I thought hard about whether to post this piece. I thought about how destruction of ‘The God Hole’ seems worthy of a 24/7 crawler running at the bottom of CNN or Fox. Yet we never hear of it. As journalists, we cover every aspect of destruction except this one to the human soul and heart; a destruction of self that often causes all kinds of other palpable destructions to be unleashed on this poor world. I often see that injury and devastation to animals, environment, other human hearts and lives is done by humans who are most injured themselves. Wherever and however human beings are shot through and unhealed, wherever they are deadened… if unstopped, they will attempt to wound and deaden others.
Thus, a person by person restoration of The God Hole, that opening between worlds where God meets humans, that place where a far deeper more far-seeing self is stablized and restored, is newsworthy. At the opening between worlds, the answer about how to live is seldom either/or. More often, it’s and/ and/ and.
I think of how little we journalists cover such significant shifts in psyche and soul that for many in our world occur on a summons from their faith at several points during the year. It’s true some pray loud but choose to live shallow. Not all take the summons to heart, and that’s what it takes: widening the heart. Change of heart. But still, I thought about you, and how I hope, if you find resonance in any way, that you will in your own way, join me on this ‘night of return’ to the opening between the worlds.
Tisha B’Av: A serious conjure, jurare, meaning to make a promise, take an oath, resolve, and exorcise, all at the same time. People are called to exorcise the false self. People are called to taste once again what it’s like to be a prophet who can see what most others cannot. And say it. Out loud. In the world, and in their private intimacy thereafter. To be a musician who can hear a different music. And play it. With all one’s heart. In the world, and in private expression, thereafter. To be wild and wise, with all one’s heart: to find the ways through.
Most of us live in a desert of incessant cultural thump and harrumph and revenge– but tonight, on Tisha B’av, a significant portion of 13 million people across the world will go to bed hungry. Even though they have money for food. And tomorrow some large portion of those 13 million people will again also go without food and water, until the sun sets again.
All in order to taste instead, an odd manna of thought that engenders braver sight, and a strange kind of spiritual water that causes remembering of a wider, deeper self. We’ll sit low to the earth, near the heartbeat there, like the old people used to sit Shiva. We’ll be away from the workaday, that ‘keeping busy to keep my mind off what really matters to my soul.’ We’ll sit there cheek on upper arm, eyes closed, listening to the poetry of the Lamentations and answering. We’ll sit low with only our miserable little thoughts about how we have over this past many months, dynamited shut ‘The God Hole.’ And we’ll ask ourselves as we slide down that ravine where we’ll be carried head over heels in a glory, only able to navigate with the wild rather than against it, we’ll ask ourselves, “Whatever was I thinking to try to ‘be safe’ and close this huge magic over?â€
Isn’t it strange that exactly this: ‘misery accompanied by contemplation’… along with that sitting there so low in the barrel of ourselves… right there at the opening between the worlds… that it’s precisely some portion of all these which helps undo all the barriers we’ve set against love, that opens the aperture again, that swings us around…. and there we are shooting right through the channel again.
It’s hard for me to explain, and I am clearly not a rebbe or theologian, but I’d try to put it to you like this: Tisha B’av is a time to remember original self before it was landlocked or deadlocked; before it became covered over by the sand drifts of parents, culture, by stilted adaptations, by one’s own commandante ego dressed in mismatched policeman’s uniform yipping orders from shore about how to be important instead of how to love helplessly, and how to explode into aliveness time and again.
Tisha B’av is about lamenting all of this closing off the opening to the deepest remembering… why you came to earth, no small thing… and who sent you… and how to be here in the midst of division and death, betrayal and harm… and yet remain unruined… all these reaching way way beyond ‘the usual self.’ It is about heeding that other souls we know and love, spin off this planet daily as though on a turntable going too fast; and that life is now, that it is within our reach, that time for the half-awakened to wake is now, to live alive in the deepest ways. This is what breaks open The God Hole between the worlds: the living and breathing of a larger life beyond the paltry and often pusillanimous ideas carried by ‘the usual self.’
I am writing to you before noon on Monday July 23, 2007
I’ll soon have a last meal. Tonight at sundown,
I’ll begin the all night tonight and all day tomorrow fast. I’ve laid out to eat yet today, cold black cherries that snap when you bite, they are so fresh. I’ve laid out fresh pear I’ve been watching over for three days in a paper sack, so it’s not too hard, not too soft; when it’s ‘just right,’ the pear’s juice always rolls down from my lips to my chin no matter how daintily I try to eat it. By the time I’m done eating this ‘last meal,’ my fingertips will be stained purple from blackberries, from gobbling them up like a greedy child. I’ll have a hard boiled egg cold. Also a cold whey protein drink.
My blood sugar can bounce, which sometimes makes me faint, so a long fast is tricky, but I think I can do it. I’ve had 80 ounces of water today. Enough to last, I think. It’s over 100 degrees here in the high country desert where I live. The air-conditioner is broken. Just right. Perfect timing. To night, we sleep less comfortable than usual, trying to be beyond our ‘usual selves.’ I’ll sleep on a wooden floor. Outdoors. No pillow. Just diamond sky for blanket. We, my soul and I, will see what we will see.
It’s what Tisha B’av is about: radiance and chai, Life! in the midst of all fallen down, all that has gone wrong, all that has been destroyed, hurt, dying, dead, all that is missing, not yet right, all that is broken, not yet reunited; all that is alive underground, all that is the Void before Love simply looks at it and it lives anew, all that does not yet show, but will be again for it is written in inerasable ways.
Tonight at sundown: Tisha B’av, the ninth day of the fifth month, a holy day only second in length of observance to Yom Kippur. Tisha B’av is a time that commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples, 2,420 and 1,930 years ago. Since then, this day of remembering opens its desert arms to include the Roman extermination of Jews, ethnic cleansing and murder of Jews in England, France, Spain, and Eastern Europe, the last four massacres, 717 years ago, 701 years ago, 515 years ago, and 69 years ago.
And what has Tisha B’av and egregious matters that happened long ago to do with me, with us, with you and I? It is an opportunity to remember the egress and ingress of the inspirare, the One who breaths with what is human and yet is greater than human, that which can tow us out of our mundane thoughts into a far deeper range of being human. Tisha B’av is not about temple buildings falling down, any more than 9-11 is about buildings falling down, or Dresden being bombed to dust or Nagasaki being made into rictored rebar. It’s about loss of life, about the closing off of the center, the cornucopiea, the incandescent filament, the roar of love, ‘The God Hole’ between the worlds. It’s about forgetting how easy it is to become narrowed, and how challenging but fulfilling it is to be wide and deep.
It’s about the wrongful smashing of all that is holy that would normally flood through The God Hole, that juncture between psyche and mystery. It’s about the forgetting to live there, caregive there, bring it away in armfuls to put into family, into work, into sexuality, into the culture, into life, into love, into thought, art and justice. It is about wrongful living away from the nourishment of a finer food, away from clear cold water that thunders through when that aperture is open. It is about wrongfully insisting on nice tidy hydroelectric dam diversions that make the water behave itself so it no longer leaps, eddies, throws rainbows.
When The God Hole is collapsed, we live small, in a crouch, often with pickiness, and self congratulations, and usually at least one high horse called Insecurity in the corral. We think we can deny that a falseness to self and to the vulnerable spirit… will somehow not break wings everywhere we go, that we with 10 foot wingspans can really fly in canyons only 2 feet wide without breaking everything. Impossible. When the opening between worlds is blocked, it means thinking ‘appearances’ are more important than imperishables. It means convincing oneself without authentic conviction, that being afraid to live to the depths, holding back from speaking a true, almost desperately loving heart, is the way to ‘be good’ or ‘be safe,’ when in fact, it is the way to be dead while alive.
Tisha B’av is about what has to happen to un-destroy, to un-deaden, to tunnel through, to remake, rekindle, reach for, demolish the impediments, be a brave weakling if need be, to go, to keep going beyond one’s ‘usual nature.’ One’s ‘usual nature’ has a false god who loves to close off chai, the life force, in ever so many ways. Tisha B’av is about exploding the aperture open again. TNT. Fire in the hole. Yes. About throwing oneself into the rapids with preparation but not undue delay, relying on one’s instincts, allowing one’s heart to break with need and with desire for choosing all things and beings and persons who have life incomparable inside them. To keep the soul’s joy of reaching for real life, not the narcosis of being diligently busy.
And why eat so well before entering Tisha B’av, the time in which to confront the psyche’s obliteration of its own temple of ideas and actions, to confront the culture’s destruction of its own greatest ideals, to stop accepting only subcutaneous reach, to un-enslave our thoughts? Just these; To remember the richness of what has been, what yet can be, what yet will be, that which one will cause by act of will and dream to come into being again. The destruction of the indivisual, the Temples, the torment of any people is a time of eating ashes. But the not rebuilding of another being, a more finely tuned idea, a more insightful people, is even more anguishing for anyone with a soul.
Thereby, there is fasting and lamenting, and sitting so low to the ground, trying to think beyond ‘the usual self’ that often harps that all matters have to be this way or that, and that if they are not perfect, they just cannot be. The point is to remember The God Hole is not closed off by ‘things,’ but by fear to be softened as well as fear to be strengthened to reach bravely, to be fully alive. To remember the Place where God and humans meet is cemented shut by hardening the heart; by turning away too high mindedly; by over-feasting without tasting, filling without being filled, sleeping without resting, talking without saying anything, being angry at what is, rather than by also being overjoyed by what can yet be.
‘The usual human’ is but a tiny island in an ocean of selfhood… if allowed, it will ever try to limit the limitless, bind the boundless, insist on bringing boulders and creating rockslides to further clog the aperture. The usual human has often spent quite long enough refusing to undo, soften, render, surrender, reunite, repair, to find the openings, to blow them clear again, to ride them, no matter how imperfectly, to plunge into, to flow, to dare, to thunder through again. Tisha B’av asserts just that: Our right, our imperative, no matter what past devastations… to, no matter how imperfectly, plunge into, to flow, to dare, to thunder through again. To return. As is our birthright. As is The God Hole’s claim on us.
CODA
I like the phrase The God Hole, not as an emptiness, but as an aperture. When I wrote the term in this piece, I was thinking of an underground waterfall I know; an amazing hidden place for those who have the capacity to be awe-struck by Nature. The cavern is filled with huge gray and rose granite walls forty feet high all creviced and jutting, colored as though you are inside a body. And from high high above, the water comes thundering down in a huge spout through a rock hole. The water does not roll down a rock wall, it free-stands about 25 feet across, as though a giant shower head were up there with no little pinholes, just one enormous conduit. The light is eerie and only sunset reaches into the vault making the most heartbreaking light. And you cannot hold a conversation there and the endlessly pounding water is only fingertips away. If you were with another, you would indeed be, in The God Hole, two souls as one.
I have a second posting for you that I wrote for Tisha B’Av, regarding the destruction of the sensory opening between the worlds. A friend who is a compassionate soul, a Buddhist, will post it for me yet tonight or tomorrow, as they will have posted this later in the second day of Tisha B’av too. I hope I will see you soon.
***Kayaker in photo, an amazing young woman, Lizzy English, one of our own from out West. Fine photographer; Ben Stookeberry. This stunning gorge is in Costa Rica, where, Lizzy tells me, they may have been the last humans to ride the river in its purity, for ” a hydro dam is soon to plug up the gorge and fill it in completely.” Destruction of the temple. It needn’t be. Keeping the temple and creating water power do not have to cancel one or the other. Thinking beyond ‘the usual self.’ Tisha B’av.