I.In this Issue
This first issue after my summer vacation feels like it’s been a long time coming. I had a wonderful summer of bouncing back and forth between the East and West Coasts including lots of visiting with family, studying Jewish meditation, and, of course, spending time in and around salt water. But I am happy to be back here in Chicago and ready to settle in for a long haul. So this issue offers news on my upcoming local gigs and a Minna-drash about trying to establish a writing practice as I begin dissertation work. Let me take this opportunity to send all of you blessings of health and peace and sweetness as we enter the year 5763 in the Hebrew calendar.
II. Kavannah: The Heart's Direction
May every distancing be an opportunity for return.
III. Offerings
The Dirt on the Dissertation
My sociology dissertation work is starting to get into full swing. I’m currently awaiting word from the folks at the university who make sure I’m going to be ethical in my treatment of human subjects. As soon as I get their approval I’ll actually get to start interviewing people about gender, choice/ascription, and Jewishness. I am especially interested in comparing conversionary, interfaith, and inmarried families. My latest thoughts have to do with how identity formation is thought of as a responsibility of childrearing. Anyone with interesting thoughts of their own on the topic (or reading recommendations) is more than welcome to share them with me.
Upcoming Gigs in Chicago
For those of you in the Chicago area (or those contemplating a visit), I’ve scheduled some close to home gigs for myself at the No Exit Café (6970 N. Glenwood, Chicago). I’ll be playing there on the following Saturdays at 8pm: September 21, October 19, November 16, and December 21. As usual I’ll be performing an odd collection of originals and covers sure to include themes of love, seafaring women, personal politics, and Jewishness. If you aren’t currently on my gig mailing list and would like to be, or know someone else I should add to it, let me know.
Next Issue
I have some sense that something big is brewing...trouble is I have no idea what it might be.
IV. Minna-drash: Writing, Possibility, and the Work of Our Hands
In these beginning stages of work on my dissertation, I am trying to establish a writing practice. Through fits of procrastination, general flailing about, and despairing cries of “I can’t do this!” –to which the cats usually give a look which seems to say, “Get over yourself, honey”-- I am slowly learning to write six days a week. Jean Bolker, in her very helpful book Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, suggests that this can be thought of as a writing addiction, where eventually the day just won’t feel right if you haven’t done your writing. Wendy, the chair of my dissertation committee, recently seemed to echo this by telling me that I would know I was actually going to finish the dissertation when I was at least as miserable not working on the damned thing as I was working on it.
Several weeks into the discipline of the writing practice it has occurred to me the process would be strengthened if I could come up with some good reminder of how I answer the question: “Why do I write?” In part this was inspired by a recent suggestion at a meditation circle that we go around the room and answer out loud the question: “Why do you meditate?” Our answers could then be used as something of a slogan; the process of asking and answering offers a way of reconnecting with our kavannah, our deepest intentionality.
Why do I write? I quickly went through the usual inspirations: Flannery O’Connor’s “I write in order to know what I think;” Marge Piercy’s “The real writer is one who really writes…Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.” I just as quickly remembered that simply borrowing someone else’s kavannah only gets us so far. Fortunately however, it sometimes gets us just far enough. While neither of these by themselves felt like they could become my slogan, they each offered some clue to my own answer. O’Connor’s notion of writing as a process of discovery and Piercy’s clear acknowledgement of writing as real work got me thinking about the role of opening up to possibility as a key component of doing the work of my hands.
Let me take these notions one at a time. First there is my problematic relationship with possibility. Writing every day, particularly the type of free writing that I usually do, demands a certain opening up to possibility because it is a bit like prospecting. I’m producing piles and piles of “dirt” with the hope that there are some nuggets of usable text within them. Theoretically, one can develop incredible patience for sifting through cold, wet dirt if one has some inkling that there might just be gold somewhere in this creek bed. There are certainly some days where my writing turns up tiny nuggets of eureka, and I keep telling myself that this will happen more often once I have some actual data to work with, but right now these eureka days are rare. Rather, my bigger hope is that all this “dirt” might itself be made usable through the magical process of revision.
The fact remains that possibility, with all of the lack of control it implies, is terrifying to me. This is most easily understandable when dealing with the possibility that out of an uncertain situation, something undesirable might happen. For example, when I was a volunteer for my local rescue squad, one of my first patients passed out in the back of the ambulance on the way to the hospital. My voice got louder and louder trying to wake him up until finally Phil, who was driving the ambulance, turned around and shushed me. After we’d left our patient in the care of the emergency room staff, Phil came up to me and said, “Sorry for shushing you, but you were louder than Ron [our squad leader] and he was trying to talk on the radio.” I said, “I guess I was just scared.” “Why were you scared?” he asked, “What’s the worst thing that could have happened?” “Well,” I said, “he could have died.” “Sure,” was Phil’s reply, “but you know what to do then.” And he was right. Our patient’s death would have given me a clear plan of action, the possibility of his death gave me nothing but fear. Eventually I learned to be calmer in these moments and simply ride with one hand gently on the patient’s wrist and the other on the chest, keeping tabs on pulse and breathing and keeping tabs on my own work by asking myself occasionally, “Is there anything I could be doing for this patient that I’m not doing?”
As it turns out however, the possibility of something good coming out of uncertainty is frightening to me as well and I have not learned any similarly calm posture for the ride. This is most evident in the way I approach new friendships with people I am attracted to. I’ve had this bit of a song floating around in my head for the last year or more, waiting for some way to turn it into something usable:
“Can we fast forward to the part where I lose?
This uncertainty is killing me.
Disappointment is an old familiar scar.
I touch it lightly every morning in the shower.
Possibility is a paper-cut.
New and nauseating.
Catching every page.
Re-opened every hour.”
My tendency to choose the certainty of disappointment over the terror of possibility is evidenced in my reactions to rejection. As this journal excerpt illustrates, I tend to find the thud of the closed door somehow comforting:
“Sadness feels like walking on the ocean floor. Solid ground beneath my feet. Deeply anchored. Inescapably awash in wave after wave of salt water. But so solid and familiar that it feels like home. It feels like a place from which great movement is possible. Something to push off of. A place from which I could push off and simply rocket straight into the sky. Or sleep peacefully. Or each in turn.” (4/28/02)
But I have no desire to fast forward to disappointment where my dissertation is concerned. My hope is that the key to opening up to possibility is a willingness to let go of control. For those of us who experience the world as part of a living Universe, letting go necessarily means letting go into the arms of the Beloved. And this is what brings me back to the idea of writing as the work of my hands.
One of the psalms I find most compelling ends with the lines: “U’ma’aseh yadeinu, konena aleinu, u’ma’aseh yadeinu koneneihu. Establish for us the work of our hands; the work of our hands, establish it.” This partnership between God and humanity is a particularly striking ending to Psalm 90 because the psalm spends much of its length describing the distance between the Sacred and the rest of us: We perish, You are everlasting, our days are numbered, Yours are without number. The Psalmist writes: “Our days total seventy years, and with strength, eighty years, and their pride is frustration and falsehood; cut off quickly, we fly away.” A couple of lines later we are given what most people take as the best answer to how to face such transience: “Teach us to number our days that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” But I want to suggest that the psalm’s last lines offer a slightly different option or perhaps simply an elaboration. To number our days is to be aware of how fleeting life is. To demand that the work of our hands be established is to go further and insist that though our days are numbered, we are still God’s co-creators. Flimsy creatures, made of blood and breath but co-creators nonetheless even if only briefly.
The verse doesn’t demand that God do our work for us. The Psalmist is rarely shy, and I’m sure if he had wanted to he would have just said, “Hey God, do my work for me!” Nor does it say, “Oy, enough with the help! Let me establish the work of my own hands for once.” Similarly, when the liturgy of the morning blessings offers praises for “making firm our steps,” the implication is that we agree to do our part by taking the steps in the first place. “Make firm my steps” implies “walk with me,” but not, “walk for me.” It implies that we will do our part and then let go.
My hope for my writing practice is that it will allow me to cultivate the ability to do the work of my hands and let go into possibility. I am reminded of the words of Wendy Shifrin, a dance teacher at my alma mater, Simon’s Rock College. Even in the face of life’s limitations and uncertainty, she suggested that we could, “Choose to still move.”
In the last weekly Torah portion before the New Year, we were given just this choice in the form of the commandment to “choose life.” Whenever I choose the known (disappointment) over the possible I run the risk of choosing death over life. As death is our only certainty, every certainty carries with it a little bit of death. My prayer for this coming year and for my dissertation is that I will be able to continually choose possibility. As singer-songwriter John Gorka warns us, we have a lot to lose if we keep on “trading the maybe for the sure.”
