Courage (Gevurah)

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”
― Mark Twain

I was fifteen years old the first time I jumped off of a cliff. I was on a hiking trip in the desert and as we came upon the base of a cliff our tour guide pointed to the top and said, “we’re going up there, and then we’re going to jump!” It wasn’t exactly jumping, it was rappelling. We would be lowering ourselves down the cliff while attached to a rope. I watched people in the group in front of us gracefully glide down, bouncing themselves off the side of the cliff, lowering themselves with apparent ease. In my mind I knew it was safe. But my body was not as ready to trust what my eyes saw. 

As we climbed my body began, ever so slightly, to tense up, to contract. At the top, I walked right up to the edge and looked over. Immediately the guttural sensation of fear kicked in. My stomach lurched, turned over, and revealed a blackhole-like space that my insides seemed to be swirling around; my heart skipped a beat and then started beating faster, generating a burning heat in my chest; my breath lost the easeful rhythm that I hadn’t even been aware it was keeping; and my field of awareness constricted - my vision narrowed, I could no longer make out the words that those around me were speaking, and all of the meandering thoughts that had kept me company on the hike disappeared so fully that I didn’t even know to miss them. 

I took a step back from the cliff’s edge, reestablished my breath, and found inside myself a clarity of focus and determination. There was a decision in front of me and it quite quickly became clear what I was going to do. My choice was to take the leap, to trust that I would be okay. I was deciding to acknowledge the fear and move through it, move towards the edge of the cliff, towards the experience that I wanted to have. I didn’t suppress the fear, but I didn’t give into it either. When it was my turn, I put on the harness, walked up to the cliff’s edge, strapped myself in, and began lowering myself down. 

The first step was the hardest. I could feel the dissonance in my body as my brain worked to convince my stomach that it was safe to lean back over the cliff, that it was safe for my legs to release the weight of my body, to give up the control they were so used to possessing. Letting go was exhilarating and terrifying. My heartbeat and my breath were all over the place. My brain was processing so quickly I could barely notice the experience. About halfway down I paused, held myself in place, suspended in the air, and took a moment to look around. Taking in the beauty that surrounded me, my breath came back, and for a moment I could feel everything I was experiencing: the peace and the terror. The fear then kicked back in and I started shaking, I started worrying, I started doubting my ability to go on, noticing all of the ways I wasn’t doing it right. Another breath and I got myself moving again. Before I knew it I was back on the ground. My landing was not graceful. My legs, shaking so vigorously, could not hold my body as it re-established contact with the earth. Flat on my back and still shaking, I got unclipped by one of the guides and made my way out of the landing zone. 

I sat quietly with my group integrating the experience I just went through. I could feel the fear in my body begin to subside. I could feel the air on my skin. My breath returned, my heartbeat slowed down, my vision became crisper and more clear. The space in my body and my mind that had been so consumed by fear became open and I could feel a new emotion take its place. I was proud of myself.

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
― Maya Angelou

In the years since that moment in the desert, I have taken many a leap into something unknown. Some of these leaps include small moments of being present in my physical body: crossing the street during aggressive rush hour traffic, stepping onto an airplane, standing at the edge of a cold body of water readying myself to jump in. Some of these leaps come in the form of larger life moments: leaving a steady job without a full plan as to how I would sustain myself, opening myself to a new relationship after a deep heartbreak; getting myself to try again after a perceived professional failure. And some of these leaps come in small moments of putting myself out there in the world: knocking on the door of an unfamiliar apartment even though I triple checked that I had the correct address, walking into a room of people I do not know, sharing an unpopular opinion in a conversation, or speaking an uncomfortable truth to a beloved friend. 

In each of these moments a version of that guttural fear shows up in my body. And in each of those moments, I remember that I have a choice as to what I am going to do with that fear, as to how I am going to respond to it. This choice, this moment, is where courage lives. Courage becomes a possibility only in a moment of experiencing fear. Courage is remembering in a moment where I am overcome with fear that I have a choice as to how I am going to respond, that I have agency over how I am going to act. Courage is choosing to act in accordance with my values in the face of my fears. Courage is what allows me to do hard things. Courage is an attribute that can be cultivated, a skill that can be practiced. Courage is what allows me to live out in the world as the person who I think I am, the person I see myself as, the person who I aspire to be.

Tenderness (Chesed)

Tender: soft, open, vulnerable
Tender: one who cares for and maintains 

I have a tender heart and the heart of a tender. 

My tender heart is soft and open, whole and full of holes, scarred from the wounds it has accumulated but not scared to face what those wounds reveal. My tender heart wants to be seen, wants the truth of my pain to be welcomed, to be held with grace and care, by others and by myself. My tender heart seeks out quiet and slowness, calm and warmth. My tender heart houses my vulnerability and heightens my sensitivity. It is the garden of my healing and the birthplace of my strength.

My tender’s heart is fierce and warm, attentive to whomever it holds, focused on the space it can offer and the care it can give. My tender’s heart wants to see people as they truly are, wants to know their struggles and honor their strengths. My tender’s heart wants to hold people in their wholeness. My tender’s heart houses my patience, my empathy, and my compassion. It is through my tender’s heart that I practice humility and forgiveness, that I get to live out my value of love and my belief in people.

Tenderness is an orientation towards the world. It carries a softness that allows for opening, for vulnerability. It requires patience and spaciousness. It has no room for urgency or harshness or the very notion of domination. A tenderness paradigm invites the wholeness of the self to show up with empathy, with care, with a desire to hold and a willingness to be held. Tenderness asks us to gaze upon each other with soft eyes, with a smile, with open arms. Tenderness asks us to be present with ourselves, often with our pain, our hurts, the places inside of us that are in need, that want to be tended to. 

To be tender is an invitation to reveal the most delicate, gentle, embarrassing, and vulnerable parts of myself to the world with the understanding that it will sometimes be met with harshness or disinterest, but it will other times be met with care and love.

To be a tender is an invitation to dedicate the entirety of my focus, of my attention and care, to the wellbeing of something outside of myself, be that a fire, a garden, a friend, or community. 

I aspire towards tenderness, towards my soft openings, and towards my kind holding.

Magic (Malkhut/Shechinah)

But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be
- Iris DeMent, Let the Mystery Be

It was dusk or maybe a little earlier. It was hard to tell if the sun had already gone down because the cloud cover was thick and dark. And then the sky opened and the rain came pouring down. One hundred campers were sitting on the deck of the dinning hall and my best friend and I were standing in front of them under the overhang. After about ten minutes we turned to the campers and told them that if we could all be absolutely silent for three minutes, we could stop the rain. They looked at us with the perfect mixture of skepticism and curiosity. Across each of their faces we could see variations of the thought, “we can’t stop the rain… wait, can we?” They wanted to believe but they also didn’t want to believe. Eventually they were willing to try. The first few attempts were disrupted by nervous giggles that turned into huge outbursts of laughter and chatter. Then on the fourth or fifth attempt we made it past the halfway point, the rain started letting up, past the two minute point, it was just a drizzle. Just before the three minute mark, one of the counselors stepped out from under the overhang and the rain stopped.

There was a counselor who worked at the summer camp I ran who was impossible to get in touch with. He often didn’t have a phone and was quite unresponsive to emails or other messages. During camp this wasn’t a problem because we were all at camp, but during the off-season, when we were all spread out across the entirety of New York City and only had an activity once every couple of months, connecting with him was a near impossibility. Eventually we discovered that the most consistently reliable way of getting in touch with him was conjuring. If we needed to get in touch with him, one of us in the office would speak his name and he would show up. Sometimes it took a day or two, but most of the time it happened within a couple of hours.

I have a deck of Jewish Values Cards. Each card has a value written on it. A few years ago I started having people pick a card at random to see which value the deck wanted them to contemplate. Over the years, this deck developed a reputation for having powerful magic. Invariably the deck would show people exactly the card they needed to see. One time someone picked patience, immediately got annoyed and asked if they could pick a different card. I usually don’t let people do that but I made an exception. I reshuffled the deck, and this time when the patience card showed up again, she had no choice but to accept the lesson.

Magic is an orientation, a way of experiencing the world that embraces connection, that invites the unexplainable, that sees interconnectivity that the logical mind cannot find reason for. Magic accepts the notion that we are more than our physical form, that we are more than our minds can understand, that there is something going on that is beyond our capacity to make sense of. I choose to embrace this phenomenon. I choose to find joy in the unexplainable. I choose to accept that there is something more that I do not understand, that I will not understand, that will remain a mystery. And I choose to like it that way.

Anchor (Yesod)

One of my favorite things to do while staring out the window of the back seat of my family’s station wagon while on long road trips was to imagine that I, or a version of me, was swinging alongside the car, from electric pole to electric pole, as though I was spiderman. I could spend hours staring out that window watching, in my mind’s eye, this semi-embodied version of me, imagining myself out there, in the open air, swinging from pole to pole, actively propelling myself forward, through the air. There was a mesmerizing quality to it. The stability of those poles gave this imagined version of myself something to grasp onto, something to play off of, something outside of myself to keep me connected to the ground while simultaneously flying free.

Occasionally, we would find ourselves on a stretch of highway that didn’t have these poles. Sometimes in those moments, my swinging self would just disappear, but other times I would watch him land on the top of a Semi-truck, where he would rest until it was time to start swinging again. 

One such drive that my family took during the summers was from New York to Cape Cod. There we would spend a week biking, eating seafood and ice cream, and playing in the bay. The Cape Cod Bay was an incredible body of water. Because of its particular geographic features it has one of the most dramatic water level differentials in the world. At low tide the bay consists of miles of sandbars with nothing but ankle deep streams of water separating them. At high tide the bay fills in completely and the water comes over your head just feet from the shore. 

One of my favorite things about being at the bay was watching the boats rise as the tide came in. These boats that just hours before were sitting flat on the ground would get lifted up and be floating, rocked gently back and forth by the evershifting water, held almost in place by their anchors. Anchors that once sat right next to them in the sand and were now digging into that sand keeping their boats from drifting away.

In some way these anchors are to their boats what those poles alongside the highway were to my imagined self. They offer, at the same time, grounding and space to float. They offer the chance to fly, to move freely, without concern that you will be left adrift. 

As a person who moves around a lot, it has been important for me to set anchors for myself, to give myself some grounding so that I do not find myself adrift. These anchors take the form of places that I know and return to, people that I love and can hold me, and rituals that bring me back to myself, that I can come back to, that I can call upon if ever I start drifting a little too far. The security of these anchors gives me the courage to follow my curiosity, to disrupt the scripts that I might get stuck in, to drift enough away from what is known that I might experience and learn something new. 

Sometimes the tides I find myself caught in are quite strong. In these moments my anchors might give a little more than I’m comfortable with, but if I’ve built them well, they will hold me just enough to weather the storms, and can be reset when the waters are once again calm. 

I have been sick for the last three days and I was not able to write and post this piece according to the timeframe that I have been abiding by during the last twenty-six weeks of this ritual. But I was able to gather enough energy and brain power to write and post this today. The anchor that is this ritual got dragged a little bit, but in the end, it weathered this storm and kept me close enough to where I want to be.

Discomfort (Hod)

The only way out is through
- Robert Frost

For a long time I would use as my personal motto the phrase: I don’t do easy. It was a crude and not quite accurate wording of a concept that I knew I was committed to but didn’t quite have the language to name clearly. A couple of years ago I heard a phrase from Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams that perfectly encapsulated this commitment I had been living: building my tolerance for discomfort. 

It was never that I wanted things to be hard, rather it was that I understood that the only path to the kind of growth I was looking for, to being on the road towards the person I wanted to continue becoming, was to continue making choices that pushed me out of my place of comfort, that asked me to challenge the assumptions and habit patterns that I had been conditioned in, and to - in making those choices - widen the space inside myself that I could occupy. 

One of the things that I carry, a habit pattern that I developed very early on, is a tremendous amount of shyness. People who know me or have seen me in one of my communities have trouble believing this because when I am comfortable in a space or with people this shyness disappears completely. But when I am in a new situation, when I am around people I do not know, my shyness can send me straight into a freeze response. It is a shyness that is rooted in a fear of judgement and manifests in a feeling, an assumption really, that I will not be accepted, that I will be ridiculed. 

What is most frustrating about this shyness is that the person I know myself to be, the version of myself that I understand as true and core, actually loves meeting new people. I love making new connections, I love hearing another person’s story, I love learning the ways we are each different, and seeing the ways we are all the same. So this shyness that I carry shows up as a real challenge for me. It is a built in obstacle towards getting to experience the thing that I am most drawn towards. 

I have, throughout the course of my life, discovered that there are three strategies I employ to move through this shyness. The first is avoidance: to not go to new places, to only meet people in situations where people I already know are making an introduction. This strategy, while keeping me in comfort, is completely unsatisfying to the part of me that actually enjoys new connections. 

My second strategy is finding work-arounds: this mostly looks like putting myself in situations where I have a specific role to play, a script to go by, an external reason or structure that gives me permission to engage with people without confronting my shyness. The problem with this strategy is that it locks me into a role, it doesn’t make space for me to show up with all of myself, and doesn't allow me to see what version of myself wants to emerge in a given situation. 

The third strategy is the only one that ends up being satisfying: sitting with the discomfort, sitting with all of the feelings and doing the hard thing anyway, staying in the messy space of holding at the same time the truth that meeting new people absolutely terrifies me, and the truth that I love meeting new people. It is a practice of holding both, of giving myself space to feel all of the discomfort, while also pushing myself to do the hard thing. 

To me this is what building my tolerance for discomfort means: that I face the hard things, that I sit with the uncomfortable feelings that arise in my body, and that I breathe into those sensations to remind myself that - though the discomfort in my body is real, I can handle it, and by handling it, by sitting with it, by breathing through it, by facing the hard thing, I am doing the work of living out my values, I am doing the work of becoming the person I know at my core I want to be.

Change (Netzach)

“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“If everything you think you know makes your life unbearable, would you change?”
― Tracy Chapman, Change

It was a beautiful day at the beach: clear skies, a warm but not overbearing sun, the air was moving but there was no strong wind to speak of. After a lovely nap, I got up from under my umbrella, approached the shore, and walked into the ocean. The water was fresh and cool, a perfect temperature for swimming. I made my way through the breaking waves, jumping the low ones, diving through the high ones until I reached the calmer water where I turned onto my back and let myself float, embracing the stillness in my body, bobbing slightly with the rhythm of the water. When I was ready to head back, I flipped over and rode a wave into the shore. Emerging from the water, I looked around for my umbrella but could not find it. At first I worried that it had fallen over or been blown away, but the wind was not that strong. I started walking up and down the beach and eventually I spotted it, nearly a hundred yards north of where I came out of the water. In the time I was floating on my back, the current had moved me nearly the length of a football field without me noticing that I had moved at all. 

I have experienced this phenomenon dozens of times in my life - both in the ocean and out of it. From my perspective I am staying exactly where I am, where I have always been, but the circumstances around me shift, change, and suddenly I look up and notice that I too have been moved, that I am, in fact, not where I started but somewhere very different. Sometimes the tide can be so strong that I can swim in the direction that I know is north but still when I look up, when I leave the water, I can find myself south of the place I started. Sometimes the shift in the landscape around me can be so dramatic, that I can think I am making decisions that are in line with my values, but when I look up, I notice that in this current context a choice that in a previous moment was in support of my values, no longer is. 

Change, as Octavia Butler reminds us, is the only lasting truth. It is the only constant. And yet, we humans are so resistant to it. We try so hard to hold on to things as we understand them to be that we can fall into a delusion, that we can find ourselves acting as though things are as they once were, and not as they currently are today. 

In order to keep up with the change that naturally occurs in the world outside of us, we have to continue changing our understanding of who we are, of how we need to move in order to navigate the changing environments we find ourselves in. But changing the way we do things, changing the way we see ourselves in the world can feel so threatening to who we understand ourselves to be. And so we resist changing. But since change is inevitable, when we try to stay the same we are simply relinquishing our agency in determining how we are going to change, we are letting the changing world change us.

If I know and accept that I will change, that I have to change, the question then becomes: how do I ensure that the changes I that I am making are in line with who I want to be, who I want to continue becoming? How do I change in ways that support my growth towards the person I aspire to be, towards the world I want to see? How do I ensure that when I change, those changes are in line with my values? And when the ground itself is changing how do I know if I’m being adaptive, responsive, or reactive? How do I know if I’m giving in, if I’m ceding ground that I need, or if I’m making a sound strategic choice that will help me in the long run? When in a turbulent moment, when the tide is strong, how do I know if I’m staying on course, or if I’m being moved in a direction I wouldn’t want to go? And if it’s not only that the tide is moving me but that there is also someone on the shore moving my umbrella, how do I determine which direction to move in? How do I navigate change when the signposts are moving too?

The first thing that I know to do is to get myself to a place where I can take a breath. It might take a minute. It might require waiting for the ground to stop shaking, or finding a place where the ground can offer a moment of steadiness even through the shaking. Once I am breathing deeply, I then lift my gaze, expand my field of vision, look for signposts that are further out, that may not be so easily moved. For me this means looking at the current moment in the widest historic lens that I have, it means taking the time to see clearly where we actually are and what is actually going on, it means centering myself in the values that I hold most dear, it means accepting that the strategies and approaches that worked for me in the past may not be the ones that will work for me now, and most of all it means finding other people that I trust so we can navigate this changing environment together.

Paradox (Tiferet)

Creating paradox with our very being is the spiritual imperative of these times.
- Norma Wong

There is a Jewish idea that truth can be found, not in any one person’s perspective, stance, or experience, but only in the space between our points of view. And in fact, the truth that lives between what you see and what I see cannot be fully known, but through discussion, through striving to see each other’s points of view, we might find our way to a closer understanding of that truth. We call this idea Machloket, or argument for the sake of heaven. It is a beautiful practice and it requires of us a few things that the conditioning of contemporary socialization does not prepare us for. 

It requires that we enter into these conversations wanting to listen and learn, not wanting to convince or win. It requires that we put down our righteousness, and center our curiosity. It requires that we release ourselves from the either/or binary, that we open ourselves up to the possibility that two contradictory things can be true at the same time - that, in fact, the only way to understand reality as it truly is, is to accept multiple, often contradictory truths. 

The good news is that even though our social conditioning incentivizes us to embrace an either/or paradigm where paradox is seen as wrong, where the idea of embracing paradox is meant to feel like an exercise of magical thinking or fantasy, we all have experiences of paradox to draw upon if we open ourselves up to see them. 

One of the most common, and perhaps hardest, experiences of paradox in the human condition is the choice to forgive. Forgiveness, especially of someone close to us, requires that we simultaneously hold the truth of our hurt with the truth of our love. It requires that we do not let either of those truths go, but that we look those truths in the face, hold them at the same time, and decide that we can accept them both as being true. We do not throw away the loved one that caused harm, and we do not excuse the harm either. We sit with it, we wrestle with it, and we heal through the choice to forgive, to accept the truth that this person is not one thing. 

Whenever I have to do the work of forgiveness, of choosing to remember that this person who hurt me is not only that one thing, the way that I get there is to remember that I am not one thing either. When I look inside myself I know that I am full of contradictions, full of truths that if I were to line them up outside of myself would certainly not pass a consistency test, that would often fall on opposite sides of an either/or binary. 

The either/or binary requires that we pretend that truth is simple, that it can be categorized, that all of who we are can be placed neatly on one side or another. And when we pretend that we can fit neatly into one side, one box, we end up cutting off parts of ourselves, we end up separating ourselves from our wholeness, we end up losing our ability to see things as they truly are, we end up living in delusion. 

Wholeness does not come through separation, truth is not found on one side, healing is not possible without accepting the reality that we are all full of contradiction. The challenges that we face in the world today can only be met if we each hold a little more loosely the attachment we have to being right, and instead center ourselves in the truth that we are all going to have to figure out how to live here together, in wholeness, in full embrace of the contradicting stories we’ve been told and the contradicting truths that we hold - both among each other and within ourselves. 

This, for me, has been the key to accepting as my mission the imperative of creating paradox with my very being.