An old story about rain, a wooden boat and a bird runs through this whole week.
The story read on Saturday, October 17 is the flood. Forty days of water, one family afloat, and a long wait to see land again. You don't need to know a word of it to feel it. If something in your life has quietly run its course, this one is for you.
When the old shape is done
Some weeks you can feel that the way you have been living has reached its edge. Nothing is broken. It simply stopped fitting, and holding it together takes more effort every day.
That is what the flood stands for in this story. An old way of living comes to an end, so a new one has somewhere to begin.
The water rises so something new can find ground.
The coat and the fire
The man in the boat comes with an image I keep going back to. On a cold night you can wrap yourself in fur, or you can build a fire. One warms a single body. The other warms everybody in the room, the one who built it included.
Most of us know the fur very well. We call it guarding our energy. Where you may be choosing it right now, and why the story asks you for more, is in the full reading.
Three flights
When the rain stops, two birds go looking for land. One returns empty every time. The other, a she in the original language, keeps going back out until she finds it.
What she brings home, and why the old sages hear it as a sentence about freedom, is in my reading inside the community. So is a second story, about a woman whose heart did what four great men could not.
Going back to dig
Once the ground is dry, there is a pull to return straight to the worst of it and take it apart. Why did it happen. What did I do wrong.
The story shows exactly what that does to the man in the boat, and it is not pretty. The way through it is in the community.
One question, let go
The practice this week starts on Sunday with one question you can't answer yet. What you do with it next, the sentence to say out loud, and the audio in my voice are in the community.
Saturday, October 24
The last day of the week. Look back over the seven days and notice what came back to you. A message, an idea, a line someone said in passing. The small ones count.
The method is built on the lunar calendar and on years of studying Sefer Yetzirah. I do not teach the tradition. I use its calendar as an instrument, and I translate it into the language a modern woman actually lives in.