The Falling Tree

The air above tastes so wonderful to breathe
As opposed to the death that has been alive
And for so long has sustained me underwater
As afraid I have been to surface and enjoy the warmth
Of a summer's day or the chill of a winter's frost
For the elements above the surface are unpredictable

An innocent child once walked through the forest
Merrily laughing away while admiring a tree in the distance
When suddenly there was a loud bang and then a piercing cry
And no longer was this child merrily walking through the forest
For his innocence had been driven far beneath the ground
By a tree falling in the distance, dislodged from its roots

The sunlight disappeared that day and no longer was the boy
Able to merrily laugh his life away in the thick forest
For he never knew when a tree he so admired
Would unpredictably and for seemingly no reason
Violently crash to the ground as it lost its sway
From a place far beyond from where the boy could see

The air above tastes so wonderful to breathe as
The little boy that has been buried below
No longer enjoys the death that has been the life
Which has sustained his soul from within drowning waters
That have eerily flowed underneath the head of
What appeared to the little boy as a giant falling from the sky
As I learn today to enjoy the majesty of another tree

The Stretching Rainbow

A season in the sun dances before my eyes
As if a rainbow cunningly glows from
Within the approaching shadows of clouds
That formed from a dark and lonely place
And have moved within the outer edge
Of my flickering candle that pulsates
A radiant breath of fresh air that repels
The impending coming of the ominous clouds

Just for today I can enjoy the magical colors
Of the bright and radiant rainbow that echoes
A blossoming flower rising above the thawing ground
As I breathe an everlasting gratitude for a love
That is destined to outlast even the darkest of clouds
That hovers above my head threatening to retract the rainbow
That so effortlessly emanates a beautiful reflection
Of both Heaven's revealed and hidden loves

So the season continues to dance and the
Candle continues to sway in the wind
Moving to the rhythms of time that
Are giving birth this very moment
To a soft and vibrant flower so humbly blossoming
That not even a dark and ominous cloud
Pointlessly hovering over my head can
Rain a single drop of despair upon the gratitude
Pouring from my heart and reflecting a defiant glow
As a rainbow stretches from high above stretching
From one dark and ominlous cloud to the next

The Melting Heart

To love is to hold a heart in your hands
And embrace its raw stillness with a gentle touch
That fills eternity with a beating breath
That pulsates a burning flame that kindles
From deep within a timeless candle

Her love is like a tiny drop of wax
That disolves away and loses its form
Within the timeless burning of the eternal flame
That has darkened my vision as blindly I watch
The last of my lover's heart melt away

That ceaseless tapping is the sound of an eternal flame
Prematurely knocking on the gates of Heaven's door
As skyward her flame has soared far beyond the limits
Of our timeless love we shared in one single moment
As the raw stillness suddenly leaps from my embrace

I had a dream that was more like a vision
In which I was floating as if in a dream
Yet I was blind as if I had lost my vision
And had only my trust to guide me
As clouds surrounded me with a glow
That stretched out like a hand to lead
As I struggled once again to find the love
That only a moment ago was in my grasp
Yet was stolen away by clouds that insisted
On love that remained forever floating in a dream

The blue sky above reflects a gentle light
That also glows in the distance as waves below
Crash against my elevated feet that remain suspended
Like a dream floating away in a deep sleep
As the lover returns and takes my hand and
holds it to her breast so that my fingers
Can touch the heartbeats of her love
So that I never forget that clouds that glow
are like a dream that forever floats
beyond the shadows of true love below

And clouds that forever float in distant dreams
Are like wistful waves crashing against the shore
Reflecting glimmers of the sun from the sky above
As the moment for love instead races back to sea
And the dreams are left to float without ever finding home

The Angry Wave

The dream gets lost in words which
Aimlessly disappear into an endless fog
That hides a peaking mountain away
In a thick cloud of gray mass that threatens
To heap a torrential flood of despair onto the
Deepest and most intimate dreams of lovers
Gently walking together hand in hand along
The sandy shores of an isolated beach as '
Towering and merciless waves continuously
Explode upon impact against the gentle sand
Whose delicate softness dances like a candle
Reaching out to embrace the impending explosion
Of an angry wave that blows like a grenade

The dreams have lasted a lifetime and now
The time has come for the endless fog
To reach its end and to say goodbye
To the mountain whose peak is peaking
Far beyond the mass of gray clouds
Whose threat to heap torrential despair
Onto the deepest and most intimate dreams
Of lovers gently walking together hand in hand
Has instead fallen into the rush of a wave
That no longer carries with it the desire
To cruelly crash against a kindhearted shore
As a dancing candle has reached out its arms
To embrace the fury of an angry wave

Surrender

It has been more than two months since I last published anything on this blog. I have had plenty of good intentions about sitting down at the computer and putting together some thoughts, but each and every time my fingers were about to touch the keyboard, I became distracted by one thing or the other and the impulse to write soon passed into thin air. The reason why I have found the necessary discipline to write is that I have discovered a topic that has sparked the flame of interest vital to any quality piece: surrender.



This word has been floating around my mind in various forms since I arrived in Los Angeles four months ago. The fact that I was even open to the idea of returning someplace that contained so many painful memories was an act of surrender, although I did not realize it as such when it first happened. Perhaps this is why it was effective, for the simple reason that I did not see it coming, for if I had, I do not think I would have been remotely open to the idea of returning to this city. But I remember the exact moment of surrendering to the idea that I wanted to live here again. It was a cold and rainy day here, one in which the drops kept softly falling from the sky, sometimes harder and sometimes softer. I was in Los Angeles because the school at which I was working sent me here to be trained in the Hebrew Language program we were using to instruct our students. Two weeks before I came to Los Angeles, I had the unfortunate experience of getting an ear plug lodged deep into my right ear. I thought that the natural process of time would dislodge the ear plug, but much to my discomfort, the foam found a resting place in my ear beyond the reach of my thick fingers. I woke up on the morning after I arrived here with my ear ringing louder than it had it weeks and in more pain than I was willing to tolerate. Fortunately, I did not mind finding any excuse to miss out on the tiresome training sessions that I was sent here to sit through. The closest hospital to my location was the Encino Hospital on Ventura Blvd. It was my lucky day because I did not have to spend the duration of the morning waiting in the emergency room, which would have been even worse than sitting through the training sessions. I was the only patient in fact, and the ear plug was removed with a narrow pair of tweezers about an hour after I first arrived. When I left the hospital, I was literally singing in the rain over the fact that the ear plug was no longer blocking my hearing. A funny thing happened at that moment: I made my peace with this city and I felt like it was time to come back. I also realized that this was the same hospital that had been the last place I ever saw my father alive 13 years before.



I never said that surrender was easy. There are times in fact that surrender is very painful. To make moving back to Los Angeles a possibility, I had to give up on some things that I would have never voluntarily walked away from. The most important of these was my teaching job that for two years had become the center of my life. But through a series of misdirected and misunderstood relationships, the wheel of losing my job was set into motion. The speed of the spinning wheel accelerated so fast in fact despite my best efforts to slow it down that I was relieved of my teaching duties on the last day of school.



Heartbroken I was, yet hopeless I was not. Somehow, I knew that there was a higher purpose to these misfortunes, and if I could only hold out hope just a little bit longer, I would soon start to see this light within the darkness. The going at first this past summer however was not very easy because I knew that I could no longer find courage and hope through the ability to stand my ground and battle through some of life's greatest tragedies. For me to find true happiness from now on, I knew I needed to find courage and hope through a different force, one that I call surrender, even if it meant saying goodbye again. It is through surrender that I have learned to love, forgive, understand, listen, and feel true compassion for others. I have become the person I have wanted through this calm, gentle, steady, and softly forceful energy that guides me more and more each day as I slowly gain the confidence and trust to allow it to lead each and every step I take.



My dreams are coming true less as a result of fighting my way through life and more because I am able to calmly breathe my way through challenging situations. Acceptance comes with surrender, as does the understanding of what my responsibilities are to myself and to others. I am more thoughtful in my actions and less prone to overreacting to situations beyond my control as I have embraced the warmth, beauty, strength, and most importantly the acceptance of this amazing and miraculous force that I label surrender.

How my love of sports became a Jewish Value

I have been an avid sports fan my entire life, not necessarily of playing any particular one, but rather of following the action on the field. Especially during baseball season when school was out for the summer, I would locate the sports section of the newspaper delivered to my house each day and find a quiet space where I would be undisturbed for at least an hour so I could practice my labor of love of tracking at bats, runs, hits, and runs batted in. More than watching any sport, I enjoyed reading about the action as it appeared in box score form. I loved the precise details of which players helped their team to win or caused their team to lose. A box score offered no congratulations to these winners and no consolation to these losers. It simply reported what a player did or did not do on a given day in a specific sport and quantified his performance into a sequence of numbers.


Nothing was able to diminish my love for sports as I grew away from my scrawny childhood and into my turbulent teenage years. By this point however, distractions such as family dysfunction, making friends crazy, chasing girls, and ditching school were stealing almost all of time away from watching sports. I no longer sat transfixed in front of a television and watched historic moments such as Joe Montana passing to Dwight Clark in the end zone in the final minute of what proved to be a huge dagger in the heart of my beloved Cowboys for years to come. I was too out of breath throughout my teen years to sit down and enjoy watching sports on TV.

This situation though of not having the mental capacity to enjoy sports began to change in Israel of all places. It was while living in the Holyland that I would stay up through the wee hours of the night and enjoy a sporting event such as the Super Bowl and the World Series. It was also in Israel that I began another passion: teaching. I spent six years studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and began working with kids in classrooms in 2000. Truthfully, I first got into the profession because I wanted something practical to do after completing my college degree in Jewish History and English Literature. It would take 10 years for me to fully appreciate the impact my teaching could have on kids, and it came through nothing in particular I did in the classroom, but rather something that happened on the football field.

Part of my duties with my previous employer was to supervise the combined fourth and fifth grade class during the last hour they were in school on Thursday afternoons. Usually by this point, they were restless and wanted to go outside for extra recess. I was just as restless as they were to leave the classroom at this stage of the day, so I was always in search of interactive and educational activities. In was on such a day that this brilliant idea flashed in my mind: teach the kids how to get along and have fun together through playing football.

The students were of course excited to go outside and I gave them the choice of either playing basketball or football. They were not allowed to bask in the glowing sun, so they needed to choose one of these options. About half the class chose football, which meant that we would have a game of five on five. To make the game fair, I picked the teams, having the students count off, "one, two, one, two'" until each was assigned a team. I also decided to be the quarterback for both teams, thinking this would be the best way to make the teams more even, since I unintentionally put the best athletes on the field on the same team.

The game was predictably a chaotic disaster from the opening kickoff. It was officially two hand touch football, but this did not prevent kids from flying around and tackling each other. There was either an injury or a hurt feeling after each play. The losing team was upset that their counterparts kept scoring each time they touched the ball while they were unable to catch any pass to them, no matter how perfectly thrown. By the time the game was over, most of the children were angry at me for allowing such a travesty to substitute for quality teaching. Four children needed to make a detour to the nurse's office on the way back to class and I was politely asked by my superiors to make a detour into the principal's office. All agreed it was not a wise idea to teach Jewish Values through a hastily organized football game, except for one student.

A special award is given at the 5th grade graduation ceremony to the student who best exemplified living by Jewish values while studying at the school of my previous employment. It is a prestigious honor bestowed on the child who most consistently demonstrated character traits such as getting along with others, acting with dignity, and showing a deep conviction of faith. Before the award is presented, each of the 5th grade students graduating reads a short prepared speech in which they describe some of their most memorable moments at the school. The girl who would later win this award gave a touching speech that I will always carry with me as a badge of honor. I sat in the audience among the rest of the school community with a strong sense of pride and even a touch of vindication when she gave me a special thanks for being her Jewish Studies teacher, specifically mentioning that football game her classed played that Thursday afternoon. She reaffirmed my belief that a hastily organized game of touch football could indeed be a powerful vessel through which to teach the Jewish values I wanted to teach her class that day.