E T T Y - Q U E T T E

  Photo Sasha Freemind on unsplash “Repentance,” like most words that have come into the English language from Latin, is thin on emotion, feeling. There is something cerebral about it that does not capture the sorrow, the regretting, the regressing to the fervored childlike promises of I’m sorry, I won’t do it again. But lashuv , to go back, means not only ”to regret,” it also means “to return.” This translation captures the hope that going back is always possible: going back to a pre-lapsarian world in which our wrongdoings are gone, in which we have not yet missed the mark ( cheit , the word for sin, being an archery term), in which broken relationships are healed without leaving scars, in which we ourselves are innocent again, having said No to the apple and the knowledge of good and evil. Yet somehow the notion of returning implies a place or a state of being to which we can return, as we move from the here and now to the there and then. But can we? How do I return when I a...

There's something about spring.... Trees and shrubs madly competing to get all their leaves out first, big, fat, lush; grass turning too green, then being outdone by the too-yellow of a carpet of dandelion; tulips burning up the near-empty garden beds with hues of deep purple and barnfire reds. It's all somehow too much. And people, too, popping out of their sealed houses, shivering in thin shirts and sandals with grim determination, trying to ignore the hard spring breeze. In all that rushing towards new life, that frenzy seemingly shared by all living things, with the swallows repairing last year's nests, and the Canada Geese squatting in the middle of the hayfield, or even by the side of the road to get the new crop of children out ... in all that there is also denial, a forgetting of what fails to return, what has quietly ceased during autumn and winter: plants that went underground and have failed to rise again, animals whose last breath rode away on the stiff winds of...

                              art by Shelley Yampolsky Inside the shells of our solitude edges and contours disappear. What use is skin without an other leaning in. When we are free to love again the deep dark pool of me will flow into the deep dark pool of you like water going home into the sea.

We're okay, we say, we're well; zooming to see friends, it's great,  we're smiling, waving, smiling.  Smiling. And all around our elders trapped in airless rooms with only one way out: in body bags. Curbside the freezer trucks are waiting. Remember what it's like to hug,  to kiss, to be so close we dreamt each other's dreams? Will we remember--if we live? And will the woods be green again this spring? Will God forgive us our sins?

          "Parade of Planets," George Abramishvili You raise your hand; is it to strike me or to let your fingers learn the curve my cheekbones make? You say Hello, and I am lost to know whether you mean Hello, I’m here, Hineini, or you mean Hell, no, don’t bother me, I’m busy, what would I want with you. Always I know to read the horses’ neighs, the dog’s tail when it wags, the cat’s meow (it always means, where’s dinner?); I can read the rabbit tracks in snow, the tree leaves in the spring, the tea leaves in the cup; seasons, snowstorms, turnips and tulips wanting water. Sometimes I even read the mind of God. Only the words and gestures humans make I cannot fathom when they aim for me. Is there a dictionary, a translation guide that helps explain motions and moves the hearts of other people make in this direction? What does it mean? What say you? Who are you? Who am I? Somewhere between these questions is the answer. Words as words are easy. Words from...

A cool day in October, but warm inside the car. Left turn onto Derry, then a right onto Appleby Line. Heading south, down from the Escarpment, the thin road winding past horse farms and other large properties with houses set back, dotting, as they say, the landscape. The leaves are turning. Cross the 407, and the single-family homes are replaced by large parking lots fronting commercial plazas, and mid-rise apartment buildings. Keep going south to Harvester, turn into the Tim Horton’s parking lot. Here. Clutching Tehillim I cross the road and place myself on the sidewalk next to the open gate into the compound that looks like a large manufacturing facility, many low buildings made of concrete with corrugated roofs. No windows. A chimney from which rises white steam or smoke. I can see the 18-Wheeler sitting at the intersection. I open the book. Adonai is my shepherd, I shall lack nothing. In lush pastures He makes me lie, Beside tranquil waters He leads me. Then the vehicle i...

I have always loved God for rebuking the angels when, seeing the Egyptians drown in the Sea of Reeds (Talmud, Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b), they burst into song. But the Israelites, newly and safely arrived on the other shore, also sing triumphantly (Shirat Hayam), completely oblivious to the fact that in order to save them and nudge them toward a better life, God has had to sacrifice so many of his other children, and is weeping at their loss. And God is silent. In 5780 the plague is not only killing the Egyptians, it is killing both the Egyptians and the Israelites. And everyone else, too. At the seder we are to experience what our ancestors went through, as though we had actually been there. At this year’s seder I found myself reliving the story of the Israelites, and the story of the Egyptians at the same time. Maybe the latter more so. Mitzraim, the narrow place we must pass through to emerge as free and responsible individuals, is here. Right here. And right now. Do yo...

A friend sent me this poem by Mario de Andrade. It is clearly a poor translation, but it is lovely still, and I feel myself agreeing with the sentiment--until I don't. MY SOUL HAS A HAT I counted my years and realized that I have Less time to live by, Than I have lived so far. I feel like a child who won a pack of candies: at first he ate them with pleasure But when he realized that there was little left, he began to taste them intensely. I have no time for endless meetings where the statutes, rules, procedures & internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be done. I no longer have the patience To stand absurd people who, despite their chronological age, have not grown up. My time is too short: I want the essence, my spirit is in a hurry. I do not have much candy In the package anymore. I want to live next to humans, very realistic people who know How to laugh at their mistakes, Who are not inflated by their own triumphs ...

This is how the book I'm reading begins: Sometime, somewhere, between Africa and Hindustan, lay a river so Jewish it observed the Sabbath. According to the ninth-century traveller Eldad the Danite, for six days of the week the Sambatyon pushed a heavy load of rocks along its sandy course. On the seventh day, like the Creator of the universe, the river rested. Having caught my breath, for who could not be breathless at such beauty, I begin to wonder: Is this who we are, every one of us a Sambatyon, a Sysyphean river, or a tribe of one lost on the other side, and at the same time the dividing line between this and that. Caught in a paradox: on the day on which the river ceases to flow and the rocks are like stepping stones, we may not cross; and on the days we may cross, it rages and threatens to kill anyone who steps into it. This is Kafka long before Kafka. But Kafka is a jackdaw. A jackdaw can cross; you and I cannot. We go to work, we carry the stones and we are trapped....

Perhaps this Perhaps this is it. Just this.  IT being the purpose, the meaning, the point of it all.  ALL being life, existence, Dasein, Being-in-the-World. Feeding this cat; cleaning the litter box, trimming her nails.  It’s not a lot she asks, except that I rise before my time to fetch breakfast. Six thirty, six fifteen, six....  She subtly hints by stomping about like an elephant,  knocking stuff off the table: keys, papers, eyeglasses.  Just in case I died in my sleep and have thus forgotten. I don’t always love her; sometimes I don’t even like her— mostly at six in the morning. But for all anyone knows she is a holy soul. In fact, I’m quite convinced of it; and also  that this is my mission:   to feed, to clean, to trim.  And provide cardboard boxes and paper bags to dive in. It’s little enough. Maybe her whole life is little:  naps on the radiator, a basket on top of the fridge,  a  m ad dash through...

The Light Take back the light-- now or tomorrow, or in June; it has grown dim, blunted by compromise. It is too frail to set the heart on fire, to sing, to praise, to fight Goliath --to battle the dark. Take home the light and hold it in your palm. Breathe on it, it will grow strong again and full of love. Let it be born again, that light: inside a tree, a stone, a dog! It will be holy once again when it's no longer me. All things return; the molecules that make this moment, and the cells that make this bone. Merciful One, take back the light.

Clearing A dog the colour of fallen leaf dancing in the woods: a whirling dervish, his long ears mad coattails flying free, his nose sniffing the sun. He is so There, living the Now, listening, feeling his song. What does he see in his mind's eye to make him pirouette and smile-- oblivious to everything, even the unicycle going by topped by a bearded man, the rabbit winking from the ferns that line the path? Leaves clap against the forest floor when he is done, and Time starts up again; Nijinsky is a hound again, and I attach the leash to my left hand.

Love's Grammar Walking the dog. Sweeping the floor. Paying the bills. Walking the dog. No more! Henceforth we'll walk as friends-- ambling through the woods in silent conversation, now he taking the lead, now I; or racing through the fields-- his long ears rising up like startled birds; mine --not so much. And when he sleeps-- curled nose to butt-- I sweep the floor, I pay the bills. I love.

PR1245 .B5 Got it? Kindred soul! I've been wondering how many years or months I've spent in libraries. I have always loved them; they seemed a shortcut to life, a way to know without having to feel. All life, all wisdom, all poetry catalogued. A short walk from Beowolf to Virgina Woolf to the Big bad Wolf, God and devil in the same row. With my own mind ever in chaos, butcher knives waiting silently in the kitchen drawer for the right time to call out, and bridges and tall buildings whispering like sirens in the wind, library catalogues seemed like a calm mind. Rows and rows of small drawers with index cards be-typed by cataloguers, with subject categories from the most general to the specific--a world ordered and predictable and safe. My favourite has always been the LCC, the Library of Congress classification system. Even though it is more enumerative than epistmological, its attractiveness lies in that it does not seek to reach beyond what is human. With my universit...

I sit in the dogbed; the dog, presumably, is sitting in mine. I am glad he understands quid pro quo. Fortified wine slides from the water glass down my throat, sticky and sweet. From the Bose on the sideboard the Master of Song speaks like a prophet. He has been to the future, gone through the bright light, turned left at the next intersection. Gone home. Snowflakes the size of matzah balls float by the window. Having landed, they soften the edges of the world: the barn, the house, the road past the house and the barn. Immortal Leonard sings of death as though it were the Beloved, and he the one waiting for an embrace from his Shechinah. The tune is Baroque, and I imagine lady ghosts dancing in costume, pulled gently right and left by his magnetic voice. La-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. I am happy. Some happiness comes when ambition goes, when there is nothing left but an old body sitting in the dogbed on a day just like this.

I am not much of a list-writer, mostly because when I do write lists, I write on pieces of paper that are almost invariably lost as soon as the ink hits the paper, only to reappear years later in some coat pocket or the bottom of my purse, crumpled and thin, the words worn off from rubbing against camera, wallet, other bits of paper, pens, loose change, scotch tape, lock deicer: "..pinach," DOG FOO," -email Ka..." Bits of long ago that have lost all meaning, their lingering sense of urgency now a bit of an embarrassment. Still, a list is a reassuring thing. It suggests order, a plan, a person with a plan, someone who's in charge, and on the sixth day..... I have not studied the issue sufficiently, but I suspect that most of us write more lists when we feel least in control of our world. Just the creation of the list, putting those sequential numbers one below the other, or letting those bullets give weight to the words that follow feels therapeutic. I am ...

And so I begin again. Again, I begin again. I do not know if every beginning has the same point of departure, or if there is some distance, however minimal, between these points. All I know is that I must begin again, and that I must hope. Could it be that this in itself is part of my soul curriculum? If so, what middah is so woefully out of kilter that I must be confronted with it at every step, at the beginning of the beginning--or even before? If this kind of failure, a failure that it is the warp to the woof of the process of seeking growth, adjustment, becoming-whole, points at one challenge, it is ANAVAH, humility. Like many, I always assumed that those of us who are shy, lack social skill (not to say, graces!!), live in constant self-doubt and with the firm conviction of our inadequacy, are somehow immune from the qualities at the other end of the continuum: hubris, self-aggrandizement, arrogance. But it is not so. In fact, were it not for those feelings of haughtiness, ...

If I had a cigarette, today I would smoke it. I haven't smoked in many years, but I'd show you what a grieving woman can do with a pack of tobacco and some papers!! All I have is a bottle of sherry. All I had was a bottle of sherry. For so many decades you sang for me. Sang my sadness and my loneliness and my despair. Now, what shall I do with these feelings? I loved you when I was 16, and I have loved you every day since. (As have millions of other women, of course) I am almost old now, and you have left me. How could you! How could you. Hineini, Mr. Cohen, didn't you hear me shouting, take me along! You probably never knew that we were born on the same day, you and I, the man with the golden voice and the woman who can't sing. I knew your friend Irving Layton, and you'll be having a laugh with him soon. Say hello for me. So much darkness. I will cut my hair. I will never be afraid again. I will stand tall. I will speak my mind. Hell, I will sing, my Lo...

It is the very middle of May, an unseasonably cold and blustery day. From time to time snowflakes and apple blossoms ride tandem on the wind. But a dog must have its walk. So coonhound-named-after-a-central-European-president and I take a short drive to where the woods start, and then march along between forests and fields, trying to enjoy each other's company, even as I wish myself back indoors, and he searches for the most perfect spot to have a leisurely poo. As we get near where the road makes a sharp bend and a footpath emerges from the forest, a man is coming out of the woods and heading for his car, which sits parked at the side of the road. I judge him to be in his late thirties or early forties, and whatever it is about him, whether his average build or his unremarkable attire, he seems exactly the kind of man who would be out in the woods on a day like this walking his dog, So I am not surprised to find that he is in fact preceded by what I take to be a very smal...

We finally decided to paint the old farm house. It had some sort of stucco on it that was rough with little pinkish and beige sharp-edged pebbles I'd always disliked. The stucco had never been painted, and although it probably wasn't as old as the house itself (which was built around 1900), it was definitely old. In the 1970s a one-storey addition was built on, pointing the way further up the drive toward the old bank barn. It too had never been painted and was an unsightly brick.    We had sort of done what we could with the place, put in new windows, added a deck. But we had never considered just painting it. Until now. But what colour? In Ontario all houses, though they are wood-framed, have either a brick or a stone exterior, and they come in every shade of beige or mud brown imaginable. It is a strange thing that even the few houses with stucco or aluminum siding on them are beige or mud brown. In Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, as in many other p...