there is nothing
closer,
more 
intimate
and pervading,
than awareness

letting everything
settle
to the ground 
on this busy mind morning—
wings gliding through 
spacious 
awareness
 

golden soul of sun rising
radiating wisdom rays
be the light 
and let love flow
that is all

Winter Solstice Blessings

He was a young man from a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, where emerald forests beckoned, and an enchanting blend of magic and mystery hovered like evening mist. But then war came and the Holocaust was raging, and my father was no longer a poor Jewish villager with holes in his shoes, studying religious texts, removed from the ways of the world. He was now an Initiate into the horror realms of human cruelty. Stripped of personhood, he had become an object of contempt; prey to be hunted, exterminated, erased; a rejected, reviled one, who in the center of a cyclone of hatred and derangement still trusted Life.

I was completely astonished, and almost disbelieving, when he told me as a young teen that he was never overtaken by despair. Fully aware of his dire circumstances, despair would visit and circle at times but it never put down roots. HIs mind he said was “very stable.” I asked how this was possible and he credited his spiritual life and deep faith—a radical trust in Life and an All Pervading Source of Goodness, not dependent on conditions or outcomes.

This quality of radical trust was something I often heard him refer to over the years. The word he used in Hebrew is בטחון/Bitachon.  Bitachondoesn’t create the Good, and it isn’t a strategy to manipulate the universe to get what we want. Goodness is the underlying reality that is always, already there. Bitachon in its highest expression trusts this Ground of Goodness.

During the last year of his life, when he was 93, we brought in caregivers to provide needed support for my father. One day when I came to visit, his caregiver Tisa recalled an event from earlier that day that deeply moved her. Walking slowly across the room, using his walker, my father had started ahead of her and she said “Menachem wait, you shouldn’t walk alone.” To this he replied “I never walk alone; I walk with the Almighty.”

I listen
to the sound of leaves
rustling in the wind,
and gaze
as they
seamlessly
release
their arboreal existence—
dancing into dream,
morphing into memory,
offering
the whole of themselves
back to the receiving,
generative,
Ground.

Gratitude

Reverence

Acceptance

Compassion

Equanimity

A koan for now:
Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going from here?”
Fayan said, “I’m on pilgrimage.”
“What sort of thing is pilgrimage?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not knowing is most intimate.”