This Sunday - a great green program from a great organization

Got Trees?

Does your congregation want more trees on your property? 

The Interfaith Partners for the Chesapeake is looking for congregations to partner with the Maryland Stream Restoration Challenge - a challenge by the state to establish 1,000 acres of stream-side forests by 2015.

Congregations that are selected as planting sites will benefit from:

•             teachings on the spiritual foundation of earth stewardship

•             workshops on trees, planting, and maintenance

•             trees for planting and follow up maintenance for 1-3 years

You can find more information here.

Or  contact dottie@chesapeakecovenant.org 

The peepers are here... those adorable little frogs that inhabit the wooded area around my neighbor's pond. They announce themselves with their nocturnal chorus (which often spills into the daytime but is dimmed or hushed by the busy rush of life).  They came out around Passover but what with the snowstorm and my (joyous!) demands of kitchen and guests, I think I missed their debut chorus. Still, they have serenaded us in our comings and going for over a week now.

The daffodils are coming out in earnest, too. Uncertain at first, with their heads bowed like shy children, they are now upright and sturdy, certain of their place in spring's parade.

The house is full of lovely smells from all the flowers adorning various surfaces.

And today I turn 60.

One of these things will never happen again. Life is funny that way.

Sixty is such a big number. (I hope to see many bigger numbers in my life, but for now, this seems Very Big.) While other round numbers bring us their own share of growth, sixty reminds me that death is no longer a rumor; not something that just happens to other people. It is the visitor that is biding its time, waiting for the right time to knock.

But this realization is more jubilant than depressing. It is like the boost one feels after recovering from an illness, the joyous celebration of energy and renewal. There is an increased clarification of what is important and what is not; what to fight for and what to let go; and how to spend the precious time that remains and what truly makes life worthwhile.

I was hoisted over this birthday threshold by a bundle of friends and family, some older, many younger, who offered me gifts of wisdom and camaraderie. At this moment in time, I leaned on them.

For after all, in Hebrew, the number 60 is represented by the letter samech, which looks very much like an O with a short ponytail on the upper left. It is a circle with a flourish; something complete on its own that yet reaches beyond itself.

Even more, the root of the word samech means to rely on, lean on, support. (A rabbi is called musmach, one who both relies on the divine and Jewish tradition for their wisdom and authority, and whom others rely on for learning and spiritual guidance.)

Who better to rely and lean on at times of transition than our friends and loved ones? And with their support, I will be someone, a friend and musmach, whom others can continue to lean and rely on.

And lest we forget, the classic Jewish blessing we give at someone's birthday is "Til 120!" (the age of Moses when he died). On that scale, I am but half-way through.

Which is good, because there is still so much to do to help heal this needy world, create my legacy and live fully into my eccentricities!

May this be a great day for all.

Stuff and Hametz

There is something primal about celebrating Passover.

The prohibition of eating anything that has leavened (yeasted, soaked in liquids, bulked up or otherwise fermented through time and kitchen alchemy) leads us away from the luxurious refinements of everyday culture and back to the place where nature and civilization meet. At its simplest, Passover removes from our kitchens most processed and prepared foods. No eating out; no bringing in; no quick thawing of frozen delights in the microwave. For many of us, and certainly for me, Passover is when I encounter most of my daily rations at their rawest state. My food’s journey from field to fork is shorter on Passover than at any other time of the year.

Over this past week, between the seder, family and guests, I prepared roughly 140 meals. By hand, largely from scratch. My main ingredients were fresh vegetables, eggs (15 dozen), nuts, quinoa, tomato sauce, and, of course, matza in its various guises and stages of refinement. (No meat. And fish - gefilte - only at the seder. The house - and I - are vegetarian.)   

My compost pile is bursting with peelings, parings, and post-prandial scrapings.

So what does it all teach us?

The rabbis like to riff on hametz, leaven, as the “puffed up” part of our selves; the prideful part that thinks too much of itself, chases away humility and gets in the way of a caring, improving, reflective self.

But I am beginning to think that just as much as hametz can reflect a bloated self, it also reflects a  bloated civilization. Perhaps we need to speak of this recurring ritualized ridding of home and hearth of hametz as an antidote to the excesses of the artifices of culture. This annual cleansing allows us to temporarily deflate and scrape away the endless accretions of culture that we seek to pad and cushion the bumps of our days, and our over-blown attitude toward materialism and endless growth.

Life's many material accretions, while no doubt sometimes necessary and helpful, also often mute, hide or diminish our encounters with life's startling stuff, like the different textures of cauliflower and broccoli; the shredding qualities of different potatoes; the family of carrots; the intimate foldings of pomegranates. And when we miss these little things, we tend to miss the big ones too: like the long set of combinations of nature, people and steps it takes to get this food in this condition from seed to stove to mouth.

However, when we are re-awakened to these daily marvels of rain and soil, networks and markets, fuel and cooks, we become alert and attentive witnesses to the parts of life that civilization hides and covers over. We are re-awakened to the flow of water, the gift of the commons (and its gradual loss), the  blessings of a friend's kind words, the pain of a colleague's quiet heartache, the gift of time that one stranger gives another, and that everywhere in life, more than enough is often too much. 

When we are reawakened to life's daily marvels, we see what we usually overlook: how wrong it is for the highways to be rushing full-speed at 5:30 am every morning when people should be at home, in bed, sleeping, dreaming, snuggling with loved ones, or quietly, thoughtfully preparing for the day. How wrong it is for more and more people to work harder and longer to buy more and more things that use up more and more resources and take up more and more space only to find themselves less and less happy. That at some point, the excess of life's hametz diminishes earth and us instead of improving earth and us.

It seems to be time to speak of the removal of hametz, then, as not just about de-puffing of self, but de-puffing the excesses of civilization.  Our bodies, our spirit, our neighbors and our Home will all be better off for it.