I'm Still Here

 Where have I been... 

This is a straight-forward question with a complicated answer. I fell into a rabbit hole initially that ended up fundamentally changing my life. I’m not even kidding.  

At the tail-end of my time on Twitter, I suddenly found myself drawn to asking about Jewish Kabbalah. I had been peripherally aware of it for a long time, but knew almost nothing about it. So I put some feelers out for some book recommendations and got some really good ones. I started with God is a Verb by Rabbi David Cooper, and it honestly was a fantastic jumping off point. It was easy to follow and I was thankful for that because, as it turns out, Kabbalah is incredibly dense material. I also picked up some stuff from Gershom Scholem which is much more scholarly in feel. I’m glad I didn’t start with it, and saved it for my second read. It’s great stuff. I felt my brain exploding while I read it.  

Now, I have not grasped onto Kabbalah necessarily. Definitely not in its entirety. I am not converting to Judaism or taking on a teacher of mysticism. To me, initially, this was just me reading about another facet of a faith system that I didn’t know much about. The concepts and underlying themes. Those are what I want to highlight as being really important to note.  

At the exact same time I’m going about my Kabbalah dive, my husband Stephen had crashed through a wall of spiritualism completely independent of me. He had begun listening to and reading the work of Ram Dass thanks to a cascade of seemingly random events. Ram Dass covers a multitude of faith systems in his talks and writings, mainly with an eastern mysticism focus. I had been watching Stephen go down this path with a great deal of fascination. He hadn’t ever really expressed much interest in spirituality in the time I had known him, up to this point.  

While we walked these parallel paths, we would talk to each other about it. Sometimes sharing thoughts about things and even reading chapters out of our books to each other. What I noticed... what WE noticed actually, was the great deal of overlap that existed between the very base of these varying faith systems.  

Stephen and I have a kind of incredible history of having things line up in just the right place at just the right time, and this was absolutely no exception.  

Some of the bases of these varieties of mysticism hit every single mark in the personal faith system I have established for myself over my lifetime, completely independent of any kind of education on the matter. Reading about these concepts in books and hearing these famous spiritual leaders talk about them has been earth shattering for me. I suppose it might be backwards to have seen all this stuff in books finally that I had just seemed to overlook for most of my life, instead of having it taught to me. Part of me feels a bit ignorant for it, but maybe I’m not. Perhaps it’s a new kind of validation that all the time I’ve spent in introspection and paying attention to the world around me was correct. 

I do know that it has changed my world. The lens I see the world through now is a new, clearer, more beautiful color.  Anxiety I’ve battled my whole life has all but left me. There are many, many personal aspects of this journey I may never actually share because I don’t think I’m meant to. But for now, this is an update.