Happy Thanksgiving! The last few weeks have been wonderful, having the opportunity to step into different communities and glean treasured learnings from new environments. In each place I'm invited to speak, I acquire new unexpected mentors. I've learned from leaders in Buffalo, Toronto, New York, Phoenix, and many wonderful faith communities in and around Los Angeles. I always return with handfuls of new seeds to sow in my own garden of beloved friends, family, and congregants. As many will gather around their tables this week, I imagine that all our tables are connected, that we pass around the same bottomless cup and sip from the same eilxir of gratitude and hope.
In honor of the holiday, from "The Gates of Prayer": Let us not be content, O God, when others go hungry, or be serene while some lack their daily bread. Teach us to give thanks for what we have by sharing it with those who are in need. Then shall our lives be called good, and our names be remembered for blessing....
And a poem of mine which i wrote for the Air Quality Awards in Los Angeles years ago:
Sacred Invisible
How can we be strangers
When this moment
I breathe in and out
The same thousands of nitrogen molecules
That were in the deep breath
Of your great great grandmother
Whom you never met,
Swept up into the winds of the planet
To join the international stock
Of terrestrial atmosphere,
To join the natural and necessary breaths
Of every creature that ever sighed,
In an eternal dance,
Ballerinas of the air,
Clothed in star jasmine and hyacinth,
Lavender and exhaust,
Spiced with citrus and spirits,
Smoke stacks, sawdust,
Hairspray, soap bubbles and cities burning.
The perfume of Christmas ham
Waltzing and whirling
With kosher strudel
High above and apart
From our imagined distinctions,
Incense and offerings
Swaying with the sound waves
Of distant sobbing
And recent laugher,
The sacred warbling from citadels
And minarets,
Magical mantras,
Wind chimes
And soothing bells,
Pierced through with shrieks
Of tortured sufferers
Somewhere else.
The breath of my enemy too,
And the faint current of a butterfly wing.
Flurry of snowflakes, blast of heat
From a laundry vent.
How can we be strangers
When a year from now
You will breathe in and out
The same thousands of nitrogen molecules
That were in my deep breath
This moment?
We are not strangers at all,
We are most intimate,
For what is in you was once in me
And will be again,
And I in you,
You are each under my skin
And I under yours.
The stuff of the distant past
And the breath of great creatures
We've never ever known
Blend seamlessly with
Future souls.
Air is the ultimate intimacy,
All of us drinking from the same
Bottomless cup,
Ruach Elohim,
Eternal wind,
Blessed be the breath
That makes us one.
Blessed be the transcendent air
That bridges time and space
And you and me
And rock, bird, icicle, tree,
In honor of the Sacred Invisible,
In hope of repair,
In resolve, pledge and commitment
To our covenant with earth and sky,
We who breathe,
We whose souls are Eternity's breath,
We join not as strangers,
But as partners,
Blessed be the air we breathe this day,
The breath we pass from one to the other
Back and forth
Out of me and into you
And out of you and into me
And my ancestors
And your descendents,
This air, this prayer,
For time immortal.
