3 Elul
Separation and longing: part two, second paragraph
Below is the second excerpt from Saki Santorelli's magnificent book, Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine (the entire excerpt is below today's message):
...separation is the way of the world. This is true for all of us. From this mistaken identity spring greed, strident individuality, and the destruction of planetary community. I cannot easily assign meaning to any of this. Rather, I have come to feel the truth of the situation while gradually learning to take responsibility for it. We are at a cusp, a turning point in history. We can go on living in this hard darkness, pretending that it does not exist, feeling helpless, cynical because we know it does, or we can begin to peer into the darkness, allowing the eyes to adjust, seeing with gradual clarity that which is before us.
--Saki Santorelli
Jewish tradition teaches us to be responsible for everything -- for our own behavior, for relationships, for the weak and disenfranchised, for the stranger, for world peace. It is exhausting. And yet, how glorious to live as if we matter, as if our intentions, our prayers, our actions make a difference. So, make a difference. Commit to just that, to making a difference, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might....
Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar
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The excerpt in its entirety:
We human beings live inside such a tight cocoon. Because we are not so different, I know whether you say so or not, that you and I live most of our lives in this stifling, unsatisfying, airtight encampment. We have named this self-woven world "I." "Me." "Mine." Frantically running out of the mystery of who we or what we are behind all the extras of title, status, and role, we have reified and made special this cocoon world, making it small and solid, calling it "self." In our time this process has reach its zenith. We are in a dark enclosure. Can any of us say with absolute honesty and certainty that we are content with this state of affairs?
Tragically, while we continue weaving this secure blindness, our world has reached it nadir. Separation is the way of the world. This is true for all of us. From this mistaken identity spring greed, strident individuality, and the destruction of planetary community. I cannot easily assign meaning to any of this. Rather, I have come to feel the truth of the situation while gradually learning to take responsibility for it. We are at a cusp, a turning point in history. We can go on living in this hard darkness, pretending that it does not exist, feeling helpless, cynical because we know it does, or we can begin to peer into the darkness, allowing the eyes to adjust, seeing with gradual clarity that which is before us.
Rumi's opening section of the Mathnawi, "The Song of the Reed," begins: "Oh hear the reed flute, how it does complain and how it tells of separation's pain..."
Rumi tells us that the pain of separation, the longing of the reed pulled from its source, is both a lament and a fiery, triumphant call to return - a remembering of our fundamental inseparability. Yet our experience of separation is unavoidable and holds within it the metamorphic energies of transformation. It is our willingness to make contact with the experience of separation that allows us to touch and reckon with the full force of our longing for connection. It is the intensity of this longing -literally our willingness to live intimately with the discomfort and anguish of separation -that is the threshold and pathway leading through separation to joining.
Saki Santorelli , Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine