I have rewritten this piece over five times. Part of me want to mount the barricades in the last scene from Act One of Les Miserable and wave a proud flag of courage. Part of me wants to be reasoned and cautious and believe that “this too shall pass”.

My mother who had lots of health and life challenges used to ritually intone those words. She meant that every experience has a purpose – not all of them too our liking, but all of them are meant to be instructive and all of them have the potential to help us grow. It does not imply that everything will turn out the way we want it to; it does not mean that there won’t be challenges ahead of us. It means that there is a kernel of truth in all that happens to us and all that happens to us demands us to act.

So I am struggling with how to act as this Inauguration week breaks. I am back in front of a black and white TV. In my mind it is cold and the wind is blustering, biting into the sweet promise of the next four years. Not that all of the Presidential promises were sweet or that the person being inaugurated that day was the President of my choosing. There were those whose platforms filled me with skepticism and concern. But this time it isn’t only the platform. It is the very essence of the man, at least the one who shows up on my color HD screen. On my Facebook feeds my friends are telling me this moment is different. It is not just concern and skepticism; it is a game changer and we need to mobilize and be prepared.

I am trying hard not to panic. I will go to those pre and post inauguration gatherings but not to mourn; not to despair. I am going to try and use some of the lessons I learned in the Jewish spiritual discipline we call Mussar which suggests to us that how we react to the stimulus around us act as a mirror into our souls. So, I am looking at January 20^th as a mirror with the Capitol as a backdrop. Who is the me reflected in the image? What does it say about my feelings and actions? I am pasting a sticky note on that mirror, (a blue one) with the word “trust” in Sharpie black. I am talking about trusting yourself and the process that things will work out the way they are supposed to. Don’t take that as a recipe for passivity.

I am going to double down on the way I approach the political process. More donations to the causes I believe in and see as threatened; more active engagement with those who supposedly represent me. I am now in the loyal opposition and it is challenging. It is scary. I wrote the week after the election that we would have to wait and hope that the office would make the man. We don’t have to wait much longer. The man has remained true to who he was. It is time for us to trust each other and ourselves and reach out hand in hand to restore and preserve a more compassionate America.

There was a new moon last night. In my sky it was bright white, a sliver of its fullness, floating against a black sky. It was warm with promise. It spoke of what is yet to come. It came at a good time, reminding me of what is real and what is not. It was the Elul moon of preparation.

Yesterday we spent the day packing. Or to be more accurate, yesterday we spent the day unpacking and repacking. The guidelines for the trip are “duffel bag, no more than 24 inches, no frame, small wheels”. We will be gone for a good portion of September so what to take, what to leave behind; what to carry forward, what to assign to the unnecessary pile. But unnecessary is such a grey word. What if it is colder than we anticipate; what if it rains; what if the mosquitoes are out in full force (unlikely this time of year)?

Prepare for every eventuality? Not in 24 inches. (I know people who are really good at this, I admire their decisiveness.) Or is it trust? What we call in Hebrew – bitachon. Trust that they can weather almost any eventuality. Trust that they are prepared.

There’s that word again. Prepare; fortify yourself that you are ready. Ready for a new moment, a new year, a new experience, a different way, a new path. Switch gears. Engage the clutch. Gradually let it out and find that sweet spot where when you press the gas, you move forward slowly, smoothly, gliding through the unknown, like last night’s moon.

I promised myself that today I was zipping them up. It is hard to carry when it’s open.
Things just keep falling out. Gotta make that leap of faith. Done. Done. Done.
But you know, I know, it’s never done, just finished for now. Thank God we can begin again. That’s the season you know; that’s the blessing of last night’s moon.

It is almost a week since the slaughter of 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando. If the media is any indication of what is true, our nation is sad, angry, confused and shaken. At the very least those are good descriptors of where I am.

Sad, intensely, that 49 lives have been taken. They were mercilessly killed by a man wielding guns who in my humble opinion had no right obtaining or owning. Somewhere on line I read that it is easier to buy an assault rifle than Sudafed. (Probably an exaggeration but you get the point. We choose what we regulate and guns seem to be too sacred for the Feds to touch.)

We are angry at each other and we are angry at our elected officials who refuse to do anything about this plague of violence. I think J.J. Goldberg’s editorial in The Forward is right on target. He asks, “Why the Orlando Massacre has America so angry at itself”. We are so angry we can’t hear each other talk; we are so angry we can’t even agree on the causes of the attack. Is it the easy access to assault weapons? Is it Radical Islam and the actual or emotional ties that the killer had to ISIS? Is it homophobia or even self-loathing? Is it mental instability? Is it one of the above, some of the above or all of the above.

I don’t mean to be cute or make light of the tragedy. My answer is it is all of the above. It is too easy to get assault weapons in this country and if someone is on the no fly list and they are too dangerous to be sitting on a plane next to me it feels too obvious that they are too dangerous to have a semi-automatic rifle. And that is on Congress. And that is on our public representatives who are supposed to insure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Well who cares for “the people” in Washington? Not those who think guns are more sacred than human lives, or the gun lobby is too powerful to go up against.

I can feel my anger rising as I write.  I am not afraid to say the words “radical Islam”. I am also not afraid to say the words “Jewish extremists and Christian crusaders”. My point being that every religion and culture has those who pervert their fundamental message and use them for their own political purposes. I feel for my gay friends. This hit their community extra hard. All the pride and progress of the last few years diminished. It is a terrible reminder that we have a long way to go for GLBT equality and acceptance. And how young? But I guess that’s no criteria – they were younger still at Sandy Hook.

No, I don’t care what you say: It is not about ISIS; it is not about Homophobia: It is not about mental instability; it is about guns. It is about easy access. Someone will always find a cause worth killing for. It is about the cowardice of congress. It is about the failure of our representatives to protect us. It is about their interest, not ours. It is disgusting.

I have set my computer screen saver to change pictures every five minutes and randomly select them from the photos I have loaded either from my camera, my phone, slides I have had digitalized, images shared. I readily admit that I have no idea how to control the choices that fade in and out and I notice that some pictures rotate more often than others. I fantasize that the computer is laughing at me and playing hide and seek with my pictures.

Each picture is a memory and a slice of my life. Maya and I are feeding a dolphin in one; the illusive, mysterious moss hanging on twisted trees in the squares of Savannah; aqua green water peppered by red and white buoys floating in the Bay of Nhatrang, Vietnam; the beige sand of a Moroccan flea market punctuated with the saffron and purple head coverings of the women hiding their faces and shopping for bargains; stages of life reflected in my different body shapes, hair styles, clothing choices, each one a sacred moment, each one an opportunity to mentally move along the arc of my life.

Sometimes the computer program zooms in and only part of the picture shows up on the screen. This morning I had a close up of my smile and my teeth – my dentist would have been proud – I laughed when I saw it but I think I could use some whitener. Sometimes I have to challenge myself to figure out where we are. Invariably the process touches me in places deep and inside even when I can’t remember the name of that site, city or setting.   It is often tinged with sadness and loss; but more often than not, if I let myself linger in the memory, I feel a profound gratitude for that which I have been given. Each moment is a different letter in a blessing formula.

But my challenge to myself is to extend that thankfulness to all of life, even that which is not apparently striking. I tend to take pictures of the beautiful and surprising but that is not the complete picture of life. There are photos I did not take with a camera but are still imbedded in my internal album: my mother curled up in her bedroom deep in depression; the steps I tripped up when I was given the honor of opening the door of my grandfather’s synagogue where the hearse stopped so that the Cantor could ask God to bind his soul in the bond of eternal life.; the dreams that astonish me in content and vividness in the middle of the night – the ones that wake me up and sometimes serialize themselves after I fall back to sleep. And I could go on.

All of these teach; all of these make me who I am; the good, the beautiful, the embarrassing, the disappointments, the successes, the endeavors I wish I had finished and the relationships I wish I had done differently. All of these are opportunities for introspection and growth. Even those out of focus.

Enough, it may be cloudy right now but there is still a golf ball wanting to be hit.

The bus collected us at Victoria Coach Station for our excursion to Stonehenge. It was Eileen, our grandson, Corey, who is studying London for a term and me. Don’t get me wrong, there were 48 other people as well, but there was WIFI on the bus so you could stay in your personal space, except for Eileen who knew an awful lot about her seatmate, Dr. Dave before we hit the M3.

As we left the highway and the tour guide got back on the mike, it was still early morning: “You should be able to see Stonehenge in that field on the right but the fog and mist is hiding it. Hopefully it will begin to lift before we take the shuttle bus from the visitor center to the site.” I sort of thought, this is how you should see Stonehenge, a little bit of mist and a little bit of mystery, although, I did want some good pictures.

And then she was right and then it was there. Across the fields, the sheep were barely moving, little non-discriminate mounds in the grass, everything shades of grey. Stonehenge slowly emerged: a statement to a civilization and culture that knew how to keep its secrets, from how they got the stones here to what their purpose. Yes, there are theories and I am sure some day one of us humans will figure it all out, but right now they range from the magical to the ritual, the astronomical to the sacred, a place of healing and magic or a place of sacrifice and death. I like some of this unknowing. I believe in mystery. I am attracted to the mystical. It makes me appreciate the hole of knowing at the center of life.

So it was ok with me that the sun wasn’t shining. The ancient stones were resting on a bed strong enough to keep them erect and resilient enough to keep them mysterious. It was ok with me that I wasn’t certain if the stones may have been a place where the sun and the moon found alignment or the stones may have been a place where people were sacrificed to some unknown but demanding deity. What isn’t ok is that centuries and millennia later we are still finding reasons to believe that the gods want us to kill and to maim, to blow up suitcases and people and the smoke that rises from the explosion is a sweet smell of obedience to a cruel and uncaring universe. What isn’t ok is to believe that these acts of terror are courageous or even part of a holy war one civilization wages on another.

What’s sad is that we have lost the meaning of the word mysterious that for me implies knowing that you don’t know. I believe built into the word sacred is the word doubt. I believe in a healthy dose of skepticism in my approach to faith and it is a wonder to me that independent of the physicality of my brain, I am conscious of life I live. There is a wonderful Jewish teaching that the black handwritten Hebrew letters on every Torah scroll are only half the story. The creamy white spaces between each letter tell the other half. So maybe it isn’t the stones at Stonehenge – maybe it’s the galaxies in between and their placement in this field of fog, mist and haze.

In my worldview that which is sacred is the humility to be in awe of how much we do not know.  No one has a lock on truth.