The Womb Garden by Hatty Taylor, 2014
It’s 2022: a new year with its promise for change and renewal. I am never one to walk away from an opportunity like that. In contrast, the Jewish calendar has many new years like: Rosh Hashannah-the new year for counting the years, the first of the month of Nisan- considered the first month and within it, the festival of our redemption from Egypt, and coming up later in January-the new year for the trees. All of these moments on the calendar are ways for us to bring additional intention, mindfulness, holiness and openness into our lives.
Ever on my journey to live a better and more meaningful life,, I think a lot about my habits, my relationships, my connections to community. And of course, I think about how I live.
Our new au pair arrived from Mexico thankfully and has been a breath of fresh air. As she gets to know our family and her new home, she has jumped right into organizing spaces. It seems that it is her way of settling in, to hit ‘restart’ on the areas where she will work in order to make them more efficient and frankly, appealing. It’s been a blessing to say the least. She has straightened up closets, bookshelves, pantry spaces and the junk that piles up in the kids’ rooms.
What’s so powerful for me is the clear change in how those spaces make me feel. And I’m not alone in that experience at all. We are all feeling it. Of course, the challenge will be training all of us to keep it like that but for now, we are all breathing better and deeper; now we know what’s possible.
Productivity author, David Allen, bestselling author of Getting Things Done, wrote that rather than focusing on goals, we should commit to clearing space. This clearing will open us up to creativity and productivity because we have given ourselves much needed physical and mental space.
I have written on this before and it certainly bears repeating, especially for me. I have been listening on and off to Marie Kondo’s Magical Art of Tidying Up and when I finally finished the book (hazak hazak!), I started it over again. She brings a beautiful spiritual element to the work of tidying. However, I have no intention of spending my entire life tidying; yet it does seem like an ongoing practice in order to get to the good stuff, like living in a peaceful space.
Yet, Kondo’s method involves doing all of it at once, not space by space, but by category of item, and her book, Spark Joy, is a reference guide for how to do it. She recommends getting rid of anything that we do not love, that does not spark joy in a way that we can actually feel. We thank everything else for their service and let them go. I aspire to do this one day.
For now, I am working on clearing my work spaces using the three box method I learned about from Learn Do Become: one box for stuff to keep, one box for stuff to throw out/donate/whatever and one box for stuff that needs to move somewhere else.
Clearing space is also a spiritual practice. In simple meditation, one focuses on the act of breathing in order to clear the space in our minds from the clutter of thoughts, some of which are not helpful for us.
In the most profound meditative experience I ever had, I experienced this clearing out of my thoughts as a process to allow the Divine presence to enter. The mystics of the Kabbalah understood the creation of the world to be through a ‘clearing out’ of the Divine self to make space for a finite universe. The Divine creator had to carve out a space within itself and that retraction is called ‘tzimtzum’.
While Rabbi Ben Shalva guided our group in meditation, I experienced a kind of tzimtzum within myself as I breathed and contemplated the words of the Shema that we say at least twice a day, Shema yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad/ Listen, Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One. The breath created a space within my body that I could feel filling up with the Oneness. It was a most powerful experience that could only have happened by intentionally opening myself up and making space.
As we enter a new calendar year, what can we make space for in our hearts? More compassion, more love, more understanding, more opportunity for connection? What great things may lie in store if we clear the space for them to arrive?
I am grateful for the many gifts that came in 2021: vaccines for the whole family, time for my growth and learning, reunions with family and friends, dedication to my mental health with regular therapy, recommitment to my physical health with intentional eating and exercise with a new trainer, communal moments like the High Holidays, Ramah Passover retreat and summer camps, laughter and conversations with my partner and our kids, and the continuous commitment to in-person school for my children and the ones I work with, and more.
Still, it was a very difficult and challenging year for us and for many people in our communities and beyond. And now, I’m looking forward to what the new year will bring. I pray for healing for all of those worldwide suffering from the impact of covid-19, physically, mentally and economically.
Amanda Gorman’s incredibly powerful “New Day’s Lyric “poem includes these words:
“This hope is our door, our portal.
Even if we never get back to normal,
Someday we can venture beyond it,
To leave the known and take the first steps.
So let us not return to what was normal,
But reach toward what is next
What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,
Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee,
Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake,
Those moment we missed
Are now these moments we make,
The moments we meet,
And our hearts, once all together beaten,
Now all together beat.”
In solidarity, we move forward. Until next time…