Day 11
Psalm 27:8
It was on Your behalf that my heart said, “Seek My face!”
It is Your face, O God, I will seek.
from "Where Will I Find You"
Where, Lord, will I find you:
your place is high and obscured.
And where
won’t I find you:
your glory fills the world.
I sought your nearness.
With all my heart I called you.
And in my going out to meet you,
I found you coming toward me.
by Yehudah HaLevi, translated by Peter Cole
The psalmist’s heart says, “Seek my face!” and the psalmist understands this to be a call to seek God.
God isn’t “up there” or “out there” to be sought. Or, at least, not only out there. God’s glory fills the world, including us.
During Elul and the High Holidays, we slowly strip away -layer by layer- the barriers in our minds and souls to the knowledge that we are a piece of Godself.
We see God coming toward us as we turn inward. A piece of God is in you, and it is the piece of God in you that is seeking, searching, trying to come to the surface this month, crying out to be recognized by the rest of you as your heart cries "seek my face."
And you, heeding that call whether you know it or not, have begun to turn toward that heart, your inmost self. In doing so, you turn toward a piece of God, your piece of God, toward that part of yourself that is infused with the Holy.
Seeker and Sought are One.
By the time Yom Kippur comes around, we will stand naked, empty of self and also full--whole, completely aware of the Godness inside of us, of the divine sparks we carry. We will gather together with others who have also revealed their own sparks, and we will see God in them, too. We will understand so much more, just by being together in our raw holiness.
This, then, is the work of repair for this moment. Repair not only of ourselves and our relationships, but repair of the world. The world is repaired by the recognition that we all share this Universe and so share ultimate fate, which means we belong to one another.
Beloved.
Which Dreams Shall Live and Which Shall Die?
The Seven of Water holds our dreams and fantasies out to us in an enticing array. These are the cups from which we may drink, but the trick is, if we try to drink from all of them, we may be sick.
In order to fully appreciate the dreams we choose, to allow them to flourish, we must narrow our focus.
Which of your dreams are ready to be released?
There is a Kabbalistic creation myth that in the beginning, there was nothing but God, and God filled up existence, leaving room for nothing else. But God was lonely. In order to make room for something new, God contracted Godself (tzimtzum) and made a space of nothingness, darkness, into which the light of creation could be poured.
In order for our imagined future to become, we must make space for our chosen dreams to manifest, and we will do so by letting go of those which no longer serve us. This season of turning inward and letting go is a perfect time to examine your dreams.
Do any of your dreams belong to a person you no longer are or wish to be? Are you holding them simply out of habit?
While daydreams help us sort out our deep needs, this card is calling us to wake up and do something about it.
Which of your dreams are calling you to allow them to be born as reality?
“emotion and imagination can produce wonderful visions, but without a grounding in both action and the outer realities of life these fantastic images remain daydreams…
”
What will you do to begin the process of releasing the old dreams that no longer serve?
What will you do to begin to make your dream a reality?