Dangerous beauty

Stendahl syndrome, also called Florence syndrome, is a physiological response to too much beauty. Here's a link to the wiki page about it. 

Because I'm sensitive - too sensitive, some might say - beauty gets to me, every bit as much as sadness and trauma. I don't suffer from the classical symptoms of the syndrome, but I can feel overwhelmed, even exhausted, around too much beauty. Is that sad? It just is.

Once upon a time, encountering great beauty literally knocked me down. I used to fall on my knees when confronted with a perfect sunset, a beautiful painting, or while listening to a beautiful piece of music. It was hard on the knees! I was younger then, though, so I dealt with it. In fact I decided then that the reason some people bow or kneel to pray is because the beauty of the divine light knocks them down in slow motion. I've always had my theories about everything, just everything!

At some point, the Voice in the Shower suggested that I allow beauty to strengthen and enliven me instead of knock me down. What an insight! Love that Voice in the Shower. I began practicing this art with things that were pretty but not quite beautiful, letting the energy come through me, root me to the earth, then flow upwards, expanding and extending my spine and limbs. What an incredible feeling.

I've gotten much better at this technique over the years. These days I think of great beauty as part of good nutrition. I seek it out, breathe it in, and grow taller - or so it seems.

A rare sight - one of her stars reflecting direct sunlight. From the street it looks like a headlight, turned up to its brightest setting. Incredible, knee knocking beauty.

However, lately as this wave of grief for my ancestors passes through me, my heart is more open than it has been in awhile, rendering me more vulnerable to everything, including beauty.

There has been so much beauty this fall. The abundant rains of summer and a holy combination of perfect temperatures brewed up a more colorful and brilliant autumn than we've seen in years. There have been many times this season, out there taking pictures, when I actually became queasy from the overload of color and beauty.

I am NOT complaining! May the world be as beautiful as possible. The fact that I sometimes have a hard time managing beauty is a wonderful problem, isn't it? I say it is.

Shalom.

Sense and sensitivity

Yesterday I was better, but still felt tender. This morning, I feel whole again, wrapped in my bubble of energy, insulated again from what I find to be a bizarrely intimate connection with the Vzygorodek Melikiers.

I've been so tender I couldn't even handle the autumnal beauty for a few days. It was too much for me. I have often been overwhelmed by spring in this landscape, but never before have I felt too moved by the fall colors. This year it's different. Is that to do with the discovery of the Yizkor book or is it because fall this year is the most spectacular we've had in several years? It's always pretty, but we had plentiful rain over the summer, and apparently just the right temperatures. The trees are out of this world, even the great oaks, whose leaves usually just turn brown then drop by the zillions onto Eighth Street. This year they're red and gold and bright. It is rather overwhelming, but it shouldn't be, should it?

I continue to ask myself what purpose it serves to grieve intimately for people I never met, who lived in a place and at a moment in history I can not imagine. Does it serve or is it just weird? Who knows?

I will perhaps find out more on Monday when I go back to the Library of Congress. I'm going because Monday is one of the two days a year that they open the main reading room to regular people. The ordinary citizen is not allowed in the room except as part of a tour. I loathe tours, hence if I want to get inside that room, I have to wait for the open houses. And I do want to get inside that room. The main reading room of the Jefferson building is perhaps as beautiful as the rotunda at the Capitol - maybe even more beautiful. I will take pictures. After that, I may return to the African and Middle Eastern reading room to hold the book again. Or maybe not.

The main reading room at the Library of Congress

However you slice it, this ancestor work is strenuous. I need to take it little by little.

Elsewhere in life everything is splendid. Fall? Gorgeous. My practice? Busy. I'm healthy, sleeping pretty well, getting out for my walks, taking pictures, spending time with friends. I have great clients, friends, neighbors. I love my home and neighborhood. I'm even back in love with DC (during the government shutdown my ardor flagged a little bit - understandably).

In a little more than two weeks I'm going to get on an airplane, go to Oregon to spend Thanksgiving with my family, something I haven't done in decades. I love my family. Right now, in the midst of this exquisite fall, I love everybody.

OK, maybe I'm not as insulated as I hoped from the connection with my ancestors. Oh well. An open heart is a good thing, right? That's what they say.

The Buddhists are correct - that this life, a "brief, greedy sugar high," is a precious existence. It surely is. Even while grieving, I appreciate that truth, especially now that I'm sixty.

L'chaim, y'all.

May we never hunger

Today is the first normal day I've experienced since Halloween. I am grateful. The Voice in the Shower said straightaway this morning, No ancestor work today. I was down with that idea, oh yeah. Grieving is heinous work! Does it serve a purpose? I keep asking myself. Do you have an opinion? How is grieving useful? Help me out.

While we're at it, why do I suffer so much personal grief for people I didn't know? Obviously, I have a lot of questions. However, today I put them aside and instead went grocery shopping. It's my favorite thing, buying food. I love wandering the aisles, noticing what seems enticing. I look for lively energy fields, bright colors, nice smells. Unless I'm specifically planning to cook for a dinner party or something, I shop by whim rather than from a list. I buy what's good, then figure out what to do with it once I get home.

Given my open-hearted fragility of late, I decided to go ahead and buy whatever I wanted today. If I need to invite people over to share dinner so the food doesn't go bad, then so be it. And anyway I love entertaining. Today I needed comfort. I decided to be generous with myself and just go for it.

OK, I did cringe at the cash register and I walked out of the store with twice as many bags of groceries as usual. My fridge is now cheerfully full of lively food. This is a good thing. I'm going to make an apple/pear spice cake to mostly give away. One dinner this week will be centered around oven sautéed chicken dredged in cornmeal, salt, pepper, and thyme. I will roast winter vegetables and squashes, then spritz them with lemon juice, sprinkle parmesan cheese over them. I have olives and grapes. I have stuff to make salad. I bought kosher pickles made in the Bronx. No matter the grief, I will be well fed.

Here's the funny thing. Inadvertently I bought everything I need to make beef borscht with sour cream, one of my father's favorite meals and probably one of the Melikiers' favorites, too. It's blustery and late fall-like outdoors, hence perfect for a hearty soupy stew. It wasn't until the groceries were out of the bags that I noticed I'd bought beets, leeks, tomatoes, cabbage and big piece of beef. I also bought sour cream, something I never buy. Hmm, I thought. That's borscht.

Me and the Melikiers of Vzsygorodek? Like peas in a pod I tell you. Like peas in a pod.

Shalom.

A mile in their moccasins

I'm not much of a weeper. I never have been, actually. I cried a lot as a child but it didn't get me anywhere so I gave it up. As a teenager I hardened my heart and decided to be a cynic. I worked that scenario for a number of years. It was ill-fitting, me as a cynic. I tried so hard, but it rang false and was exhausting.

I was well into year three of psychotherapy before I wept during a session. My therapist seemed quite relieved when I finally cried. Maybe I was, too. I can't remember.

Since menopause, I cry even less often, but oh man I've been weeping like a professional the last couple of days. Grieving is heinous work. The small part of my mind that's rational is wondering why the hell I'm so moved to think of my relatives from that time and place, people I never met, who lived in a world I honestly can not imagine. Is it healing? I hope so.

I read about Kremenets today. Oh my. There were 14,000 Jews in the town. Only 14 survived the Holocaust. It's inconceivable. Kremenets was close enough to my family's tiny hamlet of Vzysgorodek that the memories of both places are contained in one Yizkor book.

So, all that. And I wonder that I'm grieving? Good lord.

My ancestors were country people. Even though Vzysgorodek was within a few kilometers of Kremenets, in those days, 10 or 15 kilometers was a long ways away. You can't even really call Vzysgorodek a village, more like a hamlet. It was tiny.

At the Holocaust Museum library, I was shown a business directory from 1920. The Melikiers were bakers, dairy people and also skori, leather workers. They made clothing but also decorative boxes and other artsy stuff. The Melikiers got their hands dirty, they surely did. They were not sophisticated city people. Country people are earthy; there is no other choice. I've always imagined these ancestors as learned and erudite -- also judgmental. But I might be wrong about that.

Maybe my ancestors were more into the rhythm of Judaism than every last little rule and law. Maybe they didn't care so much. Maybe when they observed Shabbat, for instance, they just relaxed and had fun. I'm sure they said the prayers but maybe not with the orthodox fervor I imagine.

I met plenty of people at Temple Micah who knew all the prayers and songs in Hebrew, but had no clue what they were singing. I found and still find that so weird. They were praying but didn't care what they were saying? What?

I don't know every word of every prayer. They're beautiful texts, but that's not the part of Judaism I love. It's the rhythm of the faith that resonates. I really get, at a deep level, the point of starting a holiday at sunset - for instance. Pray for awhile, but then feast, drink red wine, enjoy, talk, argue, sing songs. Time enough to get serious and pray the following morning. I am way into the liturgy of feasting, drinking red wine and singing after sunset. Oh yeah. It weaves the energy of the people celebrating into a festive, happy web. A feast smoothes the way for spiritual observance.

The holidays, the rhythms, of my tribe are a part of my DNA. Even when I was far away from Judaism, I knew when the High Holy Days had arrived. I could feel it. I grok the strong arm and outstretched hand of God at Passover, I get the journey through the desert. The plagues and having to have the shit scared out of you to break free of the old enslavements? Oh yeah. The High Holy days - taking a week to reflect and complete the work of the year just passed - feels right in my blood, in my bones.

Perhaps we have common ground in the feasting, the joie de vivre, the intensity of the holidays. Maybe the rhythms of the seasons and the gatherings to observe the turning wheel of the year is something they felt in their bones and blood, too.

Am I imagining Fiddler on the Roof? I have no idea.

I'm trying to relate to these people who lived in a place and at a moment in history I cannot imagine. It boggles the mind, even my mind, with my famous imagination. But I have to try. Don't ask me why, but I must try. I'm trying!

Shalom.

What is remembered, lives

I haven't got the right words yet to describe my experience yesterday. It was powerful, meaningful -though I am unable to articulate the meaning just yet. The experience is still brewing.

I marched down to the Library first thing, renewed my reader's card, arrived in the reading room a half hour before the person who could fetch the book came in to work. I was on a mission! It was wonderful to sit there in the beauty of the Library. You can feel the history, the reverence for books - so cool. I read a book about ancient Sumer while I waited - it was not time wasted, and too, it gave me time to get grounded before the encounter with That Book.

I held the Yizkor book in my hands, I stared at it, I leafed through it. Most of the book is about Kremenits which was a much bigger town close to my family's village. At the back of the book is a very short section of memories of Vzysgorodek. As it turned out, the book has not been translated from the Yiddish. The Hebraic specialist on duty doesn't know Yiddish at all, or she could have done some quick translating. I didn't get to read the stories, but I held the book. It was epic, I tell you.

The experience was so powerful, I didn't even take pictures, except for these - the cover of the book and the first page of "Memories of Vzysgorodek before 1927." When I go back, I'll remember to photograph the reading room. It is exquisitely beautiful.

I guess that's one of the Carpathian mountains in the background. The village is certainly Kremenits since almost the whole book is about it. It looks rustic, doesn't it? And that was the BIG town.

I ran into a couple of the brainiac househusbands of Capitol Hill this morning. One of them, the guy who asked about the tattoo and pointed me in the direction of the Library of Congress, has already put out the word that I'm looking for someone to translate the memories into English. He's hooked in to the Yiddish program at the U of M. He says a grad student could do a great job and would be interested in the work. What a great idea. But even before I get it translated I'll go back just to hold it, leaf through, look at the pictures and such. Oh that book.

On the way down to the Library, I took lots of pictures. Sundogs appeared and disappeared in a ring around Brother Sun. I saw some before, some more after I left the Library. The air was crisp, the trees were resplendent in all their colors. It was surreal. It was like a cartoon of autumn, everything exaggerated.

I didn't cry until I got back to the chateau. Once in the quiet of my home I wept profoundly. My heart was wide open. It will take awhile to integrate.

In a way, it's funny because these ancestors would not know what to make of me, my "life style," my mysticism, shamanism and my pre-Judaism Jewishness. I am not traditional, but they were. They would disapprove, I guarantee it. They might even be appalled to hear my life's stories - even I find them somewhat appalling, well some of them anyway. Ah but they're stuck with me, because I'm the member of my family who is strongly called to work with Holocaust era ancestors. My siblings are grateful I'm doing this but the work doesn't call them. No. It's up to me. Sorry, ancestors!

Actually I'm not at all sorry.

Shalom.

Eclipsatarian

Do I like daylight savings time or standard time better? Either one is fine; the switching back and forth is what bothers me. I have jet lag and I haven't even gone anywhere.

I do enjoy light in the morning. Rising when it's still pitch black can seem a little creepy, at least to me. This morning's light featured a partially eclipsed sun rising an hour earlier than it did yesterday. Quite dramatic. Of course the weather cooperated. It's blustery and partially cloudy. The clouds are gray, pink and gold. The trees, festooned in their beautiful mid-fall colors, are waving around, leaves are falling like gold or red snow from some of them. Others are still hanging on tight.

It feels eclipsish even though I didn't get to see it. I should know - I was born at a dark moon, four hours before a solar eclipse. I feel them especially, maybe because I entered life in the midst of this type of astronomy.

I followed the voices of the ancestors yesterday, went down to the Library of Congress to read the Yizkor memory book from my family's shtetl, but the Hebraic section is only open on weekdays. I'm going first thing tomorrow morning.

The only thing I know of these people, my father's ancestors, is exactly when and where and how they were killed. The incredible gift of the Yizkor book translation is that I'll be able to read memories of the living town before the Holocaust. I am so excited. L'chaim!

Now the overcast has blown out of the sky. I guess Brother Sun and the moon needed some privacy during their eclipse. Well, ok then. The sun is back at full illumination and the moon is brand new. It's a good feeling. Onwards into Sunday.

Shalom.

It wasn't bad.

Halloween turned out to be a really great day. At some point I realized I don't have to tune in to the lowest common denominator of the spirit world just because so many others are, and in fact, I am pretty good about avoiding most of it. I have to sip the energy a little bit since I'm swimming in it on East Capitol Street, but almost straightaway yesterday morning, I had clicked into a wave of great ancestral energy.

I knew I was on the right track first thing in the morning when I ran into the nerdy, braniac househusbands of Capitol Hill. I love those guys. They write books and conduct tours of haunted Georgetown, take school kids to the museums. Their wives are the careerists in the house, so they get their kids to school, then go for coffee. Their clatch is all about witty repartee and intellectual sparring. They don't sit there all day, though. They have to get home and do the laundry, or research their next book or lead a tour. They are adorable. Anyway, I saw them at the espresso bar, stopped to chat. One of them, someone I've never seen before, noticed my tattoo, asked about it. He directed me to the Library of Congress, Hebraic section, to the Holocaust Yizkor books.

When I did the research at the Holocaust Museum library a few years ago, they told me there was a Yizkor book for my family's shtetl, but it was in Yiddish. But the brainiac househusband said my ancestors' remembrances may be among the books that have recently been translated from Yiddish into English. I will definitely head down to the Library sometime next week to see what I can find.

I listen carefully at this time of year especially for the voices of my ancestors. How sweet to receive a tip on how to access the old stories - in English! Very cool that this happened on Halloween, from out of the blue, from someone I've never met. It was powerful. He would have never thought to steer me to the LOC except for the tattoo which, I believe, he found mildly offensive. It's interesting.

One of the brainiac househusbands took this picture of me in my urban shaman costume. I'm looking at my tattoo, sending love backwards in time to my ancestors.

After that, I went to see Damage Control at the Hirschhorn. It was provocative and disturbing - I'll be thinking about it for awhile. Last night I sought refuge, as always, at the house on Tennessee Avenue. We drank red wine, had a home cooked dinner and ignored the mayhem ongoing in front of the house. It began raining around 9:00 p.m., another blessing. The rain discourages trick or treaters.

The best thing is: Halloween is now 364 days in the future. Not my favorite day, no it is not. But I've learned in recent years how to dance to a different beat than the gross, gory, bloody, scary, greedy sugar high so many folks indulge in. This is great!

Onwards and upwards to T-day. Shalom.

Smithsonian Metro station yesterday. Nice and empty.