Not so late night thoughts

I tell my students that poetry can be defined as the overflowing of emotions on to paper and that the only thing that matters is the intent of the author.

I don't intend for this to be poetry. This is just a moment of me, alone, sitting and thinking about my year, my life and my everything. Feeling inspired, feeling empty, feeling sad and overjoyed. Living and dying through others and needing to spill it all out somewhere, just so that I can say, "it's out." Read if you want. I don't write for you. I write for me.

Sometimes I just take stock. Evenings when the wife is out working hard and Sparky the Dog is on a date, and there isn't anything in particular that captures my attention, my mind wanders and I think about, well, everything. I think about my luck -- a family, a home, a community, and my sadness -- what I have lost, what we have lost over the last year. What and who I miss right now. Where my ache is and how, despite all the blessings that are too numerous to count, I can still feel pain, and how that pain is often inextricably linked to the pride and love that I have inside me.

I'm thankful that there is kindness in the world, care and tolerance and that I can sit here in the relative comfort of my dining room, feeling tears when I have no reason to be sad, unsure whether I cry from joy or desperation, knowing that both are two sides of the same coin. I remember my dad, his smile and his sage advice. I worry about my mom, with her stubborn resilience covering an inside I cannot even fathom who must feel pains many years more acutely than I. I think about my kids, two strong women, finding their paths, both in Israel, with futures in which anything is possible and nothing is certain. I get a strange mix of fear and comfort knowing that they do and don't need me. My wife and I have succeeded despite our best efforts and now the payoff is a daily feeling of dread and emptiness.

I think about my faith and my beliefs, illogical and irrational as they are. How they hold me up and anchor me at the same time. How they make no sense and give me the joy of being frustrated by them at every turn. I feed off of questions and expect others to rejoice at the gift of the unknowable. How I am part of a chain and I bear an awesome responsibility in the face of a world which, at best, doesn't care, and how I have to be a light and carry a weight, how I have to yell to make sure others hear a thin, small voice. More confusion mixed with a fixed focus keeping me rushing headlong into the past.

I listen to a song, searching online for the one version that will touch me and drive me to understand something deeper. If you haven't heard it, the song is called Al Kol Eleh, For All This. Then I find a video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxzR9Z-kG6Q , which has strangers singing the song that unites, even as it celebrates that unique combination of mirth and sadness and what could drive us apart -- kindness in a world tempted by anger and division. Seeing people from all walks of life, all ages, and strata singing about the sweet and the bitter and recognizing that it all is what life is about gets to me. I'm a mess. I don't know what I want. I want to feel and not, to share and to withdraw.

For the loss we as a people
for the pain of just one man
for the child who learns to love
though no one says he can

for what's missed and what is broken
for the gifts we never see
for the mornings and the evenings
and what is yet to be

For all this, for all this
Please forgive this broken soul
Find my center, spread me outward
Let us learn to be a whole

For all this, for all this
Show my place among the stars
Or the sand, among the people
Let me cherish all the scars.