Had to post this

One of the weddings i attended last year was featured in an online magazine. The article totally captures the beauty and elegance of the event and the love between the bride and groom. Congratulations Emily!

A wonderful Israeli Wedding

A friend sent me this link and it is too beautiful not to share. This is a Sephardi wedding that is beyond lovely!
Wedding in Israel 

Jimmy Buffet meets Captain Jack Sparrow.

 Two notions from two of my favorite philosophers have been haunting me all weekend. The first is from Jimmy Buffet the time is now, breathe in breathe out move on. We are in the present and have to deal with the life we have. We have a choice of how we deal with the situation, but we still have to deal with life the way it is.  

 According to my watch the time is now. Don't try to explain it, just nod your head. Breathe in, breathe out, move on.

And while Jimmy has a watch that says now, Captain Jack Sparrow has a compass that always points to his deepest desire, but only if he knows what he desires. Once he remembers what he desires he can find it.

I am intrigued by the notion of these two bits of technology. No google searches, no email updates, no 7 or 9 or 28 habits to success and happiness. Just a watch that says know and a compass that points to your desires. Then follow the compass....breathe in...breathe out...move on. Repeat. 

This is the still small voice inside us. This is what the voices that sang me to sleep as a child, and woke me from my narcissistic adolescent years were telling me. There is now. And there is an inner compass that takes guides us forward. All we have to do is be present and listen.

 I did. All the way to the sea at Santa Barbara...and laughed and walked and had fun with a great friend and a wedding dress.

my compass

 A year ago, near the beginning of this journey, I attended the funeral of an amazing mentor, an amazing man. His son read a poem  by W. H. Auden that has haunted me all year:                          
                                 He was my North, my South my East and West,
                                 My working week and my Sunday rest,
                                 My noon, my midnight my talk, my song,
                                 I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

Most of us start life with the wisdom of our elders acting as a compass, a timepiece, a directional beacon. But at some point this we move beyond the reach of this wisdom and must search for lighthouses on other shores. We find them, rest in the new harbor, and move on again. 

Through my life I have had two lighthouses calling me to distant shores. The first was the voices, the songs in my head that pushed me to move on, walk on, take leaps, find my courage in the face of new challenges. They sang to me, cajoled me, tempted me, hounded me...and then fell silent after my Bat Mitzvah. 

I was happy at first, thinking that I had achieved some goal, reached some destination and had placated whatever haunted me. And then I missed them. Without that prodding I felt spiritually adrift and tried a bit of everything, looking for something that would fit, something that would aerate my heart and let my soul shine through. I wanted to remember all the things that I had never known, but resonated with, but the voices were not there to guide me.

And then one day, quite my accident, I heard the song of a distant lighthouse, the echo of a rhythm that I recognized. The voices were not gone, I had just not recognized them. They sang in the surf of the sea. I could hear them best it seemed in Santa Barbara, but then I went to Israel and put my feet in the Mediterranean sea, and I could feel them wrap around me, encasing me with the song and dance and tapestry. For the first time in my life, the voices moved into me, and became that still small voice that I had been searching for. 

Sometimes though the world around me becomes very loud. There are demands and challenges, distractions and emergencies, and the ways that destinies collide and overlap and weave together. And I would forget that the compass now lived in me, that I could hear my north and south and east and west beating quietly, just beyond the noise.

I have found the perfect cure for disconnection...in the words of the great poet Jimmy Buffet...a holiday. A trip to the sea. Almost any sea, any shore, where I can walk and listen and realign.

Of course...there really is something magic about Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara Mermaid

I spent three days in my wonder place...a place that opens my heart. Santa Barbara may not be where I grew up, but it is where I learned to listen to the still small voice that spoke to me. I had walked on many beaches left home for a dream at 18, and spent time walking in the mountains...I had tuned out the demands around me before I arrived at UCSB...but I had not listened. 

The voice...in fact the many voices...that had called to me through the years, whispered to me at night calling me to something higher...or perhaps deeper had been with me since I was a child. I never really knew what the voices wanted, just that I needed to answer. Only I did not know how.

But somehow living close enough to the ocean to smell the salt, seeing the waves daily, running along the sandy sheath that connected the land and the sea, I started to understand what I was being called to do. It was in Santa Barbara that I started to study Hebrew. It was there that I circled back, though not completely, to my Jewish roots and had my Bat Mitzvah. And with that the voices grew quiet...for a very long time.

Of course quiet comes with a price. The voices that haunted me were gone, but so was the tantalizing song that had lured me deeper into life. I was free from the words, but I had lost my compass. So I tried anything that seemed to have the same resonance...the same rhythm. From meditation to sweat lodges, from wiccan circles to Shamanic visioning, from chanting and drumming to running and running and running and running. But the only time I was able to feel the correct song was when I was near the sea.

So no matter where I am, I travel there to listen for that one song that echos in my heart and clears my mind of all unknown fears. I remember who I truly am and why I have always...always...loved mermiads. As Anais Nin said "I must be a mermaid. I have not fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living." To be continued.