SERVER NOT FOUND. Hmmm. Well, that's Ironic, idn't?

When I stand in my bathroom, I can hear opera. A strong, cultivated voice wafts up from somewhere in the building, and I smile. Even when I am sloth-esque and dim eyed in the morning, the sound of her voice makes me breath. She is practicing her trade, here to fulfill a dream like so many others. I may have seen the opera singer in passing, but other wise she is completely anonymous to me. Even so, I feel connected to her. Which is something that is unusual to my mind. Roots are a coveted thing in my imagination, and very rarely have I felt the rich earth permanently surrounding mine. Here, the energy is something that you can just plug in to. There is not a precise something that you need to fit. You take the energy and make it your own, whatever shape, form, consistancy you want it to be. Sometimes I feel like I'm the round peg getting shoved into the square hole, but it's fleeting, and that's a good thing.

I went to a Rosh Hashanah service with Robbie yesterday. Of course my appetite for all things religious was whetted immediately. I was very touched to share this New Year celebration with Robin and Dotan, to experience the community bond and feel the current of a different type of faith. Different principles, different beliefs, but the message is the same to me. It's all about love and acceptance. Making peace with yourself and the world, and nurturing your relationship with God. Doing good things and contributing positiveness into this convoluted world.

Here are two prayer that really struck a chord in my soul:

Prelude to the Amidah

Don't let me fall
Like a stone that drops on the hard ground.
And don't let my hands become dry
As the twigs of a tree
when the wind beat down the last leaves.
And when the storm rips dust from the earth
Angry and howling,
Don't let me become the last fly
Trembling terrified on a windowpane.
Don't let me fall.
I have so much prayer,
But as a blade of your grass in a distant, wild field
Loses a seed in the lap of the earth
And dies away,
Sow in me your living breath,
As you sow a seed in the earth.

**************************

And I have felt
A presence that disturbes me with a joy
of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused
whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
and the round ocean and the living air,
and the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
a motion and a spirit, that impels
all thinking things, all objects of all thought
and rolls through thinking things.

*****************************

Introduction to the Amidah

I yearn for God,
I seek God's face,
I ask of God the power of expression,
so that I might sing, amid my people, of God's power.
I express my joy in God's creative acts.
I know that thoughts are human but that poetry belongs to God.
I ask of you, my sovereign, open my lips. Then shall I tell your glory.
May my words of prayer, my heart's meditation be seen favorably, Precious One,
My rock,
my champion.

Amen.