Get Funky

So, I've been in a bit of a funk.

The Jewish New Year just passed and normally I find this to be an inspiring holiday. We truly get the sense of a fresh start. We wear new clothes and eat apples dipped in honey so that our mouths taste only sweetness, so that sweetness will feed the cells in our bodies and permeate our being. For this coming year, we will share sweetness with all we meet and allow it to infuse all that we do. This is a ritual that I prize at this time of year, when school is starting, and the energy of change, the energy of becoming is palpably present. You can see it as the leaves color and hue, how they blaze into beauty, and find their moment of fullest potential. I love the autumn for this very reason.

But this year, I did not feel that energy. I felt still. And this is not necessarily a bad thing, because stillness is not the same as stagnation. But stillness in NYC is a difficult state. If we indeed need to "go with the flow" being still gums up the works. Stillness stops traffic on the street. It ignores the rules of the land.

And yet, as uncomfortable as I am being still, I know I cannot be any other way right now. This is not a quick process that I am engaged in. Teeth are not text messages or microwave dinners. They adhere to the natural law, which takes its time.

Time, it seems, is reserved for those of a meditative nature. I am reminded of the term, maha-kalpa, a Sanskrit work indicating a very particular unit of time. If every hundred years a mountain is brushed with a silk scarf, the time it takes for the mountain to be eroded by the scarf is known as a maha-kalpa. (The Buddha could not speak of it in exact years, so this was the explanation he gave.) I've thought of this so often ever since I learned the phrase in college many years ago. And, as you might imagine, I've been thinking about this unit of time, since the braces went on.

I was reading Just Over My Shoulder, a dear friend's blog today, and this is what she wrote:

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

-Tao te Ching

I've been battling against the stillness all week, feeling defeated by it, and saddened by it. And yet, this passage from the Tao te Ching was so useful, like silverware, or a ballpoint pen. It turned my thinking on a dime, and as impatient and melancholy as I am with this process, I do know that I have to wait until the right action arises, and it cannot be forced or cajoled into being. It simply needs to sit, cross it's legs, rub its Buddha belly and take its time