Spring Epistle

I wrote this epistle the week before Breakdown Epistle. All your good wishes helped and I’m back on my feet, no longer dizzy. Thank you old friends and new. Welcome to Epistles from Israel, where you will find neither war news, nor political analyses. Only the inside story.

Dear Family and Friends and Friends of Friends of Friends,

In a telephone conversation with my ten-year old grandson in Tel Aviv the other day I told him what a beautiful day I was having. He was surprised. “How can you have a beautiful day”, he asked, “when there are missiles and people are getting hurt and dying and we have to wake up all the time in the night and run to the shelter?”

His question surprised and pleased me. He seemed to be telling me that he was over-whelmed by all the bad stuff and had no room in his psyche for the beautiful.

I told him he was right – lots of awful things are happening to us these days, and people are losing their homes, and their sleep, and some even their lives, but that does not have to stop us from enjoying the beautiful spring weather. We have permission and I bet somewhere it’s even written in the Talmud that it’s a mitzvah to rejoice with Spring.

I told him how the plants in the yard are growing, wild flowers are blooming, and the purple klil haHoresh in the neighbor’s yard is beginning to flower. The air smells clean and fresh after days of rain, the sky a gorgeous blue. “Even with all this bad stuff going on,” I said, “we can still enjoy Spring.”

I’m not sure he was convinced, but I was glad I could give him permission to stretch his inner world to contain the beautiful, along with the worst. As long as we have these capabilities to be happy, we should use them, despite all the sadness of the war. I personally refuse to let any f***g politician, no matter from which country, to ruin my state of mind.

After our conversation, I realized this stance is not easy to sustain. I try to choose it every day, especially when the sun is shining. I go work in the neglected yard for an hour and I am convinced that being outdoors enables me to stay upbeat. I was using small clippers to get rid of small branches, but the clippers broke, so I walked around the corner to a bldg. supply shop and bought myself a larger pair of shears for larger branches. It’s heavy to use, but gets easier with practice.

Cleaning out dead branches and thinning out live ones is good for my writing. It helps me get to the roots, to unpack the chuncks of clutter that haven’t seen sunlight for years. Passersby throw trash over our fence—bottles, tins, plastic wrappers, nylon bags and last year’s rat poisoning devices. Piece by piece, twig by twig, branch by branch, the landscape becomes clear.

I’ve noticed that in nature the branches of various bushes weave in and out of each other and get knotted, just like the weave of my Persian rug. As I untangle the knots in the yard, I also get to the core of my rug essay. Writer as unweaver, or re-weaver.

Yes, the war is awful, as was Corona. In both situations, I sought the positive in being cooped up and wonder of wonders, in both situations creativity flourished.

Yours in hope mode,

Judy

P.S. David told me last night that I was talking in my sleep. “Siren, siren,” I shouted, when there was no siren . .

Junior in bomb shelter with Judy, sleepless night, window for bow and arrow on upper right (undated)