Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

Discovering paths near my new home in Oregon

Today is Day 236 that the Israeli hostages are in captivity.

Bring them home!

Life is beautiful, banal, and cruel. We have all experienced moments of each since they broadly cover the human condition. It’s the balance that makes life unfair.

This weekend, I watched the interview with four mothers of the five young Israeli women in the recently-aired video as they were kidnapped and brutalized by H-m-s. Another opportunity for more cracks to the heart because of casual evil, and an overwhelming sense of injustice and helplessness. Empathy for these women and their daughters is too hard to experience because how can I, a mother of daughters who are safe, who are living their undisturbed lives, even purport to comprehend what these mothers—and their daughters—are going through? But they are in me, which feels like a duty I have committed to.

A few hours later, my daughter and her boyfriend came over for dinner. It was early evening on a beautiful spring day in Oregon. We sat in the backyard around a big table, enjoying the food that I cooked over two days, eating and talking about our week, planning for the next week. During pauses we watched the occasional hummingbird feed on the flowering bushes in the back of the garden. Later, I realized that this was the first time that I had anyone over for a meal since before Covid. The last time was brunch with my Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom group. (SOSS is an organization for Jewish and Muslim women to meet as friends, learn from each other, and work toward acceptance and understanding.) I still have hope in connections made around plates of food, though right now that feels like a band-aid when heart surgery is needed.

With all the videos I’ve watched, and articles I’ve read, and essays I’ve written about antisemitism, Jew hatred, and anti-Zionism over the years, after October 7^th I decided that I need to do more—to be more. Learning and awareness are important, but I need to figure out how to stop feeling like an observer.

Almost eight months after that apocalyptic event, I’m acting in a new way: focusing less on me as an isolated individual, and more on me within a Jewish journey. In this space, I plan on sharing some of the lessons and ideas that I learn that resonate with me. To learn from a tradition, a people, a religion that has survived and thrived, in often intolerable conditions, is to honor those who came before, and to learn from the richest, soul-touching, thought-provoking ideas that can inspire me to be a light—to keep me focused on what is essential to continually work on myself to, as I recently read and am absorbing, “show that I am deserving of the Divine Presence.” This seems to be the worthwhile goal.

Trust the Divine Presence and do good; dwell in the land, and be nourished by faith. (Psalm 37:3)

The interconnectedness of life in an Oregon forest

Before writing silently for 60 minutes, the participants in my Shut Up and Write! group talk about what they’re planning to write. This week, I explained that as my part in pushing against the rise of antisemitism and anti-Zionism—in addition to my aching howl to FREE THE HOSTAGES and my plea for people to stop being motivated by hate—I plan on sharing a Jewish learning.

It feels right to be Jewish publicly, showing that Judaism is a way of being that encourages the individual to constantly improve the self and the world around you, where empathy and concern for the other are motivating factors and that this religion, philosophy, culture, people—this way of being that has been around for over 3,000 years—is not something to chant against or accuse of horrors.

I was drawn back to a quote I heard in the Mussar class that I’m taking. (Mussar is a virtues-based approach to Jewish ethics and character development.) This quote by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, from To Heal a Fractured World, focused my pre-writing musings.

“Each of us is here for a purpose. Discerning that purpose takes time and honesty, knowledge of ourselves and knowledge of the world, but it is there to be discovered. Each of us has a unique constellation of gifts, an unreplicated radius of influence, and within that radius, be it as small as a family or as large as a state, we can be a transformative presence. Where what we want to do meets what needs to be done, that is where God wants us to be. Even the smallest good deed can change someone’s life.” 

Not only does this conceptualize the idea that we’re always where we need to be, but it helps me perceive each moment—each circumstance—as an opportunity for growth, to be more fully me. The idea that we must continually work on ourselves, combined with understanding that we are always at our appointed place, means that there is never an excuse to not try to be my best or even to find fulfillment in the simplest of moments. This moment—each moment—is not a mistake: it is a stepping-stone within a life.

Contemplating that quote, I keep returning to, we are “where God wants us to be.”

What does that mean? Am I (this human, this spark), on my own, or is there a current upon which our lives—each of our lives—flows? Is this the concept of God that can help me understand the idea of God that has been so elusive?

Which reminds me of something else that I read recently. In Jewish with Feeling, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, says, “Think of God not as the subject of your sentence, who is or is not this or that, but as the is-ing, the very process of being itself.” He went on to talk about not using the word God but to think of how we each are enlivened or en-spirited to live our lives.

As I looked over my highlighting in his book, another idea stood out.

“Nothing we can say about God will survive the rigors of logical analysis. But that shouldn’t get in the way of our search for the presence we have felt in our most spiritually open—or spiritually hungry—moments. If there is a tension between what we know in our minds and what we feel in our hearts, then let’s stay with that tension. If there is a contradiction, let us take it upon ourselves. Only let us press on with our desire to experience the numinous and serve the patterns of the universe in a deeper, more meaningful way.”

And finally, “That part of us that always seeks to awaken even more, I call soul. Judaism speaks of the soul as a spark of God.”

The concept of an eternal, spiritual energy or force, stripped of the anthropomorphic man-in-the-sky imagery, appeals to me—speaks to the essence that is. The something within that wonders about the connections between people—the strings that seem to draw us together in coincidences and circumstances as we go about our lives—prefers to contemplate the “patterns of the universe” rather than that we are disconnected individuals stumbling around. It seems so much more correct, so much more of a way to consider our own purpose because in this case, purpose is not merely survival. It is to be, as Rabbi Sacks said, “a transformative presence.”

To be within the presence, the fertile soil, comforts me and challenges me. I do not want to wither. I want to use the nutrients that I am given to “serve the patterns of the universe in a deeper, more meaningful way.”

With this perception of God, this force, this is-ing, I can cry out for the pain that others experience and believe that there is a gathering of life forces that has an impact, has meaning. And to that I say, amen.

Seeing far and fog on a walk in the woods

I’m slipping into my next, the fourth, retirement stage or mindset. I call it Detachment.

First, there was the astonishment that I don’t have to be at a specific place, at a set time, to do a certain thing, and that nothing can be demanded of me by anyone. That was Relief.

Second was Disappointment. This was when Relief was awash with negative thoughts. No one needs me. What am I going to do with all these days stretching ahead of me? How can I fill my time so that I still feel needed, important, alive? This mindset began the stripping bare that’s happening even more now. But, as a courtesy to ourselves, this doesn’t happen all at once.

Third was Unretirement. Looking for activities (volunteer and paid) and get-togethers that made me think that I still have it, that I’m still the person I was, that I’m still good at the things I trained in and practiced for years, the things that, in fact, enabled me to retire early. This stage is when people often go back to work, escaping the freedom of retirement.

Interspersed amongst those mindsets is Escape. Travelling, especially when teaching, was hard during the school year. We all seemed to have someone determining when we could or couldn’t escape. Now, my schedulelessness is another bit of proof that I’m in control of my life and my time. This one also feels good when I hear about other people’s trips—it’s not just mine. There’s less envy than there may have been in the past. Now, it’s about appreciating that other people are cutting loose from whatever schedule they created for themselves and are setting out to have new adventures.

Two weeks into my Oregon sojourn, I realize that I have transitioned into the fourth stage, Detachment. This is me figuring out what I want to do without the imposition of external shoulds or shouldn’ts.

I’ve been spending whole days without anything to show for my time and it barely bothers me. When younger daughter asked what I did one day, I told her, without apologizing, that I read emails, watched lectures, viewed stories on Israel, napped, and took a walk. I can now spend my time productively for me without needing to have anything to show for it. Receiving—information, thoughts, observations, ideas, learnings—are just as important and necessary as output. The veneer of acceptability is being scratched through: I don’t need do something to prove (especially to myself) that I’m not lazy or that my life is of value. Every moment is to be lived and embraced as I need, and within every moment I am figuring out how to keep growing.

As I’ve been thinking about why I continue to write and what I hope to get out of it, I’m becoming aware that I don’t contain within myself all that I want to know and share. I’m ready to learn new things and be a conduit to others. But, and this is key, this is self-directed.

For years, I was fixated on needing to get a PhD to prove (to myself and others) that I know something, that I am an expert in something. But I never did it and now the idea of going back to school and spending years putting my mind under the scrutiny and assessment of professors feels like a waste of the time that I have left and a waste of what I have learned up to this moment.

This, too, is a shift in mindset. I realized that what I want—need—to know is not more detached information. What I need is as pertinent as breath: how can I keep improving as a person.

With no job that demands and drains my time, and adult children who don’t need me for their sustenance, I’m free to follow the path that leads me to be as me as possible, giving me the opportunity to fulfill my purpose as I understand it to be.

Mt. Charleston, Nevada

“I’m bothered about this thing with Sandy,” my mother said.

“You mean that she died? You can say that she died,” I responded, a little harshly.

The “thing with Sandy” was not just her discomfort with the word “died” (if you don’t say it out loud, you keep it away apparently), but Sandy, a woman she knew for over 60 years, recently died of lung cancer even though she never smoked. Who in their generation wasn’t exposed to second-hand smoke? So now my mother worries that this will happen to her, especially since both my grandmother and my father smoked.

There seems to be a lottery wheel constantly rolling around in her head with things that she could die of. Unfortunately, the wheel keeps expanding when she hears about yet another person’s death.

At 89, so much of her life exists in memories and then recounted in long phone calls with friends, where the focus is on taking turns to retell, to relive, but not to listen, because that’s not the point, that’s not what’s needed in the exchange.

Women in their 80s and 90s, holding on, rarely going out because of illnesses or fears of the dangers out there. Their increasing frailness and so few positive things to look forward enable trepidation to become a barrier.

Do they only look forward to seeing their children and grandchildren, and hoping for great-grandchildren? Are they done thinking of things to do? Are memories enough? Has life become a waiting game, even though the end is dreaded?

Looking at my mother, at her life that has been still for so long, I wonder what I want to be doing or thinking about if I make it to my 90s.

At 62, I have a hypothetical 30 years to go—not a pause or an epilogue, entire chapters, a new book, a lifetime. Looking at it in stark numbers terms, if I don’t want to regret my life as still life, I need to commit myself to more than I’m doing now. How should I spend the next third of my life (fingers crossed, tfu tfu tfu), so I don’t live with regrets for/in 30 years.

The other day I realized that I’m always searching for meaning. But I’m not content with that; I can simultaneously wonder and do.

With all the time I have to write, I realize that I don’t want to just sit and reflect. I need to be thinking about what I’m doing, gaining insights from living, not only remembering or observing.  

Lately, my focus has been on where I’ll live, but that’s not a cure or the core. That won’t satisfy my endless desire for purpose, to push beyond the borders of my life as it is.  

What will make me feel fulfilled? What new stories will I recount, animating conversations with as yet unmet people?

I’ve been retired for two years; enough time to know that I need something new; but not travel, or a hobby, or a relationship, or a pet. Studies and related work: to get me out of my meditations, not letting my concern for my mother overshadow concerns for myself.

I’m a busy person with two paid part-time jobs and two volunteer jobs: dogsitting, course evaluator for online courses, grant writer, and translator of Holocaust testimonies. Each of these jobs brings satisfaction, but none is enough. None animates my entire being and I realize that I want that: I don’t want to retire from contributing of myself.

In the past, I have often fallen into things. Now I need to be intentional, to get off the conveyor belt. I’m leaning towards expanding my knowledge in a chosen area that aligns with who I am and what I’ve done, so that I can express myself fully in mind, being, and actions. The direction is mine to determine.

Blooming cactus on Mr. Charleston

I'm excited to announce that I now have a blog at the Times of Israel. Some of my writing will be posted there (depending on the topic), rather than here. When that happens, I will post a link here.

Here's my first link, to my post, "Learning Not to Be Judgmental to Save the World." I hope you continue enjoying my writing.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/learning-not-to-be-judgmental-to-save-the-world/

Dusk

It is now Tuesday morning. Since last Wednesday afternoon, I have been living in a cabin in a rustic lake-side resort in a national forest in Oregon. This is where younger daughter and her boyfriend live and work. I’m here dog sitting while they’re on a two-week vacation in Hawaii with his parents. There are guests and other employees around, but I’m not here to engage, I’m here to completely disengage. I now see the impossibility of that.

Since I retired in June, I have been living with my mother in her one-bedroom apartment in Florida. That was quite the change after having been an empty nester for eight years in my own two-bedroom apartment in Northern Virginia after younger daughter went off to college and, like her older sister, only came back for the occasional visit. The transition seemed easy for my mother; after all, I did go to help her out and make her feel less alone after having been a widow for over ten years. I have found it challenging. I haven’t lived with a parent since I was 17—I’ve been the parent for 30 years!—so being watched over by my 87-year-old mother was jarring. Living with anyone after being alone for so long was going to be difficult for me; I didn’t think that I would ever live with anyone again. Which means that I really did look forward to this retreat in the woods.

A mental and physical retreat. A writer’s retreat.

I was going to focus on learning to be okay with myself as a retired person, not feeling that I should be filling my time with activities and interactions, and some kind of work. I was going to settle into my own rhythm, with four daily dog walks mixed in. Walks in a forest and along a lake surely fit into any type of retreat. What’s more, I had decided that I would use this time to see if I was a writer, where the only way to pass the test would be to work on a book and, in my brazenly optimistic moments, write a draft!

I did start the book. And start. And start. And start. Never pleased with the previous day’s direction, each morning I would start again.

Then Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur came, and with them the time to think. My religious practice is certainly not strict, but for a while now I haven’t worked on Shabbat (Saturday) and important holidays. The day of rest: a day when I don’t write or work. I also try not to shop, wanting to have a day when I am satisfied with myself and the current contents of my life. A day when I don’t critique myself and, when I was teaching, I didn’t critique my students either by grading their papers. It is a day when I don’t write, which inherently involves criticism. A day when I don’t think about the productive thing I should be doing. This has helped me perceive myself as a person, not just as a producer of something of “value” outside of myself. There is value sitting in the moment, as I have learned, not just on Shabbat.

My retreat was supposed to be a time to see how stripped down I could get into myself. No people around to interact with and no distractions. Just get my essential story inked on the page.

But this cabin is not minimalistic and, it seems, neither am I. There are meals to think about and being almost an hour to the nearest supermarket makes that a more thoughtful task than usual. There are my mother’s constant update emails and calls (even if the connection is so bad that we only hear half of what the other person says). There are emails and calls from friends and my daughters that mark my days—and are the only things on my calendar. These have made me realize that I am not a person who fully lives within herself—needs to retreat in, as I thought I did. Rather, this retreat has made me realize that solitude is a chapter, not an entire book. My life is enriched with connections, they don’t detract from contemplation-time. After each conversation or email, I realized that there were more things to think about. These are added dimensions—the interweaving of lives through shared stories, perceptions, concerns—not detractors.

I had the entire pandemic to realize this, but it has really come home here in the woods where the solitude that I thought I craved in its totality is neither what I need or want.

If I value others for their presence, their essence, then I, too, am valued for those same aspects of self. I don’t have to produce something to be valued as a person—to value myself as a person. But these friends do have expectations of me, born of my own expressions over time and their perceptions. They expect me to fulfill my desires for myself, even if those desires change. They will not let me cede my passions and skills.

Perhaps they are helping me see that I flourish in the space between expecting too much from myself and not enough. That to flourish means that I need not be alone and solitary, isolated. That to flourish means that I know that there are people who believe in me, as a person and a creator.

And now it is time for walk two of the day. The dogs are restless, as am I. It is time to get back to the freshness of mountain air and to moving my body that is tired from sitting on this wooden bench facing my laptop. It is time to move and observe, alone. An aspect of my day, myself, my needs. An aspect that I can share later, in some way.

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Forest walk

When I started this blog in 2008, I had just finished going through a contentious divorce from a verbally and emotionally abusive man, but I was still living with him—and the abuse—in the same house with our two daughters. (Note the date and the correlation to the tanked economy and real estate market—it would take another year to sell the house and finally feel divorced.) I can remember writing posts as he was banging on the door of the guest bedroom, yelling at me, my daughters angry at me for not quieting him. It was scary and intimidating. I would huddle over my laptop, feeling less alone in the writing and the posting, even with tears dripping down my face. The writing enabled me to focus on thinking and analyzing me, him, our daughters, the situation; it kept me detached enough to not crumble continually—only some moments, every day. Friends would tell me that they would read the blog to see how I was doing. Readers would comment, letting me know that I was not alone. I would feel strengthened by the connection that writing and sharing made—it was the most secular and heartfelt of prayers.

It took years to get through that experience with my dignity and a shred of humor intact.

At some point, my posts transitioned from internal pain to observing that the world outside of me does, indeed, still exist. It was fun to write and see where my thoughts went, rather than being held within the grip of needing to write as a cathartic experience. I started to write with less pain and more joy. I could write about the comedy of online dating (it may be funny after a failed date, but it was rarely funny during one) and the frustrations of teaching. I shed my main identity as an abused woman, as a divorced woman, and was able to write about life. Yes, the deep meaning of it all, well, as deep as I go. I came to see myself as an essayist, and that did bring me some satisfaction.

While I have always been anonymous on the blog, it is hard to strip all connections, especially if you link to it on other apps in order for people to find it and read what I have to say. Over time, a few students and parents found the blog. Parents complained to administration. I’m not quite sure what there was to complain about; after all, at the first “sighting” of the blog, I deleted the post about having divorce sex. Funny, parents complaining about an English teacher writing. Well, not so funny when you realize that they expect you to be fully committed to their children, more than them it felt like sometimes. I can say that now that I'm retired! And some students, well, they seemed to think that they had one up on me by letting me know that they found it. It’s not as if I was hiding my thoughts in a drawer, but it was uncomfortable.

In the beginning of the 2019-2020 school year, a parent spoke to my assistant principal who let me know that it would be wise to hide the blog from the public. For the first time a student commented on the blog, rather than just looking around silently and making a comment to me. This time I felt violated. So, I took the blog offline, until right before I retired in June. In that time, though, I also stopped writing. I wrote a few poems at the beginning of the pandemic, but I just wasn’t sure of myself as a writer, what I wanted to express and if I wanted to express myself in words.

I focused on retiring after 16 years of teaching and wondering what I would do after. I’m only 60 (wow, using “only” with that number), so I'm not retiring from the world, just a job that got increasingly difficult and unsatisfying, and at the minimum age to get a partial pension. There are things that I enjoy doing (especially baking and cooking in concert with eating), and while I might do something with that (I do make excellent veggie spreads!), I have felt a bit lost without writing. It really is true for me that I don’t explore my thoughts without writing. And now that I don’t have classes to teach, and students and colleagues to talk to, it seems that my mind is fluttering about. It needs to land occasionally.

At first, I thought I would write a book. But whenever I start writing a book, I don’t get anything done. (I will add in my defense that I have written a few books in the past, but the process was always an unsatisfying battle.) Each day I would rewrite what I wrote the day before, filling my “notes” document, but not my Chapter 1 document. When it comes to writing these shorter posts, personal essays, I get right to it. One sitting, one post. My body and mind sync with that. Why fight who I am and what I do best? Doesn’t being 60 and retired mean that I need to be honest with myself about my abilities, and my strengths and weaknesses. My truths! So, here I am, back here.

This blog has been home to me for longer than any physical home since I went off to college at 17. I still feel that I am a rebellious woman expressing my thoughts. I hope you will join me in this continuation of my/our journey and subscribe (Yeah! I figured out how to do that now that the app I used before is no longer supported), and even comment. I look forward to continue meeting here into the future.

Welcome!  

Laura