David Hartman wrote, “ Passover is the night for reckless dreams, for visions about what a human being can be, what society can be, what history may become.”

This weekend I turned my attention towards our Passover Seder, took all my Hagaddah’s from the bookshelf, brought up the ‘plague masks’ from the basement, and looked at the envelopes of additional readings that we have supplemented over the years. What to do this year? How to honour the Seder with historical context, and modern relevance?

I actually love Pesach. That first breakfast of matzo with Tempte cream cheese is delicious! Taking out precious keepsakes like my mother’s silk, tasseled and embroidered matzo cover, the Seder plate my sister bought me from Israel. Not the cleaning, or shlepping all the dishes upstairs, polishing silver and preparing the house. I am losing more and more interest in this aspect as the years go on. But I do love the idea of our family around the beautifully table set with crystal, silver and glass, integrating blessings and story-telling into an evening laden with wine and good food.

The seed for our focus this year came from my daughter, Jesse, who said that this holiday is about story telling and we should tell of those who have journeyed from oppression to freedom. There are many. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, The Freedom Writers, the Ethiopian journey to Israel. Some are struggles of ideals, some of territory, and some resonate from the personal turmoil that lies within. But, we are all striving in some way for peace and freedom. Eckhart Tolle teaches, “Liberation can arise from a feeling of connectedness.”

When I am away on vacation and see the moonrise, or the three stars of Orion’s belt, and consider that this is the same moon and the same stars that my children can see, and people all over the world, it is a humbling bond. When I sit at our Passover table, and realize that on this night Jewish families everywhere are gathering around their tables weaving the stories of our exodus from Egypt into our modern perspectives of freedom, hope and dreams, I am again in awe of how we are all connected. Just like the moon and the stars. It’s quite a powerful expression. It makes me feel small, but at the same time relevant. As if what we do, the legacies we create, the stories we recite echo through generations; those “reckless dreams for what we might become.”

**The photograph, One Love, is of Rachel Saffer, published in the Toronto Star on March 23, 1992, The Anit-Racism Rally at Queens Park

I read Dear Life, by Alice Munro, and I am, as is the literary world, intrigued by her last four stories, the ones she describes as “not quite stories,” because they are in fact fragments and memories from her life. I was struck by her relationship with her mother, a woman suffering from Parkinson’s, and a woman who in some ways was placed in a life to which she always felt there should be more, that she was a different woman trapped in the life she had.

It made me think about my mother. The voice of our mother remains in our heads and our hearts, regardless of the kind of relationship we had. My mother embodied the essence of that word. She was goodness. I hear my mother’s words, sense the touch of her hand, still, even after almost five years since her passing, I carry her in my comings and goings, and she is the voice that guides me.

It wasn’t all tea in the rose garden. I remember how it was towards the end. She wasn’t putting on any airs, contrary to her British upbringing, and her loving designation as Queen Mom. That was part of her metamorphosis, her struggle toward the end of her life when she couldn’t recognize herself. When the woman she had been, and still felt somewhere inside, became trapped in the agonized body of age.

But, there was always a glimpse of my mother. Her fingers, crooked with arthritis were still somehow tender. The same touch as when she sat on my bed, singing a lullaby, “….they’re lighting a stairway to heaven… sleep my little one sleep…” and she traced the shape of my eyebrows, and tucked my hair behind my ears. Her brown eyes, that grew old with flecks of green, and smiled at me. Kind, unquestioning eyes, that understood that love was the only thing that mattered. The calm when I put my hand on her chest, and her breath softened and her shoulders sighed.

We found peace in one another. We had survived the death of her husband, the death of her son, and cancer, and we held our pain like a secret that hung as a hammock between two stoic trees; it lingered, unspoken, felt, with no touch, honoured, so we could get through each day. We were a teepee – her, me, the past – fastened together with ropes and knots at the top, and individually knocked firmly in to the ground, dependent on one another to remain intact. That’s how it was.

As I arrive at her ages, I often recall what her life was like, what her experience was, and how she must have felt as a woman. I can look at these times differently now, not as a child, a teen, a young woman, but through the lens of a woman who too, has experienced love, children and the joys and aches of each passing year.

This is the first time, ever, that I have taken a week just to myself. No kids, no husband. Just me. I am staying with my brother and sister-in-law, so I am not alone, but I am marching to my own drum, taking the time to nurture myself. I feel like one of those reptiles that has shed layers, and emerges, the same, but different. I am stepping in to the footsteps of the woman that has resided inside of me, the one that has been trapped, and too weary to come out. Here I am.

Before I came away, I had the intention that I wanted to use this time as a sojourn, a time to heal my mind, and my body. I found a yoga studio close by, Parasutra, that seemed to fit my criteria, and when I arrived purchased an unlimited pass for the week. I am beginning to feel the energy of life returning to my limbs and spine, my heart and mind. I like the teachings that are integrated into each class. Words from Connie like, ‘just here’ resonate, bringing me in to the moment, allowing the thoughts that congest my mind to roll by, and I am ‘just here’. Another mantra I love from Sarah, ‘think with your heart’. If I think with my heart I am open, approaching daily life with love and compassion and I feel kinder to myself, and that echoes to those around me.

I am collecting these wisdoms like shells along the water’s edge. My sister-in-law has the unique capacity to make all those in her path feel beautiful. I have learnt many lessons from her, most notably, to surrender. To let go of all of our pre-conceived notions about what and how our lives should be, and embrace the joy of what is. It’s a daily practice. One morning as my brother and I were talking about this and that, he quoted the first line of the Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy, “My wound is geography.” I had to think about this. What does it mean? To carry our wounds wherever we go? A quest to find healing? I love that I have time to consider and ponder the weight and measure of words.

I am also using meditation to clear my jumbled mind, nourish my soul. This is corny, but one of the meditations I am using is from the movie Eat, Pray, Love. Smile. Smiling from my heart, my eyes, and my centre, I feel lighter. I use the teachings of Sakyong Mipham to guide me in focusing on the simple act of breathing in and breathing out. This has been very powerful on my walks along the ocean, with the ebb and flow of the water, like the rhythm of our breath. And now, have been introduced to the words of Eckhart Tolle and his ideas about letting go of our thoughts and living in the present moment. Yes, it’s a smorgasbord of meditation, on the road to inner peace and spiritual awakening!

In yoga the other day, Sarah talked about the idea that our own life journey is our greatest teacher. I am learning everyday. To embrace all the intricate pieces of myself, that somehow, in all their imperfections stack like vertebrae, supple, yet strong and create me.

The other week I posed the question, do we have to go away to find ourselves? I realize that as Conroy says, we carry our wounds wherever we go. But I must say, stepping away, or getting out of our own way, even just a little, creates the space to allow us to connect with a part of ourselves that we might have tucked away. For me it did take a vacation to finally take a step towards embodying my life. Emerging is beautiful. Namaste.

Parasutra Yoga
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I am in a tree house. So it seems. I can look out three walls of windows to the back garden. I am high up. It’s the way the landscape goes, sloping down from street level to the ravine. It’s been raining. Now it gets dark so early. There are exterior spotlights from the house beyond and I can see their reflections on the slice of wet driveway that anchors the hill sloping down to the stream. The windows of the house are stacked one on top of the other for three stories. I can’t see inside but I can tell that there is a lamp casting a red glow as well. Maybe it is on a side table beside a chair. Someone just turned it off.

I wonder if they can see me sitting at my kitchen table, looking, and typing on my computer? The chandelier is from my mother’s house, hanging over what was also her dining room table. Her table is much more casual now, and doesn’t get wiped with vinegar and water once a week by the cleaning lady who came on Tuesdays. Now it sits here covered with daily newspapers, books, a cup of tea with honey, place mats, scattered. The chandelier is reflected five times in the black of the windows. Actually more. Each of the reflections has echoes. It could be a ceiling of magical lights above a dance floor at a very fancy party. There is no music, but I can hear a guitar somewhere, perhaps. There is one leaning against the wall in the other room. Maybe someone will play it. I can see myself as well. Black top, black pants, hair haphazardly tossed in a clip, framed in a dark window, sitting on the very edge of the chair, hmmmmm, like my mother did. She never sat all the way on the chair. Always ready to attend to us at any time, her apron tied with a bow. She tucks her hair tucked behind her beautiful little ears and leans in. One foot curved around the mahogany leg of the chair like a ballerina. There should have been diamonds, and an organza skirt swirling across the dance floor. And, oh, those rows of glass baubles and bulbs in my windows… reflections.

The trees are now almost bare, a few leaves hanging on. I can just see dark branches in the night and the trunks like stoic sculptures, standing in rows of silhouettes because of the windows and their light. There are two buildings and a drive in between and through this nighttime path I can see the yellow-white headlights and the red tails passing by in either direction. A car is coming down the drive. The headlamps flare. A dragon.

Big drops of rain coming now, like the unlikelihood of a platypus readying to jump off the flat roof in to a puddle. There is a scene in Hitchcock’s, Rear Window. Remember? James Stewart. Broken leg. In a wheel chair watching the domestic scenes play out through the windows of the surrounding apartments, as he concocts their stories. What else could he do? I am looking out the picture windows too, at the life stories that are my border. Christmas lights trailing along the trees of a backyard, shifting focus like the turn of a kaleidoscope. I would have chosen all white. Another house illuminated. A party. Lit for royalty. I heard that somewhere. A siren rises and falls. I sense him before I hear the key in the door. Prickles, like the childhood rhyme, ‘criss-cross, applesauce, spiders crawling up your spine, cool breeze, tight squeeze’…. The mandarin patchouli cologne still on his sweater. We bought it together one afternoon. On an afternoon that felt something like love; the body remembers.

I know these windows well. I have observed the passages of light across the day. In the morning the light will break, white before it turns to blue, and although the sunrise is blocked I can feel it through the windows, and a white circle pokes from the trees at some point. It’s as if this lamp that glows at night has been turned on during the day and is projecting, white on white. I can almost hear it; like the buzz through the electrical lines. To my left there is a birdhouse knocked in the bark of the tree with a nail. No birds there. Mostly squirrels. Having a rest or playing hide and seek.

The birds wake with the light as well. Instinct. In the summer the red cardinal starts on the tree. Sits on the iron back of the chair, and perches on the stone seat. Catching the light on its red feathers. Never in one place for very long. It does the same thing everyday. I have learned to watch the light as it passes over and through the garden so that I know where to plant things. I can imagine all this through the dark of the window. The stalks of lavender, peonies in May, hydrangeas turning from green to white, as if the garden is lit, but it’s not lit now; no candles in the lanterns. It is winter, after all, and the chandelier reflects in the dark windows.