I’ve spent most of my life closed up. To love, new experience, health, spirituality, many people, real friendship. In recent years, I’ve been blessed to begin to open up. To love. To a spiritual life. To good people. To a new way of thinking about health, life and death. Animals have been my magical helpers, as Joseph Campbell would put. Rose helping me to live on the farm. Izzy connecting me to people. Lenore keeping love alive. Frieda arriving with Maria. Mary Muncil guiding me to a spiritual life. And of course, Maria, a powerful, emotional and loving spirit sweeping through my life like a sweet storm. And now comes Simon.

This morning, picking up the Kabbalah in the dark,  I read about a mysterious man commanded by the Blessed Holy One:

“you are to observe. Observe. My sanctuary you are to hold in awe is the point standing in the center.” And the punishment for one who fails to observe, to stand in the center, to share what he has learned, is death.  Failure to observe, wrote the mystics, is something one should fear more than anything. And the rabbis dismounted, incredulous, and kissed the strange man, who said his father was a great fish who circumvented the ocean in seconds, and spit him out at birth like the tip of a spear.

“All this wisdom in your hand,” they said, “and you are goading donkeys? Who are you?” And he replied, “do not ask who I am! Rather, let us go together. Lt each one speak words of wisdom to illumine the way.”

They said to him, “who appointed you here, goading donkeys?”

And the man said, “alone, yod came to me, embracing me. She wept with me, saying, “My son, what ca I do for you? But look, I will ascend and fill myself with goodness – with hidden, celestial, splendid letters! Then I will come to you, serving as your support..So my son, go and goad donkeys.’ That is why I go like this…This is where I reside, but I have gone into exile, goading donkeys.”

Awesome. Maybe I’ll read it to Simon.