Shana Tova!

I am pausing mid reading Rabbi Bachman's Roshashana 5771 sermon, motivated to write by something he has written there. Not far in he writes "We think of those not with us tonight, and beseech their souls to intercede on our behalf with God; and we ask God to remember us, for life, and another year written and sealed in the book of life, the implication being that in forgetting, there is death, a terrifying thought indeed." My first thought: the dead may try to intercede for us, but sometimes we are so thickly in our entrenchment that it takes a pretty hard blow for them to get through. The second thought: Here it is again, the Book of Life.

I have noticed that I am not as lucid as I think I should be about the random details that catch my eye as life speeds by, and far less inclined to weave them into any sort of tapestry, because I don't really trust my motives for weaving so much anymore, since much of the weaving is a kind of soft armor. And anyway, what stands out to me now, I hardly understand why. There was only one thought today that seemed to take root in my heart and cause some sort of intellectual short circuit. That was the obsercvation of how soft the clouds are. I know this is a platitude but sometimes you feel the softness more vividly because for some reason you need it to balance out all the hardness you're steeping in, one's own hardness, the hardness of the unrelenting demands of life, and the hardness of all your hardened pathways. Today the sky appeared to wrap this city in a thick blanket of soft clouds as delicately and gently as you'd wrap an infant. For each day and each person, a new medicine.

Other strange and random inspirations that for some reason seemed marked with a highlighter in The Book, the way my son tried to sweet talk the waitress into coming up with some caramel sauce for his ice cream, the wilderness of weeds on top of Lookout Hill, a catbird with little in the way of a tail that seemed to make a social call as I was leaving the park, the strange enchantment the fell on me while eyeing a bowl of opalescent water left over from cooking corn, and this idea that somehow, you can talk to G-d and s/he hears you, has no objection to the misery you might very well need to express, and wonders what took you so long to speak up.