Clouds and Hope

Today I spent some time lying on the foredeck in the shade of the jib and watching the cloud wisps swirl and drift. It’s a detail I’ve never stopped to notice before. Lost in my thoughts, I realized that I’ve started internally categorizing the thoughts that come into my head. I call them either land thoughts or ocean thoughts.

Land thoughts sound something like:

- I really need to start exercising when I get back. I’m going to be so out of shape.

- If I don’t eat the pickles now, someone else will eat the pickles before I can and then I won’t get pickles.

- I’m never going to be able to paint the foam of a wave. How do you paint white? It’s just the page!

- This person clearly doesn’t know what they’re talking about; if only they would listen to me.

- How do I mix the color blue to paint the ocean?

- Some of my blog posts sound so boring and the writing is so uninventive.

- My creative work is pretty amateur. I shouldn’t charge people for it.

- I can’t write poetry

Ocean thoughts sound like:

- I’m so excited to join the adult swim team I found in the Portland area. That’s going to be such a fun way to help hold myself accountable for regular exercise and meet new people.

- We have plenty of food and plenty of snacks. No need to worry about having enough.

- I want to spark wonder in and encourage play from the people who interact with things I create and design. What invites someone to move from a “normal” state, to a state of play?

- It’s incredible that I could just sit here all day and paint all day.

- How can I make my first instinct to be curious about a person and set aside first judgements and personal insecurities? This will help me bridge gaps.

- This person clearly feels strongly that they have the right answer. How can I phrase my argument differently to help them understand where I’m coming from?

- What question does it seem like this person would enjoy answering? How can I gently help them share more about themselves?

- What color is the ocean?

- I appreciate how blog has helped me discover that I love to write.

- My creative work is my job - I can and should charge people for it.

- I haven’t really ever tried writing poetry

With all this time to think, it seems I’ve been practicing my CBT. My land thoughts are my initial, gut reactions and my ocean thoughts are what follow after a breath or two. My land thoughts come from a mindset of scarcity and insecurity and narrow-mindedness. My ocean thoughts come from kindness and gratitude and trust in my own capability.

I’m don’t often pray outside of organized religion, but today I had a desire to do that. Let me explain.

I identify as Jewish and my congregation is one of the more precious things in my life. Prayer pretty much comes as part of the package of any religion, but to me the word itself drips with conventional piety towards a known God in a way that feels distant from my own personal experience. In Judaism, prayer is definitely part of the experience and it offers a way to meditate on one’s own experiences, misgivings, and challenges. But, especially in Reform Judaism, this can look very different from congregation to congregation and person to person. One of the Cantors at my synagogue recently equated prayer, especially during the Days of Awe, to comfort food - defined as something new that also reminds us of home. But prayer so often deals with the idea of God and like a true Jew in the spirit of Y’rushalaim, I regularly wrestle with the idea of God and how God shows up in my life. Sometimes, prayer loses me, feeling less like a call to God herself and more like an opportunity for meditation by following a pattern committed to memory (and therefore requiring very little active brain power).

There are two instances where prayer at synagogue feels, for me, incredibly visceral:

The first is when a prayer is put to music or, in the case of Kol Nidre or even a simple Friday night silent reflection, when the music is the prayer. I have often found myself teary or crying when signing or listening to these melodies and letting them guide my thoughts. For a long time, I’ve felt most connected to a higher power through art, and music is no exception.

The second is when we, as an entire congregation, take the time to pray for a newly wed couple, a b’nei mitzvah, a newborn baby, a yartzeit (death anniversary), someone who is experiencing hardship or sickness, or another member of the synagogue. Sometimes it’s a prayer that we sing together from our seats, sometimes individuals are brought to the bima to receive a blessing from the Rabbi and Cantor for this key moment in their life. The people are wrapped in a prayer shawl and stand between the two religious and spiritual leaders of our congregation. The prayers are generally the same, sometimes with a small variation in melody or a variation at the end of the spoken prayer at the bima depending on the context. These moments stand out to me because they are prayer freely given; we all join together to give our attention, love, support, and well-wishes to others in our community. Done with the trust that each individual will be draped gently with love and support when their need or occasion arises.

So you see, both of these experiences are less about the presence of God as I see them described in traditional prayer, but more about my experience interacting with the product of a higher power’s work. Interacting with people and experiencing and creating art feels the most like prayer to me because, I think, it’s rarely about looking backward. It’s looking at our present moment, and looking forward to who we could be. How the world could be. Both skills I’ve had plenty of time to practice at sea. Prayer, to me, is inherently the expression of hope for a better world.

And so, I’ve had this desire to pray. However, it feels more accurate to me to say I’ve had this desire to hope. Maybe some people would say it doesn’t matter, it’s just semantics. Maybe they’re right. But to me, the semantic shift is helpful context for the intention behind the action. Hope is meaningless without a following action, but without hope we may never take the action to affect an outcome in the first place.

My time on the ocean has encouraged me to pray - to hope. And here is my prayer:

I hope that even in the wake of national heartbreak and uncertainty, we can continue to wrap one another with love and understanding, building new bridges and stronger communities for a better future. I hope that the natural world can be resilient to change, patient for our modern world to act decisively against a warming climate. I hope my family and my community remain strong, safe, inclusive, and healthy. I hope our world can move towards nonviolent action, protecting the lives of innocent people. I hope for myself: that my ocean thoughts start to outnumber my land thoughts; that I can be strong enough to be kind and generous before being self-interested, to be curious before being judgmental; that I can move past my insecurities and love my body for the capable, strong, sexual, athletic, and resilient thing that it is; that I can create something unique and meaningful to add to our world.

On one hand, it sounds simple. On the other hand, I know it’s incredibly hard to build these new mental pathways. It’s hard to hope. It’s much easier to be pessimistic, but it feels so much better to try.

It won’t always feel this way - I’ve had a unique opportunity to reset and recharge. This time is not accessible to everyone. So in addition to self-reflection and building our own hope, I believe it’s important to lighten the load for others so they can join in building up hope - and then taking action - as well.

Anyways, who needs therapy? Let’s all just get on a boat and cross an ocean and find hope.

E

P.S. Thanks for reading a long one:)