I Rest in the Grace of the World

I Rest in the Grace of the World

The Peace of Wild Things

Snuggle Leica-la

Savor a perfect cappuccino

Listen to music I love

Curl up in bed and read

Drive listening to great music

Sit on the ground

Yoga

Meditate

Pray

Bird watch

People watch

It’s probably telling the part of my bat mitzvah at age thirty-six that got the most tears from me and knowing laughter from the audience was the last stanza of the Kohenim blessing: “….and may G-d grant you peace.” Pretty much everyone there knew me too well, including the wonderful Rabbi, who said this with so much oomph I think he believed he could conjure up the Messiah as well, with about the same odds. 

I’m….intense, which is a polite way of saying that Inner Peace is not my default setting.  Or, as the sweating, drained masseuse told my  then girlfriend after two hours of struggling just to untangle my shoulders,  “Yael has an adversarial relationship with the Universe.”

Most days that’s an understatement, but some days it’s not.  The word “PEACE” in any language grabs me by the heart.  Probably by the throat too.  I talk a lot about it.  I chase it.  I try to cultivate it.  And, more often than not, I fail.  Craving inner peace is my default setting.  I am dying to trust with a capital T, to have unshakeable faith with a capital F, and to finally let go of my hyper-alert and control freak nature is my dream.  Spending the rest of my life in this hell of believing everything is up to me is my nightmare, and one I live daily.

I have had indications my soul is far more chilled, after all, this lifetime is not its first thrill ride.  I have had enough past life visions to wonder if Mel Brooks’ 2,000 year-old Man was my drinking buddy.

It’s not that I don’t have tangible proof of how amazing things are when I get out of my own way.  I am a fucking Rockstar at manifesting (see prayer notes in Kotel wall if you don’t believe me). I’ve had incredible glimpses of what it feels like to LET GO and LET G-d, and it’s nothing short of bliss.  It’s these moments, however fleeting, that keep me trying. 

There’s a line in the script of one of my favorite films, “Under Fire”, when, describing the female lead, the screenwriter uses the phrase “with a tough grace” to illustrate how the character faces the world.

I love this description, and wish it applied to me.  In my best moments I think it does.  Someone once asked me what the phrase means and why I admire it so.   Because I think it means you allow for most things to be out of your control, but you don’t lose sight of your part in the grand scheme of things.  You see the beauty, the joy, the sadness, the pain, the fear and the love and through it all, you are detached enough to not try to control everything, but you commit fully to what is up to you. But is that the ability to rest in the grace of the world??

The character in “Under Fire” was a war journalist.  I’m a recovering photojournalist with some war and genocide experience. That’s a lie, though, to say we can leave those worlds we’ve parachuted into behind.  We don’t ever recover.  We try to process what we’ve seen and done and witnessed into a narrative, a memory box, that does not destroy our psyche or our lives months, years or decades later.  But inner peace? 

So how does one who’s been on “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” World Tour rest in the grace of the world when you’ve borne witness to so much the opposite?  By relentlessly searching to also bear witness to those grace-filled moments and even to hoard them.   Just as I am trained to unflinchingly see our most horrific moments, I’ve consciously had to train myself to see the even more powerful moments of grace, and let me tell you, that’s much harder. I flinch.  We don’t give as much value to moments of beauty, of joy, of awe, of love. I know this in my bones and my bones ache for our inability to value moments that save us.

Years ago, on my 43^rd birthday, alone and kind of feeling sorry for myself, I stopped by the CVS to pick up some things. It was Prom Season.  Just then, four couples on their way to their high school prom swept in, the girls grown up and stunning in their beautiful formals, the boys scrubbed and shining in their tuxes.  They were full of the future, of possibility – their feet barely touching the ground.  As I watched them make their way across the store, they passed an older woman in a wheelchair who’d obviously had a stroke.  Her face was literally frozen permanently into an expression of surprise.  Her eyes wide, mouth open.   Slouching beside her was her husband, leaning in exhaustion on the cosmetic counter.  The young couples glided past them, and as they did, her eyes locked on them, and I could see she was wishing for each of their young lives to be blessed with only moments of grace.  She saw I noticed her, and so I blew her a kiss.  And with every incredible effort, she blew me one back.