Signing Out

Signing out for the holiday ... Not certain what can be said about it ... Celebrating the birth of a baby (giving gifts) ... Celebrating the continuation of a family (inviting folk to join about a table to prepare foods for each other) ... Celebrating rites together (as part of a community). M and I will have opportunity to share with children and grandchildren ... tasting of the future. We'll similarly have time with all our siblings ... vestiges of families superseded by newer families. I may have written some years ago about walking through my parents home when we were preparing to empty it and give it over to another family. I was with my grand-daughter ... maybe she was ten, then. She asked, looking at the pictures that were still hanging on the walls of her great-grandparents' home: How is a family made? I didn't want to tell her that new families are made by weakening the bonds of older families, even though there is some truth, perhaps, in thinking that no new family can be built without taking apart older ones ... that life is like those fern-like geometric fractals .... a series of families, many, perhaps, taking over where the previous ones have ended or, at least, are in the process of ending and making room. There were mystics who wondered how an omnipresent god could possibly create. If s/he is omnipresent, where is there room for 'the new.' Some of these religious thinkers concluded that there must be a process of redacting the self to make room for another. They called this process ... tzimtzum. Maybe the Fourth Quarter well-Played requires tzimtzum. May it be thy will, Creator, that I may, indeed, savor this process, in spite of the pains that may accompany it.