Chapter 5, "Passion," portrays the many kinds of love and intensities which keep us alive and engaged in the world: the rhythms of marriage, the demands and gifts of friendship, the acute attentiveness to all the sensory experiences which hold the power to enliven and enflame us.
So many kinds of love. When we are courageous we enter each day, each relationship, seeing within it the possibilities for arousal, for devotion, for feelings powerful enough to overwhelm.
What a dangerous way to live, to live as a lover. So we learn to be wise, with our feelings, with our fingers, we learn to be careful. Women especially are taught to be careful, are urged to be careful.
What have I wanted to teach my daughter, my son, about love? And what have I already taught in a thousand ways when I was just living, living my ordinary day-to-day life, unaware how my every move was being recorded, catalogued, deconstructed. What did I learn growing up in my own childhood home?
I knew my mother loved my father because she never challenged him, never confronted him. She treated him respectfully. It was her way.
I knew my father loved my mother because on an ordinary Saturday morning, if a Cole Porter song came on the radio, he would put his newspaper down, take the dustcloth from her hand, and there in the living room with the morning sunlight streaming through the windows, he'd dance with her. It was his way.
And what is my way? I have many ways--of showing love, of feeling love, of expressing love. Many ways of taking it in, many ways of shutting it out, many openings to arousal.
The first time we made Shabbos together
in our own home
(it wasn't really "our home"
it was your third floor walk-up
and we weren't even engaged yet)
I had cooked chicken
my first chicken
with a whole bulb of garlic
(my mother never used garlic)
and we sat down at that second-hand chrome table
in the kitchen.
It was all so ugly that we turned out the lights.
Only the Shabbos candles flickered.
And then you made kiddush.
I sat there and wept--
Oh God, you have been so good to me!
Finally, for the first time in my life,
you gave me something I wanted.
This man, whose soul is the soul of Ein Gedi.
We will be silent together
We will open our flowers in each other's presence.
And indeed we have bloomed through the years.
~make Shabbos~to do the shopping, cooking and cleaning necessary to prepare a home for the observance of the Sabbath.
~kiddush~(Hebrew) blessing over the wine
~Ein Gedi~(Hebrew) a spring and oasis in the Judean desert, referred to since Biblical times.