"Daily Prayer," Chapter 8, reveals the spiritual content of our ordinary workaday lives, from rabbinic reflections in a supermarket aisle, to a paean to worn out underwear, to a guided tour of an old address book, to an encounter on the page with snow flakes.
Life was different for me after Israel. I had never before experienced the relentless intensity of political activism, for all intents and purposes living in a war zone. I missed the almost daily stimulating reality of life writ large--demonstrations, dialogues, the stark exotic beauty of desert landscapes, the passionate encounters with people clamoring to be heard as if their lives depended upon it. Their lives did and do depend upon it.
The year in Israel made my life back in the States appear to me at times excruciatingly ordinary. But ironically, the year in Israel made ordinary life suddenly much more important, vivid.
For a long time, I had believed that work and love really were the crucial playing fields on which we explore, express, develop our identity. Now, in the middle of mid-life, I see these two categories of human expression as "necessary but not sufficient." A third realm has moved increasingly to the fore. What to call it? connection? awareness? It's no longer enough to see myself in the context of my nuclear family, even when I widen that circle to include my most intimate friends. More and more I see the profound value of paying attention to the moment, to the intricate fabric of everyday life--what are the ordinary tasks which take up my time and go to make up my day; and, as Mr. Rogers would have it, who are the people in my neighborhood: the man behind the fish counter at the supermarket, the clerk at the video store, the gynecologist who examined me for twenty years and delivered my children, my travel agent, the librarian who runs the children's room--so important in our family that we chose her name as the secret password that would tell the kids in an emergency, yes, you may accept a ride home from someone who knows to utter the magical incantation, "Dudley."
These are the people in my life and the settings in my life I used to take for granted. Why do I now see them as important? Because the moments of celebration are few and far between, crises come and go. In fact, life is largely made up of a warp and woof of ordinary moments and casual encounters. If I am to be fully alive, then I must be alive in those moments and with those people. I must learn to stop and look and really see, to listen, to hear, to hold, to finger, to contemplate, to take care with the minutia of my life. It's a spiritual reinvention of the wheel--traditional Judaism with its blessings for fruit, bread, rainbows, twilight, a beautiful woman, the king as he passes in procession--all were attempts to wake us up to the moment, the now, the myriad forms of life as it pulsates around and within us.
Last week in the supermarket
at an unlikely hour
I saw a woman I know.
She tried to avoid me
pretended not to remember me
but I had unwittingly trapped her
blocked escape in the tuna fish aisle.
I just wanted to say hello
my cruelty was inadvertent
but up close I saw
her hair was in disarray
and dirty, her face
without its careful mask
of lipstick, blusher, shadow.
She was wearing a ratty old jacket
the discard of her husband
or perhaps her teenaged son.
Nine thirty, on a Tuesday morning,
dressed like that--
suddenly I knew she was out of work
and ashamed. And coming undone
there in the tuna fish aisle.
I tried as best I could
to help her cover her nakedness
but all that day and the next
she haunted me.
How strange, I thought,
how strange and how sad
that she should feel threatened, judged,
shamed by me.
The rabbis say
when you bring color to someone's face
it's as if you shed their blood.
Forgive me.
May you be restored to your full self
soon, speedily, in our day.
And let us say amen.