LEARNING TO HEAR THE SIRENS.

This is what I know to be true in the world:
There is no greater feeling than love - receiving it, giving it, being in it.

We can't change people, unless they want to be changed.

It's normal, in this universe, for the sun to come up every day.

A cup of hot water, honey, lemon, and ginger can make a cold seem so much more bearable. 

And, a single moment can change everything.

I experienced my first rocket siren two nights ago.

I'm not sure if any of you have seen the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?" but there is a specific scene where one scientist refers to Columbus arriving on the Caribbean shores and he says that none of the natives had the ability to see the ships even though they existed on the horizon, because they had no previous knowledge of flipper ships. It was only when the village shaman noticed very odd ripples in the sea, that he began to assume that there was something more there. After days of looking he saw the ships and then told his village so they were finally able to see them.  

When the siren went off I experienced this - this inability of senses to even detect something, because of never experiencing it before. I had literally just unmounted my bike after coming home from school, and I started making small talk with the people who own the restaurant across my street and all of a sudden the owner ran out and said, "At lo shamat?! You didn't hear?! Come here!" and he pushed me into his restaurant and told me to sit on the ground under the stairs and when I finally crouched down I heard the noise - this piercing sound I'd never heard before in my life.  

Everyone reacts to these moments differently. 

I was silent, and honestly, for once in my life not a thought ran through my head and when the sound ended we all got up.

One of the waiters was complaining about how the sandwich he'd finally made for himself got cold, and the owner was talking about his dissatisfaction with the government's policies for the past 20 years, and then the other waiter turned to me and said (in Hebrew), "Why did you even come here? You could go anywhere - Milan, London, Paris - why here?"  

I literally said nothing. I just couldn't speak. Ten minutes later I felt my body shaking. That was the extent of my reaction and I just continued doing exactly what I had planned to do all along. I went to my gym to pick up the headphones I lent my friend earlier and it wasn't until I was there in the mall where my gym is that I finally processed everything, because a large group of humans stood in the basement together some crying, some laughing, some talking. There was a grandfather with his grand daughter telling her a story to keep her there so they wouldn't have to go outside. There were so many couples holding each other. I felt like I was in a museum on one side of the glass and every one else was an exhibition. The only thing I did was call my neighbor and ask if we had a bomb shelter in the basement, and he laughed at me, and asked if I was afraid, and I said "No, but I need to know", and I don't think I was lying. 

So this is how it happened, and this is how I experienced my first siren, and everyone experienced it differently. And, at the end of the night I was happy to be with an old friend who could be with me so I wasn't alone. 

But in the back of my mind this is what remained: for every siren, there's a missile. And every missile has a story: A person who chooses to launch it (and maybe they're being launched at too) and a person or place that receives it, and lately, I'm much more concerned with that. What amount of pain, anger, education moves humans to feel that they have the right to control the destiny of another human? What amount of rockets, bombs, violence can create a society where that no longer matters? When did place become more powerful than peace? When did anger become more powerful than kindness, compassion, and connection? In my heart of hearts, all I wish for in this universe is a common understanding among humans that life is too precious, too sacred, to destroy.

Today, I woke up and the world didn't stop - because how can it? Love still feels the best, and people are still the same, and the sun still comes up every day, and hot water, honey, lemon, and ginger still feel good with a cold, but now I know what the sound of a siren is, so next time I'll hear it. 

themindisapowerfulthingtowaste.blogspot.com/learningtohearsirens

THE REALITY OF MOVEMENT.

My life is about movement. I do it. I study it. I’m fascinated with it. 

I think about why people move and how they pick where they’re going. I think about who gets to move and then I also think about who doesn’t. I think about why I don’t want to stop moving and why others never want to start. Mostly, I think about how movement shapes reality and how powerful that makes movement.

Two months ago, I left New York.

I woke up one day with the East River Parkway as my running track and the Empire State building in my background. In that world I was dating a lovely human in Harlem, and I wore nice clothes to an office every day, and I had amazing friends – the type of friends that would wake up at 3 am and find me if I was lost or if my keys were or if I felt alone, because the city is big and sometimes people feel alone.

In that world sitting in coffee shops and meeting strangers was my favorite past time, and I took subways and buses to get to where I needed to be (unless I elected to walk, which was usually the case), and I was happy, because for me, there’s no other choice in life than to be happy.

Two months later, I’m in Tel Aviv.

I woke up today and I biked to school and the boardwalk by the beach was my road and my background was a city with some buildings that look like they could collapse tomorrow and with others that look like they were built today. I fall in love at least twice a day and I’m learning to trust new people and I hope that they are the type of people who would wake up at 3 am, because I lose my keys a lot.

In this world meeting strangers is still my favorite past time. I do it everywhere. And biking has created an awareness of everything for me, because I’m not shielded from the world and the world’s not shielded from me, and I am happy, because that’s my choice.

My decision to move wasn’t an easy one. I could have picked numerous other realities, and that is my blessing – that’s my privilege! But this is the reality I chose for myself.

And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about life and location and how some of us can literally alter our realities based on where we live at any moment in time, but it’s a privilege only reserved for a select few, because there are plenty of people who dream of making a similar decision but never have the opportunity.

I think about my existence in terms of all the places I’ve been and I think of the different mes that would exist if I had just stayed put: one me would be floating around a broken New York City feeling more pain tangibly than I can right now at the site of hurricane damage; one me would be dancing on a beach in Ghana listening to reggae music; one me would be speaking in Turkish and enjoying black tea and clapping to the sound of a bağlama; and the last me would be sitting at the park I grew up going to in Colorado with my parents and brother and mountains and smiling humans.

I don’t dwell in all of those realities, I just think about them, because I’m living in the one I chose for myself, and I wish that everyone in the universe had the right and opportunity to share this freedom with me. I wish that everyone had the right to be who they are in the place they love most. Sometimes it's still so hard to believe that so many humans don't.

So for now, I am hoping to dedicate this reality to exploring more about movement...

and the power it has to shape reality. 

THE BEST THING ABOUT NEW YORK.

There are 8 million stories surrounding each other every day. 

THE GRAVITY OF EMPATHY

One day the wind was blowing so hard in Manhattan that I seriously believed my five foot body would be picked up and carried in the air like a hot air balloon. I could feel the force of gravity fighting with every human being that I passed and every street sign and every car. The trash that Manhattan accrues on the street didn't stand a chance - pieces of paper and half smoked cigarettes and paper cups flattened by cars were all passing me like daytime strobe lights.

I could tell that something was going to happen that would make me sad, because it was a moment when nature and I were fighting each other...  this time, I lost.

Every morning for the past year, I'd bought an apple from the same fruit seller - Kahled from Afghanistan. Kahled's dark, leather-like skin and deep set brown eyes, made his sulfur color smile stand out, and he greeted me every day with it kindly.

In a single moment, Kahled's entire fruit stand toppled to the ground. My heart broke. 

Hundreds of apples, oranges, grapes, plums, and peaches rolled through the street in every direction. Kahled looked around - he didn't know which way to go. So his feet just stayed planted on the concrete sidewalk as he watched his fortune roll away.

I began to run to collect fruit. It wasn't a reaction I processed in my mind or really even thought about. It was a reflex to pain.

As I grabbed my armful and headed toward the stand, I began to notice that I wasn't alone. Everyone around me was staggering to collect fruit. Three men in grey suits. Five women in black high heals. The bum on the street with the sweat pants with holes in them. The tourists. The delivery men. The mom and daughter. The dad and daughter. The barista who stepped out for a cigarette.

It was as if for a moment the gravity of empathy was more powerful than gravity itself.

And I thought, what if empathy came as naturally as keeping our own two feet on the ground? 

Gravity or gravitational forces are really just forces of attraction. Kind of like the attraction that exists when you can't pull yourself away from a certain human because you really like him or her and can't explain it. Except in this case, it's the Earth pulling on you and keeping you on the ground. The pull is gravity at work. 

Every object in the universe that has any mass at all has a gravitational pull or force on another object. The size of the pull depends on the mass of the objects. 

What if the weight of a person's situation was weighed in mass? What if we were so moved by human pain that we were drawn to acts of kindness?

Maybe those rare moments are signs of a force that we don't even know exists... one where mass is determined by the amount of human need and gravity exists as empathy.

IN MEMORY OF LIFE.

As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I will admit that I did some things as a child that were probably by all normal standards considered very strange.

For example, I remember spending the time that it took between closing my eyes and actually falling asleep brainstorming places that my family could hide if the Nazis came to find us. 

And while most childrens' first memories are about playing in sand boxes or riding on carousels, I have etched in my mind the first time I saw tattooed numbers on my great aunt's arm and the first time I realized that the girl in the picture in her den wasn't my father’s sister, but my great aunt’s daughter who was taken to a death camp with her younger brother and murdered.

My grandmother had a severe stroke when I was very young and it was often hard to read her emotions, because she couldn't speak or move the right side of her body. But, I will never forget the first and only time I saw her cry intensely as my dad told her that my brother was in a play about the Holocaust, and I remembering wondering if they were tears of pain or tears of pride or both.

 All of these memories are the ones that are deeply etched in my mind.

I’m sure that for many, this would all seem very strange. All of these memories were produced before I was even 8 years old.  And maybe it was too much. Maybe this transmission of pain through generations was wrong. As a young adult, however, looking back I wouldn’t trade these memories for the sand boxes or the carousels, because above all these memories gave me a distinct sense of hope.

Today marks Yom Hashoah, the Jewish day to commemorate the Holocaust, and the day is all about memory. Today, we, as Jewish people (though many Jewish people are probably unaware of this day) take a vow to “NEVER FORGET”.

All my life, in classes, in college, at Jewish programs commemorating this day “never forgetting” has been about ensuring that such an atrocity should never happen again, and of course, this purpose is meaningful and it is a purpose I deeply believe in.

My early college years were in the midst of the horrible genocide that wrought Darfur and so much of the Jewish student community rallied around the cause by remembering what happened in our past to change the present. And, so many Jewish advocates relay their intense feelings of angst for communities in pain with our communal pain that comes from remembering our own history.

But today, I am remembering the hope – a feeling I find much more difficult to draw out amidst the monstrosity that was the killing of 6 million Jewish people and 3 or 4 million more who were killed in vein and the suffering that came in between and after and the innocence that was stripped from the world.

As a little girl, while I saw the numbers tattooed on my great aunt’s arm, when I discovered that the little girl in the picture wasn’t my father’s sister, when I saw my grandmother cry, I also have simultaneous memories of looking at the survivors in my family and asking myself, even as a young child how they held onto life.

8 years ago, I went on March of the Living an international, educational program that brings Jewish teens from all over the world to Poland on Yom Hashoah to march from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest concentration camp complex built during World War II and then to Israel.

During my experience, my tour group was accompanied by two survivors – a husband and wife named Sam and Regina. I distinctly remember standing in Auschwitz where Regina had been 60 years prior and listening to her story.

Regina told us about a friend of hers who had given up on life. When Auschwitz existed as a death camp its barbed wire had electric current running through it and many prisoners chose to committed suicide by grasping the wires. Her friend was ready to face that same fate. It was the midst of winter, and they were literally freezing, with minimal clothing, blankets and food.

But on that particular day the sun was shining through the clouds and Regina could feel the rays heating her weak body. She told her friend to look up into the sunshine and said that as long as the sun still existed there was hope in the world, and she saved her life. A few days later the camp was liberated.

I’ve carried that story with me through life, along with the stories of my grandparents and great aunt and uncle, and I still can’t make sense of them. They are stories that make me pause and think about how much there is to live for – even in moments of immense pain.

I feel guilty on this Remembrance Day for turning my personal introspection and focus on life. Millions of people were killed as a result of senseless hatred. Nothing will ever negate that. It’s a burden we as humanity must carry with us every day. People are lost every day. But I can’t help but reflect on how, amidst this horror, people still found something to live for.

There’s difficulty in remembering painful histories. We don’t want to disrupt a carefree existence with the burden of carrying memories with us. But amidst the pain there is something incredibly meaningful about how deeply so many people wanted to survive.

I hope that while we make the pledge to Never Forget, we’re also reminded how to hold onto life, because after the tattoos numbered on arms, and the photographs of children who were taken and killed, and barbed wires, and tears there was a life worth living for. I learned that from the survivors.

 (I included pictures of my grandparents' life after the war.)

SOUL MATES.

I believe in soul mates because of them.