Brain. Storming.

Today’s Philanthropy conference was exciting, inspiring and fun. Great networking, new friends, warm welcomes to this New Girl from up North.

I’m full of ideas and questions and impressions. It feels like I’m looking at my life through a kaleidoscope– pieces look vaguely familiar, but are all suddenly in different relationships to one another and look radically different. Again today, the wheel got several spins. so for tonight I think I’ll just lean back and enjoy the pretty colors.

It’s all just a little bit of history repeating

In the summer of 1996, I was planning a move from Baltimore to Philadelphia. I grew up in Baltimore, went to college and grad school in my home town, and then went to work around the corner from where I had gotten my social work degree. After 29 years, I was ready for a new adventure in a new place.

About six weeks before the move to Philly (which I had contemplated for several years, and had actively planned for months…) I went to my first National Havurah Committee Summer Institute. A large proportion of the folks attending were from Philadelphia. I spent that week learning, singing, schmoozing, and sharing meals with people from my about-to-be-adopted new hometown.

There are a lot of things I remember from that week. My mantra that week went something like, “Hi. I’m Laurie Kovens. I’m moving to Philly at the end of the summer to study in the Jewish Renewal community. I’m looking for a job and a place to live.” And everyone responded with “Welcome to town! That’s so exciting. Tell me about yourself. Let me know how I can help. You should meet…..”

At the end of that week, after one last long night of singing, I ran into a friend. It was 2 o’clock in the morning. Maybe 3. And out of the blue, this friend, who had to have heard me repeat my “new to town, looking for work and home” mantra a zillion times during the week, asked me “Do you wanna run the Institute?”

“blink. blink. ??”

Within twenty-four hours of that seemingly random middle-of-the-night conversation, I had met the folks who would eventually hire me for the job that was instrumental in turning my one-year, self-made sabbatical into thirteen years in an adopted home town. And within a week of the Institute, the folks I had met along the way helped me connect with the person who would be my room mate and who is still a beloved friend all these years later.

(Insert stock footage here: 13 years of calendar pages fly by.)

August 11, 2009: Two weeks from today, the moving van with most of my worldly goods will be making its way from Philadelphia to Durham, NC. I’ll be following by car, with my mom, who always comes along to share in the ritual of Settling In, whether I’m moving out of state or around the corner. I won’t live in Philly anymore. I’ll be living in North Carolina.

Tonight, I arrived in Greensboro, to attend the North Carolina Philanthropy Conference. And I found myself experiencing this strange Deja Vu. “I’m Laurie Kovens. I’m moving from Philadelphia to Durham in two weeks….” The details of the story are a bit different now than in 1996, but, yes, I’m looking for work. And more importantly, for community. And here, again, are people saying “How exciting! Welcome to town! Tell me about yourself. How can I help? Have you met…..?”

—————-

Another memory from that pre-move week in 1996: somewhere towards the end of that week, we did an exercise where we asked our biblical ancestors for their advice as we prepared to go home. I asked Abraham and Sarah, (who left their home to take a leap of faith when God asked them to….) for their advice as I left the only home I had ever known to live in a new place. They told me, “Never turn down an invitation for a meal. You never know who will be there. You never know what gifts you will receive from another’s hospitality unless you accept the invitation.”

And so, here in 2009 in Greensboro, I went to dinner tonight with colleagues who invited me to join them. Shared food and drink and stories and laughter. Community. I’ll spend the day tomorrow with 400 people who are passionate about building community, making the world a better place, pursuing justice, equity, beauty and creativity, learning, well-being. 400 people who are from my about-to-be-new home state. I’ll repeat my mantra. I’ll accept the invitations I am offered.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

“The Ugly Truth,” followed by “Evidence”

And the Lovely Pause In Between continued today. IHop, Borders, and a movie with the kiddos — it was all about staying refrigerated in the 105 degree heat and who-knows-how-off-the-scale humidity today. We went to see The Ugly Truth. Cute romantic comedy. I like Kathryn Heigl. Diverting. A nice way to spend a bit of time in the cool air, and a break from the movies I usually see with the girls, in which many things and people are blown up, or much over-the-top gratuitous wackiness ensues.

There was no house-hunting, no decision making for me today beyond what kind of pancakes to order and which movie to see, both pretty easy decisions within a reasonable range of choices. And the biggest imperatives were to stay out of the heat and out of the house. Done and done. Check list checked-off.

The movie today pointed out the limitations of the “check-list,” particularly as it relates to parameters for one’s ideal partner. I’ve made and torn up and sworn off and filled out more checklists than I care to think about. Not just for some imagined Other Person, but for how I want to be, myself, what I want to do, with my day, or with this lifetime.

And today, I ran right up against my own self-imposed check-lists…hard not to do, I suppose, in the midst of a major transition. Did I do everything I wanted to do with my time in Philly? with the time I’ve been leaning into this move in NC? Have I been what and who I want to be to the people in *my* life? I find myself feeling wistful and more than a little second-guess-y at the end of the day. As sticky and heavy a feeling in my soul as the heat and humidity have been to my skin.

I’ve been blowing breezes over my saturated psyche tonight. Music – lots of chanting, and a beautiful album by Three Altos, called “Camaradas.” And poetry – Mary Oliver’s new book, “Evidence,” came into my hands at Borders today.

I’ll let them say the rest for tonight:
I Want to Write Something So Simply

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think –
no, you will realize –
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time
words that you yourself, out of your own heart
had been saying.

~ Mary Oliver

And. From her poem “Evidence:”

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in
singing, especially when singing is not necessarily
prescribed.

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

————-

Making room in my heart for the unimaginable. That is what this move is all about. Defying the checklist. All the checklists. Check. Er….

Slow news days

After finally settling on movers, a moving date, a storage space and a short-term and very nice place to live, it was time to take a break from information gathering and decision making and ruminating. Or making of any kind at all. Except for ice cream Sundaes.

This weekend was school supply shopping with kiddos, tv, Facebook, library books. Keeping my head low when grouchiness (my own or someone else’s) flared up – transitions are hard on everyone, no?

But mostly just blissfully not doing much of anything.

It is sometimes hard to just let myself do Nothing. “When there’s nothing I have to do, shouldn’t I be *doing* something?” This weekend, no.

This weekend was a nice sandwich between all of the summer’s running and planning and all of the next several weeks’ activity related to the move. The first time in a while that I haven’t been either too busy or to exhausted from being too busy to write. And, I suppose, the first time in a while I haven’t put pressure on myself to come up with something Newsworthy to post here, which is probably the biggest factor in my posting tonight.

Sometimes a slow news day is really quite newsworthy all on its own.

Calling all friends: please send music for the road! (or: to everything there is a season and a soundtrack)

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time for every purpose, under Heaven
(Pete Seeger, based on Ecclesiastes)

Up on the watershed, standing at the fork in the road
You can stand there and agonize, til your agony’s your heaviest load
You’ll never fly as the crow flies, get used to a country mile
When youre learning to face the path at your pace
Every choice is worth your while
(Indigo Girls, Watershed)

I get by with a little help from my friends
(The Beatles)

————————————

Today is the day I sift through the estimates and fine print from the trans-state movers, pick one, and set a date for the move.  A week from now I’ll be boarding a plane to Philly, to spend 2 weeks packing and visiting before I say my farewells to a city, and to friends, who have been my home for thirteen years.

Today, and for the next few weeks, (well. always….) I could use a little help from my friends. Reminders to breathe. To pace myself. Reminders that I am embarking on a terrific adventure and that I have everything I need inside me, regardless of what goes in a box marked “NC” and what gets given away.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to celebrate this move, how to spend time with folks, how to ask for help, and how to say thank you. And I keep thinking: “Potluck.” and “Packing Party.” There may well be a Big Shabbes Dinner, and a Box-a-thon before I put that huge dining room table and all the boxes on the moving van, but in the meantime, I woke up this morning with an idea for how I can invite *everyone* close and far away, to come to the table from wherever you are, and get in on the fun. Virtual Potluck. Not for nothing was I raised in communities where everyone brings food to almost every occasion. (Thanks, Mom and Gidi and all my friends and communities, for raising me right!)

And then there is music. And there are friends. Music is my playground and my house of prayer. It is food and medicine and inspiration and how I find words when there aren’t any, strength when I think there isn’t any. How I say Please and Thank You and Yes! to the universe. When I am alone, it reminds me that you are all with me. When I am with you, it is one of my great delights to join our voices together to celebrate, to speak truth to power, to fling open the doors, to remember whatever needs to be remembered, to play and let loose.

And you, my friends, are the ones who sing and listen, who play on the playground with me, who make up the congregation. Who make it possible for life to mean what it does. It would be an empty table, and empty playground, and no minyan at all without you. All the notes would sound the same. But you are here. Each of you a blessing. My friends are how I know there is a God.

Here’s what I’ve learned about potlucks, and what I’ve learned from them, and how this might work:

1. Everyone brings a little something to share – whatever is easy, and whatever is a favorite — Please consider sending suggestions of songs or albums you would want to hear, or want *me* to hear, when preparing for or embarking on a journey, something you think I’ve never heard but should, something that reminds you of time we’ve shared together, something that will be inspiring or fun to hear. You know me — I love everything from classic rock to kirtans, from nigguns to a capella to jazz, from singer-songwriter stuff to gospel to classical to trance.

2. However big or small the quantity, is fine. It’s the love and the sharing that’s important. I’ll take as many or as few suggestions of tunes as you’d like to make. If you feel moved to burn CDs, wonderful! and if you just want to send along a title or two, I’ll seek them out. If you want to send CDs, email me, and we’ll figure out the best place for them to reach me in Philly, or to greet me in NC.

3. Everyone is invited, and there is always enough room. So in this case, please pass this request on to folks who you think would like to bring a song or two to this virtual potluck, whether I’ve met them before or not. Any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Feel free to forward this message in an email or post it as a note in FB — I’d love to see what happens if this little project “virals” its way around

4. Part of the fun is swapping recipes or stories about “why this dish?” so if you have a story or memory or blessing associated with the songs you send, and want to send some “liner notes” along, I’d love to read them!

5. Everyone gets to take home goodies afterwords. I’ll post a Grand Total Playlist at the end of this little party, and I’ll make sure to post suggestions as they come along as well, thru the blog, FB and Twitter. Any suggestions for swapping playlists, cds, MP3′s and stories, let me know — I want to be able to share what shows up at this “table!”

———————————-

When I went to bed last night, the prospect of picking a mover seemed so daunting – it’s big bucks, and an even bigger ticket item in terms of Really Saying Yes to what’s next. Waking up this morning inspired to ask for your company and your blessings this way takes the edge off the “YIKES!!!!” and puts the “YES!!!” back up Front and Center. And, frankly, the idea of finding a way to be with you all at a virtual banquet, on the virtual playground, is just plain fun, no matter what the occasion.

Love and thanks!!!

Anticipation and Preparation

The full moon tells me we are two weeks away from the start of the next month in the Hebrew calendar — the month of Elul, which leads up to the High Holidays. It’s traditionally a time of reflection and preparation for the New Year. I started my blog last year Erev Rosh Hashanah,*  feeling entirely Not Ready for the holiday. unprepared. and the holiday came anyway and brought lots of gifts with it. I was so in-the-midst last year, it seemed impossible to spend any time reflecting. I blinked and Elul was gone.

This year, I am no less in-the-midst. Today I signed the contract on a storage space and booked my ticket for one last flight to Philly before the move. Tomorrow I will make a decision on a moving company and set the date for the truck to come and get all my stuff from Philly and take it to Durham. But instead of putting the brakes on and saying “I’m not ready” for the rapidly approaching new year, for my rapidly unfolding new life, I am *longing* for Elul – for time to reflect. Time to look back on my thirteen years in Philly and these two transitional years leading up to the move to NC. Time to look forward to the life that I’ll be building in Durham. But mostly time to just look inside. To listen. To take a break from figuring things out, making arrangements, and living by checklist.

I feel like I’m waiting for that time with anxiety and anticipation, the way you wait for someone you love and have been missing to come down the ramp from an arriving flight at the airport.

Why the difference between last year and this one?  Maybe because it’s just different from year to year. And maybe because this year, circumstances force me to be in a Preparatory mode — a lot of information to gather and decisions to be made, packing, spending time saying farewell to friends and to a city I have grown to know and love, a place that has been my home. All flowing from the decision to relocate. To go to this place I had never, until very recently, imagined going to. And along the way, traversing far more inner geography than the miles on the map would suggest.

Weeks from now, all the way on the other side of Elul, on the far side of the High Holidays from here, and on the far side of my move South, we’ll read the Torah portion Lech Lecha.** But here I am already, saying “Hineini. I am here.” in response to some Voice telling me the time has come to go to this new place (inside and out).  ”Taking myself” to this place which has been shown to me.

Elul, that listening time, feels to me like it contains the seeds of Lech Lecha, the “taking oneself to a place” time….Elul is the anagram for “Ani l’dodi v dodi li.”**** “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”  We listen for, and then hear, that which is sacred and beloved to us, the truth of our own hearts. Then we follow where that takes us. In between is Rosh Hashana – the “birthday of the world.”

And so.  Love comes first – sometimes for another person, sometimes for what each of us finds to be most holy and true about our own Selves. And then the world is made. And *then* we go to the land we are shown and become a blessing. And then again. Maybe it just happens all at once.

—————-

*the eve of the Jewish New Year

**the Torah portion in which G-d calls to Abraham, and Abraham responds by saying “Hineini. I am here.” and G-d says to him, “Leave your father’s home and take yourself to the place that I will show you…and you shall be a blessing”

***from the Song of Songs, and interpreted not only as a declaration of love and belonging between human beloveds but also between the people Israel and God.

Apres le deluge, moi, avec some mixed metaphors.

When I started this blog back in the fall of 2008, I subtitled it “Unwrapping the sacred fortune cookies in everyday life.” I figured I would write a little something everyday about those little moments that seem like nothing, but are really blessings, lessons, little “nothings” that, when I pay attention, are really the big Somethings in my life. And that’s how it started. And then….

Someone upended the fortune cookie factory into the living room floor of my life. 

I’ve been swimming in a deluge of moments.  Fortune cookie after fortune cookie. through the mailbox, under the doorjamb, down the chimney – like the chapter in Harry Potter where Hogwarts is trying to send Harry the letter inviting him to Wizard School.  He doesn’t know what all the fuss is about, but it’s exciting. And his uncle is terrified of the Truth that will come out if that letter gets opened.

And so it has been for me.  Months spent alternately (and sometimes simultaneously…) trying to get my hands on the message meant for me, like Harry, and trying every way I know how to bar the door, like Uncle Vernon. 

But all those envelopes for Harry were an invitation for him to take his place in the world, to get acquainted with his true nature, to go where he belongs.  And no amount of blocking chimneys and mail slots or running away to isolated places prevents Hagrid from showing up with a flying motorcycle and a squashed birthday cake and whisking Harry off to Diagon Alley.

It’s felt just about that crazy and unlikely and scary and exhilarating and Right these past months, for me. Headlong. And I just needed to be In It. Trying to write about it felt, in all those months of moments, like trying to catch a hurricane in a dixie cup. or a thimble. Couldn’t stop the letters from coming down the chimney and under the door, couldn’t flee. And didn’t really want to.

Suffice to say that the message is getting through, and I am more or less squaring myself to the task of running headlong at a brick wall while trusting that doing so will land me at Platform 9 and 3/4. (The equivalent in my life being an August filled with packing up my apartment in Philly and moving to Durham NC, not knowing much except that a “Harry, you’re a wizard” sort of invitation has been issued, and I’m supposed to get on the Hogwarts Express at the appointed hour.)

I think that today is not the day to try to recap all the plot points of all these past un-posted months.  But as the water recedes a little, some story will come through.

Today was just, finally, a day for showing up. here.

Lovely quiet

It seems almost silly to talk about how nice it is to have eased into an evening of relative silence. For once, no one is playing music. The TV is off. The pets are all chilled out. Each of the humans is engaged in some quiet pursuit – reading, surfing, texting, writing, sleeping.

The only sounds are the rain outside at the pets’ recirculating water fountain, the rain outside, and the clicks of mice and keyboards.

It’s worth remarking because such a feeling of calm and quiet is rare in a household of adults who like to Do Stuff, teenagers (who are teenagers), and numerous pets including newly acquired kitten and puppy.

And now I’m going to go quietly away and savor. The ingredients of a quiet evening beckon – PJ’s, a good book, a cup of tea, the New Kitty, and an open window for listening to and smelling the rain.

Good night. rest well.

This is the kind of thing I meant….

….when I named the blog “Apropos of Something.” That there would be little things that just made me say. “Oh.” or “Huh.” or “Really???” or “Wow.”  

So much of what I have written here has been about Big Moments…maybe they all seem big because writing helps me Pay Attention?

But today there was a little thing. This little line from Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith (Nora Gallagher. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)  

She’s talking here about a group at her church, the “Core Community” that meets every week to talk about faith and life and what happens for them in their church community and outside it – a time to speak and to listen to each other in a sacred way. She says this about this weekly act of speaking and listening:

“I see our stories as fragments, salvaged by their telling.” 

Not so different from the Jewish mystical tradition that tells us the world is full of holy sparks — shards from the vessel created by G-d to contain the holy energy that would make the world.  A vessel which could not contain all that holiness. A vessel which shattered. The pieces of which are scattered throughout creation, throughout our lives.

Any lifting up of a holy spark makes a small repair in the fabric of creation. Makes a little more light by which we can see more clearly.

I will try to remember this during days when there is not much to say, or days when there is So Much that there are no words or not enough of them. Some days I don’t write because I just don’t feel equal to the task of capturing the moment. 

But that little line reminds me that even a small telling, a small listening, is also a small salvaging. Acknowledging the little things and even the big things, however imperfectly, is Something.

soundtracks…or…sometimes you just have to sit in the driveway til the song is done

Sometimes life requires that we sit in the driveway for a little while before we get out of the car.   I had one of those moments today.

I was enjoying what for me is an old-school Laurie Sunday morning. While the rest of the house was still fast asleep, I made a few pancakes with plenty of butter and syrup, grabbed my knitting, and settled in to watch CBS Sunday Morning…a decades-long ritual for me, one which is a rare-if-ever occurrence in my current incarnation in North Carolina. Fuquay Sunday mornings usually find me catching up on sleep that I didn’t get during the week, or Up and Out doing family stuff.

Fortified by the rare quiet time with Charles Osgood and company, and still with no household demands (wow…) I sauntered out to get a haircut (ah, the little luxuries.) Something just for me after the six-week, headlong rush of Philly-to-NC travel, Halloween, election, work deadlines, school play, Thanksgiving and Clover’s farewell.

The icing on today’s Just My Time cake? Listening to the music I want to listen to — the local classic rock station plays a lot of great stuff here. Rounding the corner towards home, tossing my newly trimmed, shiny, well-groomed hair in the breeze from the open window, I hear the opening notes of The Boxer, a Simon and Garfunkle song from way way back in the day.

Long before any of my gang could drive, never mind play our own music in the car, we changed the lyrics to this song and, as a group, sang it to a pal on his birthday. From my 41-year-old-self about to pull into the driveway in Fuquay Varina, NC  to deliver Fruity Pebbles and 2% milk to the teenagers dwelling within, I was transported back to another time (I was maybe 12?) another living room (this one in Baltimore) and another set of teens (and a different set of snacks — we were a chips and dip and m&ms gang.)

I pulled into two driveways at once while I lalala’ed with Simon and Garfunkle — I was in the driver’s seat of my Toyota Corolla in Jacobean Ct., and also in the passenger seat of my mom’s Datsun 710 on Fallstaff Road.  Hearing that song wrapped me in all the good memories of the love and affection we had for each other back then, magnified by the almost 30 years since then, in which we have all continued to love each other through thick and thin, across time and distance.

I might have set out this morning to Get Away from It All for a little while, take some precious time alone. But the best part of that time was that 90 seconds in those two driveways. I came home to my Sweetie, the kids and the Fuquay menagerie with more than a haircut and the milk and the Fruity Pebbles.  I found myself for a few moments in memory’s living room with my oldest, dearest friends. And that was a very sweet place to be.