewart's Point enough spiritual food to last months. Three times a year they opened the Roundhouse to people. People would come from all over, the Kashaya Pomo would come home and us hippies would join them. We'd all camp by the river, and sometimes we were allowed to sleep in the Roundhouse after the dances. The concept that the dance itself was prayer was revolutionary to me. I loved it. I loved the big heavy women dancing on tiptoe, the chanting, the drums, the trance, the community, the humor, and the big feast put on for everyone. I felt totally at home, and spiritually I was, but of course tribally T wasn't. It was during this period of babies and feeling the cycles of nature and recycling goat and rabbit shit back into the soil to grow veggies, and spending long hours outdoors at the ocean or in the woods, that I had an experience, an act of grace that has shaped my spiritual reality. It was indeed a flash of Reality. I was about 30, maybe 32 or 33. I was on the beach with family and friends. For some reason I fainted and fell down flat. I was walking a thin line between this world and the next; I clearly remember walking on the edge, when a voice said to me "You have the honor of being a human being. This means that you are the link between Mother Earth and Father Sky. To be this link is both your blessing and your duty." When I regained consciousness I was filled with joy. I at last knew my purpose in life. It wasn't until many years later, when I started my Trager bodywork practice, that I was able to share that spirit/body integration somatically with my friends and clients.
To be continued..-...
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Last updated 06/26/98 (rge)
Copyright MCJC 1998