The noble art of letting go.

We’re less than 5 days out from the Hebrew Calendar New Year (Rosh Hashanah), and the excitement is building…Like that first moment you step outside before fall has arrived in full regalia, but you can all of a sudden sense its approach; that unwarranted crispness in the air, a shift in the scent on the breeze from warm rain to dry leaves; the chemical reaction that this inspires in your blood to make you feel strong, invigorated, renewed.

That’s Rosh Hashanah: The New Year, indeed.

And since it helps me, dear reader, to always come clean with you, as I consider you a dear friend and even one of my dearest friends, I’ll be honest and say that I’m writing this on the morning it’s going to publish. I’ll spare you my excuses and only say (with a large degree of shame and a fighting sense of perspective and self-forgiveness) that I am going to discontinue my subscription to Netflix, imminently. It’s the Israeli tv shows that get me—so absorbed am I by the language and my desire to learn and speak it. Watching Hebrew language programs has the handy effect of getting words and phrases lodged into my brain. I’ll be cooking dinner and hear some words going off like a circuit (“Mah pitom! Mah pitom!!) and can’t remember what they mean, so I speak the words into the translator app to find out what’s going on. I laughed out loud yesterday when the word, mikhnasayim, was stuck in my head, and translating it revealed it to mean pants.

I was sure it was something far more serious than that.

But for all of the passion I feel inside of me to return to the city of “trees and bats”, what I love the most about this time of year is the necessity to let go of all of your plans, to send up all of your desires to the Creator, as if to say, “Here. You have given me this life, and with it, these dreams, these ideas, these loves, these plans. Take them all, so that I may better hear what You have to say as my Soul gets washed for the coming year.”

And while this week feels like a wellspring of energy and last hurrah’s, I will incrementally be putting down my pen and shutting my books; clearing the browsers in my head and turning out the basket that is my heart; sweeping clean all the spaces where life takes place; sitting where I always am standing, praying where I usually am laughing—though both prayer and laughter make excellent teachers of the noble art of Letting Go.

Happy Monday, dear reader.