Inspiration and Agony

A friend of mine recently got a job with Teva and has been ecstatic since. On Yom Kippur he told me about a transformative experience he had davening Shacharit with a leader in the woods. He wrote a lovely blog post about it.

I listened as he told me about this and found myself exclaiming internally, "Oh oh oh! You've never davened shacharit in the woods before? Oh, how sad!!!! Oh, you know now about the light inside us all that comes from G-d... you hadn't had that before either?" I am so happy for him to have discovered this and feel a simultaneous plummeting inside me as I'm realizing just how few have ever even touched this. It feels as natural as water to me. I grew up in Corvallis, OR with nature and incense and touchy-feely Jews who loved Judaism for its connection to life itself and not just to text or walled-up inside shuls. To me this is what it is.

Over the years my day-to-day view of Judaism has changed, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, but that connection between nature and the soul and Torah are already inside me. It makes me so sad when it's obscured by materialism or simply by the devoted black hat suited culture that is passionate about G-d but disconnected from land and sometimes from their children because they don't always know how to connect their spirits together. What torture to imagine that it's not for so many people who want that connection so badly, sometimes without even knowing it.

Before this friend told me this story, we were sharing how grateful we both are to have jobs in where we know we daily engage in passions of our life that make a difference in the world. But there's a piece of me that still feels something is missing, a potential connection isn't meeting. Is this just the norm that comes of not being able to do all I want all at once -- change the lives of children while still writing and meditating and being present in my own free time and being a fun mother too. Or is it a gap I need to heal? I don't get to teach spirituality. I teach reading, writing, math and how to be a citizen from a child's perspective. The passion of teaching comes through connecting with children and families, particularly when there are barriers to overcome just as social or behavioral differences.

That's just it... I love connection. I'm connecting with them, sometimes helping them connect to each other, but are we connecting to G-d? Am I connecting all the parts of me, are we connecting all to each other, to nature, to our inner spirits? Or must the writer and meditator parts of me be reserved for different times.

In short, am I doing everything to the best of my abilities exactly as I should be? Or someday should I do it a little differently... the writer, meditating environmentalist teacher of behaviorally challenged children...

who loves to just sit and be alone sometimes in the woods.

And who already does that sometimes, returning to see the perfection in the present exactly as it is right now.