Sometimes a Daffodil is More Than a Yellow Flower

by | 04/20/2021 | J-E-W - Before Now | 7 comments

My better half raised his beautiful brows when I told him my thoughts for this week’s J-E-W. After all, this site is dedicated to Enhancing Your Now. Valid. I reconsidered, but here I am anyway. This space is just as much about enhancing my life, my now. It’s my shared world where I reflect and work things through, even the shadowy side.

I wager at least some of my Jewish readers may have looked at the yellow star of the daffodil’s back and seen another kind of yellow star, the kind Jews were forced to wear in a past that is never too distant.

We have just finished a cycle of three modern Jewish holidays collectively called the Yamim (plural for days): Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), Yom HaZikaron (a day memorializing soldiers who lost their lives fighting in the War of Independence and subsequent battles, as well as civilian victims of terrorism), and Yom HaAtzmaut (Independence Day, marking the anniversary of the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948). A fourth, Yom Yerushalayim, celebrates the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem and occurs next month

I looked at this daffodil, the green stem of spine supporting the blossom. It seemed to peer at the patch of sky reflected in the small puddle nearby. I couldn’t help but think of six million murdered Jews who had peered Heavenward on a blue-sky day, and silently screamed , “Why?”

One day, one day, may all humanity look to the blue heavens, spines straight, faces uplifted and none shall be afraid.

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Rumi — A Small Green Island

by | 04/19/2021 | Wisdom - Before Now | 7 comments

A Small Green Island

There is a small green island
where one white cow lives alone, a meadow of an island.

The cow grazes till nightfull, full and fat,
but during the night she panics
and grows thin as a single hair.
What shall I eat tomorrow? There is nothing left.
By dawn the grass has grown up again, waist-high.
The cow starts eating and by dark
the meadow is clipped short.

She is full of strength and energy, but she panics
in the dark as before and grows abnormally thin overnight.
The cow does this over and over,
and this is all she does.

She never thinks, This meadow has never failed
to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night
that it won’t. The cow is the bodily soul.
The island field is this world where that grows
lean with fear and fat with blessing, lean and fat.

White cow, don’t make yourself miserable
with what’s to come, or not to come.

 

Rumi, (Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī) 1207 — 1273

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