Torah & Dreams: Lizards and Mourning Doves, Part II
A few days later after this dream of iguanas, I had a healing session with a friend. I’d just finished a book called Buried Rivers; A spiritual Journey into the Holocaust, which I felt had an important message for me. My friend intuited, and I agreed, that I needed to heal some ancestral stuff and free myself of old fears passed down through generations of living in terror. My friend calls this a Divine Mother, or Shechinah, healing. It was profound and cleansing.
The next day I got a terrible headache that turned into a three-day migraine.
Migraines for me are always an opportunity for deep spiritual work. The pain, the pulsating stabs that won’t subside, no matter what I take, drive me to tears. This time, waves of grief passed through me that came out in loud sobs throughout the second day, I felt like I was releasing generations of grief over loss.
The next day, as I was still recovering, I spoke to a friend who is a medium. We were talking about a friend from our synagogue, Evelyn, who just died a couple of weeks ago at 92 of pancreatic cancer. And Evelyn came with a message for us: “Live with a clear and open heart. Start living that way now. It will change your life. I’m not talking out of my ass.” We laughed and cried.
And I asked Evelyn that if she visited me again, would she please show a sign.
Shabbat morning, as I was just waking up, still in that liminal space, I remembered it was Shabbat, and quietly said to the world, “Shabbat Shalom,” and tears immediately sprung to my eyes. Would it be a Shabbat Shalom? And July 4th--what’s to celebrate? A history of continuous and continuing oppression of Black people, stark inequality on the rise, Coronavirus on the rise, I feel so much rage, and no, I would not be going to synagogue or seeing friends or being in community.
Then I heard the sound of a mourning dove outside my window. I often see them in the park, and they’re my favorite bird besides blue jays, but never do they come into the courtyard below my window. So I went to make sure that’s what I was hearing, and it was.
A couple of minutes later, as I’m wiping my tears still, I hear it louder. I look up and there it is perched on my window sill, inside the little slit between the open glass and the screen. It could have much more easily landed beside the open window on the other part of sill, but it comfortably flew in between the small opening to walk back and forth, cooing and looking in at me through the screen. I immediately thought of Evelyn, and tears came up again. Is it her?
I go to look up doves this time as spirit animals. This is what I found on two different websites:
Doves lay two eggs. This is apparently unique and important.
They are ground eaters so they remind us to stay connected to the earth--the feminine aspect of the Divine, which is linked to creative energy.
The mourning dove in particular invokes new “waters of life” from its mournful cry. It reminds us that new waters can still flow and new life is still possible even in the worst of times.
The mourning dove reminds us that it’s fine to mourn what has passed, but we must remember to awaken to the promise of the future.
This is a bird of prophecy. It can help you see what you can give birth to in your own life.
It reminds you to soar; to know when to move your wings and when to allow the wind to take you to new heights; when to surrender and let the wind support you.
Or stop and take a deep breath; let go of the turmoil surrounding you and take time to find peace within. Reality is shifting in ways you never thought possible.
Finally, it may be a sign that you need to purify your thoughts, because you attract what you focus on.
Words associated with the dove are: ascension, peace, gentleness, grace, holiness, hopefulness, love, peace, promise, prophecy.
Evelyn’s message, over and over again, was: “Do the hard spiritual work while you’re here. You can do it when you’re gone, but it’s better when you’re here. It’s worth it.”
May we all find ways of living with a clear and open heart. It will change our lives. And I’m sure it can change the world.
And I’m not talkin’ out of my ass.
Spiritual Messages from Torah and Dreams: Living Waters, Lizards, Broken Pencils, and Mourning Doves
It started with a dream I had last week, during the weekly Torah reading called Korach, when Korach and his supporters are swallowed up by the earth for rebelling against Moses, and the “Living Waters/Chayim Mayim,” are used as the final purification rite for those in contact with the dead.
What is dead now? What needs to be purified?
The dream:
Two Iguanas with spikes on their backs. They’re somehow my pets. I feel responsible for them and I don’t want them. I’m afraid of them. I also realize they’re not on leashes, so they can easily get away, which would make me very happy. I’m sitting on a rock, the two of them in front of me, one closer. It tries to snatch my pencil, an old #2 yellow pencil, but I kick at it. It doesn’t succeed in taking the pencil but it does break it in two pieces. (That image still floats in my mind, of a broken #2 pencil floating in the air.) Then the two iguanas slip into the beautiful water to go hunting, and I’m free! I go prancing off to hike in the forest, overjoyed by my freedom.
Why two? Why Iguanas? Why the pencil?
I hope I don’t offend anyone with what may seem like cultural appropriation, but a few years ago I was introduced to the idea of Native American Medicine Cards and Spirit Animals. I include my experience with these because I believe that all spiritual paths lead to the same place ultimately, we are all fundamentally connected, and I have found them useful and enlightening. I include my experience with the utmost respect--and my story wouldn’t be a story without them--or it would definitely not be as good.
I read about the medicine of lizards first. According to my book, they come in dreams, are the medicine of dreamers and can help you see differentiate the shade from the shadow. The shadow can be your fears, hopes, or the very thing you are resisting, and it is always following you around. For me, they were the fears that are always following me around--about my health mostly. The broken pencil was the old story of my childhood, and the fears I inherited from generations of hypochondria as a survival mechanism, I’m guessing. Broken because it’s an old story, but it’s still mine and can’t be taken away from me. I can now write a new story. I am free to do that.
We talked about my dream during a Zoom Shabbat morning service last week and someone brought the idea of two doves into the conversation as a somehow substitute for the iguanas. Then I responded, and another person pipes up and says, just as you were talking, two doves landed on my deck.
Cont. Spiritual Lessons from Coronavirus
Monday, April 20, 2020
How do I savor this feeling of a new lease on life? How do I stay in this place of gratefulness?
I have been trying to live in that place for years now, and I see how quickly the feeling starts to fade, especially as I wake up still feeling shitty more days than not.
This morning as I woke up, instead of just saying “Modah Ani” and moving on to the next prayer, I took the time to sit in bed for a couple of minutes and chant it, really thinking about the words, letting a melody come to me. You see, I don’t usually think I “have the time.” I have an “agenda,” after all. I’ve got to get up and move into my “morning routine” more quickly: the yoga, qi gong, davenin. (As it is, I feel much too privileged to have the time for all this at all. My children are grown, I don’t currently have a job, I’m in school full time. Feelings of guilt abound. I know, I know, so many people would give anything to be living my life. Is it like survivor’s guilt? Anyway, not the subject at hand…)
Of course I’m aware that the moment of waking up, washing my hands and going to the bathroom are part of my morning routine, but I so often rush through it. That’s the thing with routine. We can easily fall into doing it unconsciously.
On the other hand, it’s regular practice that strengthens a routine. If we do exercise regularly, our muscles get stronger. But so often do people put on music or watch a show while doing exercise.
If we’re not aware, we might do the same with prayer. Our own distraction can lead to unconscious prayer. I struggle with this all the time, every day in fact. I am constantly looking for a balance.
Something that works for me often and especially this week is experimenting with throwing my whole body into prayer, shuckling, but from my knees, especially when I don’t have the energy to stand. On the “baruch” of a prayer, I really throw my body forward, and sometimes stick my nose into my prayer book. The shuckling I’ve observed in many Orthodox men is my inspiration, and the nose in the book and rocking back and forth I take from observing Orthodox women. It offers a kind of passionate pleading that helps me focus.
This morning I was listening to the news--only coronavirus--as I began my prayer. All I could do was just sit, my head covered by my tallis. I wondered as I often do, what does my prayer actually do?
At the very least, it helps me to try to be the best person I can be. It may not make me feel better, but it refocuses me to my efforts to be my absolute best, which includes being cheerful and loving towards the family I’m in the house with every day, all day.
Spiritual Lessons from Coronavirus
Sunday, April 19th, 2020
B.C./A.C. (Before Coronavirus/After Coronavirus
I think it’s appropriate for me to begin with my experience of being sick with COVID. After all, this is what inspired me to make a life change--I mean, not total, but just to re-evaluate where I am at this moment and make the big decision to take a year off from official classes at rabbinical school, to begin developing my Hashpa’ah (Spiritual Direction) practice, and to create this here website. I wouldn’t have the time or energy for any of it if it weren’t for that.
So here I am, and here’s my personal story.
I know there are millions, literally millions of stories, as millions have gotten sick with coronavirus over these past months.
I begin with: To remember the blessing of just being alive.
Why is that so hard?
To just be.
It’s true that we are human beings, and not human doings, as Reb Zalman used to like to point out. Maybe the reason we are called “beings” is that we need to be reminded daily of this fact, especially in this doing-driven world we live in. What coronavirus has highlighted even more is that we need to get back to the “being” part.
Before we got sick with coronavirus, I remember thinking with frustration at people’s complaints of being told to stay inside. My heart went out to those who can’t work from home, just barely able to survive, and it still does. It’s truly a privilege to be able to work from home.
I also couldn’t get this image of Anne Frank and her family out of mind, and what it was like to be forced into hiding for years, not even knowing if they would be found and killed. How fortunate are we that we are not under siege (not of this kind, anyway), that we can still access food, that we do not live with the fear of soldiers knocking on our doors and taking us away (not most of us). How grateful that we do not have to stay inside completely, unable to see the light of day. We have iphones and FaceTime and the internet, and delivery systems, even if they are slow at the moment. The slowness and some degree of scarcity that exists are reminders that we have gotten very, very spoiled by the fast delivery system we know we shouldn’t even be using.
Now here I am, after Coronavirus first hit my family, just a few weeks since my husband Oswaldo returned from the hospital, where he was literally on the edge between life and death, and I myself am still experiencing the after-effects of the virus that laid me flat for weeks. And I’m feeling the pressure to get back to “my work.” I haven’t had the brain power to do any reading. Instead, I’ve been savoring the beauty of life, and I must say that this feeling permeates much more of my daily life than was the case before I got Coronavirus.
With my slowly building energy, I have prepared for and cleaned up from Passover, cooked and eaten delicious foods, gone for walks in the sunshine, looked at the blossoms and flowers of springtime. I have been grateful to be alive and for my husband to be with me in the face of so much surrounding death. I remember often that it could have been otherwise. I might have been experiencing an extreme kind of grief at this moment, having lost my husband, unable to comfort myself or my daughters, one who lives with me and another who I wouldn’t be able to see, wondering where my husband’s body was, picturing him in a mass grave, like others I know, unable to have a proper funeral, wondering about my future without him, unable to function.
But I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.
Instead, I remember the incredible joy at having a deep craving for food after weeks of illness, and thinking how good it is to simply have an appetite.
I remember a friend delivering a hamburger she had bought me in the street. How I savored it, how much joy it gave me. For at least a week, all I wanted was meat (and I’m normally mostly vegetarian).
I remember the support of friends, teachers, rabbis, sometimes in the middle of the night.
I remember nights of panic, no sleep, trouble breathing, tracking fevers and blood oxygen levels, watching movies just to keep my mind otherwise occupied, surviving on adrenaline.
I remember phone calls with Oswaldo in the hospital, hearing him getting stronger, crying as I listened to his stories of “seeing the light” and feeling the hundreds of healing prayers from our community, extending around the world.
I remember saying goodbye to him at the door, kissing him on the forehead as the paramedics gave him oxygen. He couldn’t even make eye contact with me. And I remember thinking I might not see him again.
I remember running to the bathroom after frenzied cries from my daughter, finding him passed out in the bathroom, dehydrated from a week of fever, and shaking him back to consciousness, yelling to call 911.
I remember with amazement the three pairs of paramedics that visited our house, bringing peace, calm, caring and kindness, despite the personal risk to themselves.
I remember breaking down with Rebecca when we closed the door behind him, crying out, “Him, of all people...he’s supposed to be the strong one…!”
I remember calling Dina, my reiki teacher and friend, and crying with her as I told her that they’d taken him away to the hospital, because that’s how it felt: like they’d taken him away. Dina immediately gathered her “forces” and within 20 minutes, she was surrounding Oswaldo, and then me and Rebecca, with healing energy. Afterwards she told me that Mother Mary had shown up right away to pour her healing energy into Oswaldo. (She was sorry, but Mother Mary was Jewish.)
I remember community members and friends shopping for us, picking up necessities.
I remember that Friday when Oswaldo went to the hospital. A community member had shopped for us for Shabbat. I don’t know how, but after the reiki, Rebecca and I were somehow able to enjoy our meal, reassured that Oswaldo was getting the care he needed, energetically, spiritually, and physically, after 6 harrowing days. and eating the potato kugel, chicken soup and rotisserie chicken with such gusto. There had been two visits from paramedics, a visit to Urgent Care, and finally the third call to 911 when he finally couldn’t fight anymore and agreed to go to the hospital.
I remember the night of trying to keep his fever down, torturing him with icy washcloths on his body as he shivered, and pounding on his back to loosen the pneumonia, all while I was still sick and weak myself.
I remember the gratefulness I felt for his healing, and for the nurses and doctors and other caretakers in the hospital who gave such love and care despite their fear for their own lives and families.
All this gave me hope for humanity, despite the ongoing horrible news, despite our government and our president.