CONGRUENCE...

"Bring the pure wine of
love and freedom.
But sir, a tornado is coming.
More Wine, we'll teach this storm
A thing or two about whirling."

---Rumi



There's so much going on, extraordinary energy around and abounds, so I am writing about that...I have no "agenda" here today, no SPECIFIC place to go...



Let's start with Shabbat...this week's portion, according to Rabbi David, is about what he was referring to as "bi-association"...one's ability to acknowledge, honor, co-exist with one's most (apparently) divergent, conflicting parts. How to have them both be there. How, at one's possible lowest, are we able to also feel and embrace our higher selves. And, while we are celebrating are favorite pieces of ourselves, how can we accept our darkest sides. As always, David hit it on the nose for me, this notion is something that I think about all of the time. Whether it's because I am Geminiacal, and/or have a kid who is (diagnosed) bipolar, or whether I have always simply just been willing and able to try and see both sides now, or as the only child growing up translating around the dinner table, and st times seemingly being the only connective tissue between the 2 "grownups", I understand what it is to often feel split. Why I have often called myself a walking dichotomy. And, I have come to realize that people who are the most congruent, who are able to work with all sides and parts, are the ones feeling most connected. To themselves. Not in denial of any one particular thing...all colors in the Crayola Box are welcome. It always cracks me up when someone, after saying or doing something that doesn't necessarily fit within their own sense of themselves (or within what they perceive to be OTHERS' senses of who they [we] are), says something like, "I don't know...that wasn't me"...as if someone else did/said it. It's that ill-fitting part that we need to embrace. Yet what I feel gets in our way is our struggle to fit them together. Directly. That's not the way it works. It's like California and New York. Part of the same whole...connected with each other...just with some pieces in between. We are all like that. We have the shades between the black and white. Colors AND grays. The puzzle works when we fit together...and, not force it. And, I see that I am forcing less than I ever have. Allowing more, shlepping boulders uphill less. More than "great," it feels "right." Embrace, embrace. Ourselves and each other.



A friend/colleague wrote to me the following: "You challenge me to be open and raw. I hope that I can honor that." Made be pause in my tracks. At first because I didn't realize that I was "challenging" anyone to anything...and, then I realized that, in a way, it's why I do what I do...why I am who I am (whoever the fuck that is)...not because I want to overtly challenge anyone necessarily...because I love holding a mirror up...representationally...because in the end, I need to be my own, and if I can inspire others to do that for themselves, that' a huge "Yay." I want to challenge myself...and, the secondary catalyst benefits aren't bad either...