Meditation For Pesach

scared of the desert scared of freedom
scared of Out There scared of being alone
scared of nothing for miles around but sand and desolation
scared that there will be no food no cuddles no love
scared that

jerusalem

is so very far away
that i will never see it
except in my mind's eye where the ochre stone
breathes lazily in the evening sun
scared i am not strong enough scared that my fear
will keep me hewing rock and sleeping in resentment

until i die

Shabbat Shennanigans #2 - Too Blue To Jew

Over the past couple of weeks, a tell-tale sign of potential imminent health deterioration has been rearing its disturbing head. Despite copious amounts of sleep, draining and constant fatigue has been stalking me at every turn. You wake up after nine or ten hours slumber and feel no more rested than you did when your head hit the pillow - your mind full of half-remembered shadows of unpleasant dreams. The lethargy follows you throughout the day, and you appear rather spaced-out to others, if not downright grumpy. Your concentration is impaired, of course, and both my hands are currently strewn with the evidence of multiple minor cutting/burning accidents sustained in the course of recent kitchen endeavours. You feel of use neither to man nor beast.

Now, in the last two days or so, and particularly today, I have started to feel my mood deteriorate as well. Unfocused anger, bubbling self-hatred and a general feeling of dark clouds all around.

I have just made challah dough, and it is, as I write, sitting rising in the fire-warmed living room downstairs, and still I feel no better. I feel no sense of celebration, no sense of shabbat, no electric sense of a future being born every second. Everything feels dead, and unamenable to alteration.

Thankfully, I am veritably bombarded with psychiatrically-themed medical appointments next week. For some reason, they all seem to have come together at once on this occasion. On Monday I see my Counsellor at the GP's Surgery. On Wednesday, I have a session with my Psychotherapist at the hospital, and on Thursday I have an appointment at a nearby outpatients' unit with my Supervising Psychiatrist.

It is pretty lucky that all these disparate resources should randomly coincide in this way within one week, given the way I am feeling at the moment. I will, of course, be talking to them all about my current situation and seeking further advice.

Given all this, I am not massively feeling like intimately exploring my spirituality this afternoon. Not only is it Erev Shabbat, but Pesach is almost upon us too, and so I hope that I will be in a better place very soon as this is such a uniquely thorny, tangled, difficult and potential-laden festival to explore.

In the meantime, love to all of you, hag sameach and shabbat shalom.

Poetry Corner #2

Wedding Day - by Seamus Heaney

I am afraid.
Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over. Why all those tears,
The wild grief on his face
Outside the taxi? The sap
Of mourning rises
In our waving guests.
You sing behind the tall cake
Like a deserted bride
Who persists, demented,
And goes through the ritual.
When I went to the gents
There was a skewered heart
And a legend of love. Let me
Sleep on your breast to the airport.

Kitchen Capers #2 (Addendum)

As promised, some pictures of the less-than-photogenic but fairly yummy pumpkin cake.


The preparatory stages.....

....ready to go in the oven.....

Humble-looking but eminently edible. Good moistness value. Quite nice with a cup of tea.

Kitchen Capers #2

Friday was actually quite a good day.

Dr Squirrel and I went out for a walk in Watergate Park, a popular dog-walking spot not far from where we live, which gives way to the slightly more daunting Washingwell Woods as you venture further in.



Predictably, Dr Squirrel went a little wild with the camera, taking some more rather cool close-up shots.

Some moss growing on a fallen log here.

While here we have a close up of the texture inside a fallen tree. Good work, it looks almost edible.

I got in on the action too, and tried my best to come to terms with something called "Macro Mode", which seems designed to allow you to be pretentious whenever you feel like it.

Here we have a close up of some grassy leaves, and here....

a close-up of a rather wobbit-looking dandelion. I'm obviously not in the same league as Dr Squirrel, but I was still rather chuffed.

While we were out in the woods, I had a strong and irrational feeling that my little nephew was going to be born very soon, slightly early. So far, no go with that, but we're still waiting!

Afterwards, when we got home, I made a quick pumpkin cake. This was somewhat experimental, as I haven't actually made a cake with pumpkin before, but I had a spare tin left over from the stash I had acquired in the USA last year and I thought, why not.

The pumpkin seemed to inhibit the proper rising of the cake, so it looked a little delapidated, and I was somewhat worried that this would have to be one of those recipes that was "put down to experience". However, when everything calmed down, despite not looking like a frontpiece for a Delia book, it turned out to taste very nice indeed - spicy and moist. Still, next time I'm probably going to go with grated apple and save myself the hour of worry.

This post won't tolerate any more pictures, I think, so I'll post the cake pictures in the next post.

Kitchen Capers #1

Thursday is shopping day. This is not something particularly exciting, you understand. It involves me driving my mother-in-law to Asda, and the two of us then spending an excrutiating one-and-a-half hours trying to fight our way through hoardes of exceptionally rude and stupid people armed only with a trolley each and our reserves of patient goodwill. Which soon run out. We come out gasping for a long drink, a fag, and a desire to be Anywhere But Here (TM).

These weekly Asda trips, though, are actually an improvement. We used to go to Tesco in Gateshead. Tesco in Gateshead is, in fact, a miniaturized model, accurate in every detail, of the seventh circle of hell. Thankfully, they're going to pull it down soon. Bring it on.

Anyway, despite being rather droopy and lacklustre this morning, I decided that I needed to get my plump and shapely ass back in the kitchen. So this afternoon, I enlisted the help of Dr Squirrel as my personal Kitchen Elf (TM) and set about having a good time with food.

It was nothing fancy - we merely made a "mur" (potato omelette with onion and parsley) and a simple salad of baby spinach, thick tomato slices, red onion and avocado, dripped with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (no, just the cheap stuff, I can't afford the good kind).

Despite the simplicity and indeed, near rusticness, of the meal we put together, it was very satisfying to be back in the kitchen doing my thing. The opportunity to cook and bake without treading on anyone's toes is actually one of the things I am most looking forward to about Dr Squirrel and I having a place of our own. He bought me a bread book for my birthday last week, and already I am fantasizing and plotting variations on various recipes contained therein.

Tomorrow, I'm going to make a spicy pumpkin loaf cake, inshallah. Watch this space. You might even get a picture. Hausfrau out.

Shabbat Shennanigans #1

You can tell from the fact that I'm sitting here typing this on a computer at half past five in the afternoon that I'm not exactly shomer shabbas. But shabbat is something quite important to me, which is why I want to try and write something a little bit reflective every Friday here on my blog.

At the moment, I am very unsatisfied with shabbat and its place in my life - and those frustrations more or less directly echo the ways in which I'm dissatisfied with my life in general. In that sense, shabbat is a bit like an archetype, a mirror, or an ideal, that you hold reality up to and compare. Obviously, that can be a dangerous thing - a person can pine over fantasies obssessively, waiting for the right time to start living their lives in earnest, while in reality, life is busily slipping past them all the time.

I don't want to be like that. But at the same time, I don't want to turn into someone who is completely accepting and resigned to the status quo - someone with no hopes or desires or preferences about the way things should be. I suppose it's all about getting the balance right, like a lot of things in life.

It's a bit like the whole concept of "Christmas". "Christmas" has to be this perfect, rarefied thing, spent in the loving bosom of a perfect family. Obviously, this is the sort of hype that is just setting you up for a fall. Mental Health and Suicide Prevention helplines notoriously need to put on extra volunteers around the "festive period", as desperation, loneliness and self-hatred seem to build to an unbearable peak then for so many people.

I still have fantasies of the Perfect Christmas. But I'm also more aware now that these fantasies need to be put in their proper context, and always seen for what they are. The fantasy of perfection should never be allowed to blind you to the real blessings - the messy, varied, incongruous blessings - that are already in your life. As a former teacher of mine used to say (usually in relation to some timetabling or scheduling issue): the good is often the enemy of the best.

I don't have the "perfect" family, all chuckling and reminiscing while we hand-ice home-made gingerbread santas, or gathering round the fairy-lit christmas tree to sing carols and hug. And I don't get to have the "perfect" shabbat, surrounded by loved ones who share my personal spiritual outlook, adoring children looking up at me as I play Obi Wan to their Luke Skywalker, a posh kitchen warming to the delicious smells of the challah I've just made from scratch. Maybe one day I will have some of that. Maybe one day I will have all of that. Who knows? But right now, it's a fantasy. And my life right now is a reality - I have to keep sight of that, celebrate it, rejoice in it, find the beauty and the many blessings in what I actually have, and take it week by week.

Shabbat Shalom, everybody!

New Toy

Yesterday, my partner and I bought an ex-display digital camera from Comet at a stark raving discount.

Yes, that's right, I do have a partner. He's very big on anonymity, so I can only introduce him to you as Dr Squirrel.

Anyway, yesterday we bought this camera, which, being Japanese, has more features than your average NASA shuttle. This afternoon, Dr Squirrel was just about climbing the walls for an opportunity to take it out somewhere pretty and give it a test run.

So we drove out to Derwent Park, a nearby place of natural beauty. Here are some of the results...

Here, Dr Squirrel, at my request, takes a slightly pretentious close-up of a lit cigarette in my hand. Turned out quite nicely, but I think we'll have to experiment a little to produce the quintessentially pretentious smoking shot.

This is the only photograph today taken by me. It's nothing fancy - I have barely mastered the theory of point at the pretty thing and press the fucking button. But still, it's my first photo with the new camera, and it's of a rather attractive pine cone basking in the afternoon sun on the forest floor.

Here, Dr Squirrel really comes into his own. He took this shot of the electricity pylon from within and underneath it. Very arty. Love the angle. I was so chuffed with this that I've set it as my Windows wallpaper.

Dr Squirrel's other big triumph of the day - a beautiful close-up shot of some sunlit holly leaves. I detect the beginnings of a talent here, gentle readers.

Anyway, that's all for now, folks. Catch y'all later.

Response To A Response

Yesterday, a rather lovely lady named Lisa, who also happens to be my sister-in-law, left this comment on my post about judaism and me.

Lisa's comment brought up some issues, so today's post is, as it were, a response to her response. So thanks, Leez, my blog is no longer a monologue, but a dialogue. I feel a warm glow of satisfaction already.


Dear Lisa

Thank you for the comment you left on yesterday's blog post about me and judaism.

In it, you say that you would like to see me draw up "a little table" with ticks and crosses next to various aspects of judaism (religious, practical and cultural) indicating which of those aspects I agree and disagree with. In response to reading your comment, I actually, and I mean immediately, began to do just that - opening up a new document on Word Pad and beginning a series of little lists. I started with "Religious" aspects (under the uber-heading of Lisa's Little Judaism Table), with monotheism, rather predictably, being the first item on the list.

Here's the thing. Rather than putting a tick or a cross, or even the word yes or the word no, next to my emboldened Monotheism, I double-returned and, without even thinking about it, began to type. I typed the following:

"I do not literally believe in a god or gods as people usually think about them. However, the concept of holiness is meaningful to me. The idea that there is something, however abstract, that binds everything together, and brings meaning out of the chaos."

At this point I stopped, took a metaphorical step back, and looked at what I had just written, realising that if I had not paused and checked myself, I would have carried on typing, probably for pages and pages, about what I mean by the word god and how I understand the concept of sacredness and my personal vision of the spiritual and the story of exactly how I became interested in exploring judaism.

My point is this. Monotheism, and brit milah, and covenant, and peoplehood, and davening, and mikveh and shekhina are not fixed, easily-defined, uncontroversial, free-standing, uncontextualized concrete things that I can put a tick or a cross next to. It just isn't that simple. Or at least, it doesn't seem to be for me. I could probably write you essays on each one of them; on how I see them, on how they relate to me.

Here's the good news though. I am going to write all those essays, and explore all these issues - and I'm going to do it right in front of you. That is a big part of what this blog is about. Exploring judaism and its relationship to me. So please don't think I'm ducking out of the challenge by failing to produce the little table. I'm not. It's just that the table is going to end up being a whole lot bigger than envisaged.

I also hope that my interest in judaism, and indeed, my potential future conversion to judaism, will not represent any kind of spiritual or intellectual exclusivism on my part. Here I'm referring to the lovely Ravi Shankar quote with which you ended your comment. I understand that I am me, and that I will never be anything else. I understand that I will never be anywhere other than where I am, anywhen other than the present moment. I understand that the universe is very big, and that meaning is very personal. I'm not trying to buy my way out of that. I'm not trying to buy my way out of the complexity, of the reality, of the complicatedness. For me, judaism is the first category of spiritual journey that has let me feel that I don't have to compromise those things. That I don't have to be less than me, and that I don't have to pretend that life is something it isn't, in order to belong.

Again, I will come back to all these things later, I'm sure.

Anyway, thanks once again for what you wrote, and I hope that my future dialectic meanderings live up to my promise to fully and honestly explore the issues you raise.

Good Atheist Commie Jewish Girl

On my Facebook profile, under "Religious Views", I describe myself as a "Good Atheist Commie Jewish Girl".

I'm rather particular about epistemology, and in consequence my metaphysics tend towards the rationally thought-out. I don't believe in the existence of a literal god or gods in the sense that most people would understand it. I'm not looking for someone, or something, to spoonfeed me ready-made morality - I've made my peace with metaethical subjectivism and come through the other side without drowning in either apathy or relativism. I am inherently wary of the type of worldview that thinks in terms of "groups", of insider/outsider dynamics and of the dilution of the individual into conformity.

I am under no illusions that all of this makes me something of an unusual candidate for conversion to Reform Judaism. And if I were under any illusions, the reactions of people around me would soon have disabused me of them. Two of the people closest to me - people whom I not only love, but also respect - have voiced strong, and perhaps even deep, misgivings.

These concerns fall into two broad categories. On the one hand, there are suggestions that I am simply not qualified to set off on any path that will end with my calling myself "jew". Words become utterly useless without clear definitions, and I simply do not meet the criteria necessary to fit the definition of "jewishness". An extension of this is the implication that I am somehow deriding or insulting the jewish religion by purporting to make myself a part of it. I cannot in good conscience stretch the boundaries of language, theology and interpretation that far - far enough to bring congruence to the dual concepts of "me" and "judaism".

On the other hand, there is the idea that I am looking for something very particular and very profound in my life, and that I will, in the end, simply not find it in judaism. That this path will lead, ultimately, to deep dissatisfaction and despondency, as I try to recapture a high that is of necessity miasmic and elusive, or as I struggle to find meaning in all the wrong places.

I am certainly not convinced by the first argument. I have never been anything less than frank and honest about myself and my beliefs with anyone in the jewish community, including the rabbis I have met. I am not trying to slip under the radar under false pretences. I do not intend to lie to my sponsor, or to the Beit Din. I do not purport to speak for "judaism" in general, nor to represent it, nor to be qualified to proselytize its orthodoxy. I claim only to speak for myself. In spiritual matters, one can only ever speak for oneself.

The second point is a little more troubling, and it is something that I will have to give serious thought to. I feel, however, that only by beginning a process of conversion-oriented study, reflection and conversation will I be able to truly discern the answer, once and for all, as to whether or not this is the right path for me.

These are merely some initial thoughts - I will of course return to this and other related subjects again. Probably often.

Poetry Corner #1

Coupling - by David Ignatow

Wherever he looks, standing still in the city,
are people born of coupling, walking in gray suits
and ties, in long dresses and coiffed hair,
speaking elegantly, of themselves and of each other,
forgetting for the moment their origin,
perhaps wishing not to know or to remember.
They dress as if having been born in a clothing store.

They were born of men and women naked
and gyrating from the hips
and with movements up and down
and with climactic yells,
as if losing their lives
in the pleasure and so glad,
so wildly glad.

From this rises the child
from between the wet crotch, blood and mucus,
He stands upright and pronounces himself
humankind and steps from bed and clothes himself
in a gray suit and from the next room of birth
steps a woman in a long dress. They meet
in the corridor and arm in arm walk its length
in search of one room, empty of inhabitants
but prepared for them.