Day 46
I watch ‘A Single Man’ on the plane to SF this morning, and when it ends I bite my lips to avoid bursting into tears and open up my journal to write instead. It’s a beautifully directed and stylized homage to loneliness, and hopes, and random or not so randoms moments of great pain and great love. I am glad I packed my starched white shirt and cuff links. Tom Ford has always been a role model..
That’s me in some way, a single man, age 41, on a 50 day pilgrimage to live the lover, within, and, hoping, through this journey, to rekindle this sense of finding my lover in the ‘real’ world, hands held across the table, eyes meet. When I envision what night 50 of this count means – encountering God on the mountain in a re-enactment of revelation, I don’t think about acquiring wisdom or the law. It’s not about the ten commandments or the 613 to do’s or a covenant between an abstract deity and a nation in need of protection. My 2010 version has to do with a sense of self love and security that makes love possible. So many of the mystical takes on Shavout and Sinai is that of a celestial wedding – God as bride and Israel as groom or vice versa – a marriage of body and spirit, physical and metaphysical, heaven and earth.
I know I’m not the first to queer it up.
Welcome to San Francisco.
It’s been implicit in my thinking and perhaps present in these writings – the search for love begins with the sense of self worth, and continued with the will to be patient, present, let go of expectations and be open to what is. All of these self help lessons we know so well but forget or distort or just don’t manifest.
One night, a few weeks ago, I started writing a letter to my invisible lover. a letter to God, to the one towards whom I am climbing all these days, the beloved.
With just 4 days left, maybe it’s time to do so.
Today’s task, now that I’ve arrived and checked in and about to go meet a great teacher and usher in Sabbath with friends – is to review these past six weeks, recall the promises, re-read the musings, start to wrap up and make sense of it all. Today is Netzach of Malchut, a reminder of how endless, infinite, vast this reality is and how contained in a grain of sand, a single keyboard, a single man, on path to more love and living.
shabbat shalom.
4 to go.
