Category Archives: Jubilee

Jubilee Part Six: Turning Fifty and Flowing Freely through the Tight Center of My Own Personal Hour-Glass

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Me, a few years ago!
Me, a few years ago!

Jewish folks have two birthdays; our Hebrew one, linked to the sun and moon cycles as well as in alignment with our Holy Days and then the Gregorian calendar one. I was born in Paris, France fifty years ago on September 4, 1964, this is my Gregorian birthday. My Hebrew Birthday is always the 27th of Elul, two days, before the Jewish New Year. My birthday is always connected to Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). The piece of Torah being read the week of my birth, which is MY piece of Torah is Parshat Nitzavim (Deuteronomy 29:9-30:20)

This September 4th, as I turned fifty, I was alone in a cabin that belongs to some friends. I cannot take off yet for my extended solitary Jubilee retreat. I still have one more bird to launch out of this nest of mine. I do still want and need to set the tone though for space and time by myself. On August 31st, I am getting away and spending several days by myself with the river, the solitude, the creatures and whatever prayers, practices and angels are present with me.

The front view of my Retreat Space
The front view of my Retreat Space

Several folks have asked about what I am doing or if there will be some big bash. Many folks want to celebrate my fiftieth. I appreciate all of the love and care, and the only thing I really want is time alone.  This makes it very hard for others to gift wrap. I am not trying to be difficult on purpose. What I want and need right now is just not the “usual.”

In order to navigate the territory of others wanting a celebration and my own desire to gift others, I will provide a luncheon for those who attend Rosh Hashanah/Jewish New Year services at Temple Beth El, this year. It will be the only “party” I intend to have. My friend Lauren Sarabia from Comfort of Home catering will make my birthday luncheon. The menu is Salade Nicoise, chocolate mousse and Key-Lime mousse. I will make the dressing and provide the champagne. This luncheon is sort of my final big hurrah for others. A very obvious and clear offering when and where I can announce my intentions for time off, time-out and time away while gifting folks with great food and bubbly.

The metaphor that I am using that works the best for me right now is of the shape of an hour-glass. My hands, body, being and energy have all been extending outwards and up, like the top half with all the sand in it, but as I draw near to this birthday, my energy, willingness and direction are all getting narrower and smaller and moving into the thin corridor at the exact middle point of the hour-glass. This is a hundred year “hour” glass. I hope I live to be one hundred, and there is good precedent for this in my family. Several ancestors have lived to be a hundred or older on both sides of my family.

I don’t know if I will be extending out or doing something completely different from what I have done on the other side of this narrow passage and time away. The next fifty years, on the other side of my Jubilee retreat, are mysterious unknowns. I have to go into this contracted physical space away from people and things first. As a woman who has given birth, and you don’t need to give birth to get this, contraction is a prerequisite for expansion.

Breathing in allows you to breathe out. My process of self-reflection, self-enclosure and self-return is an in-breath. Implicit in all these “selfies,” and underlying them is the need and desire to figure out how I am best supposed to serve the Divine and all of creation for the second half of my life.

I will no longer be actively parenting, I am no longer interested in working jobs that are not a reflection of my soul. If I can find a way to join my heart, skills, mind and ability to earn an income, that is the ideal. The terrain I will be navigating is going to be radically different. I want to consciously choose where and how I sail these sands. I do not believe that if I choose correctly or figure things out perfectly all money and goodness will flow my way. This is an overly simplistic and flawed view of how the universe works. Horrible stuff happens to great people, who are not doing anything wrong in any way and good stuff happens to jerks and cruel greedy folks. I do believe that my attitude and how I direct myself have impact on my present and future experiences and certainly they color how I experience what is happening in my life.

So, I am setting sail in a new direction. I am endeavoring to make this as easy as I can for those around me, those dependent on me and those who are used to having me around. I created a website for this purpose that really is an electronic version of me. The colors, the feel, the content are all me, it is a true Nicole zone and reflects my Open Heart, Open Hands policy. Even my sister, who was sure that this was impossible and resisted visiting my website initially, has agreed that it feels like me. So, while I am away, starting next summer, folks who really need a hit of me can go to www.ohohands.com or www.open-heart-open-hands.com and find me. You can go there now if you want as well. If you are reading this, online, instead of in the paper, you have already found me.

I’ve uploaded most of my cookbook with more recipes going up every week, a great deal of my past writings, from The Arcata Eye and the Mad River Union, older works, newer works and ongoing works. It’s been very exciting and truly feels like a wonderful new adventure. I have no idea where any of this will lead. I really am going “over the hill” and I have no idea what the other side looks like. I’ll still be sharing about that here. The next thing on my writing agenda will be a break in this series about my Jubilee Retreat and an exploration of the Jewish New Year and its attendant qualities that can help us during this very fraught time.

© by Nicole Barchilon Frank. This piece was originally published in the Mad River Union on September 3, 2014. It has been slightly altered and adjusted here.

Jubilee Part Five: Encountering Death Consciously

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Singing the Bones by Helen Redman, 1993
Singing the Bones by Helen Redman, 1993

When it is my time, the Holy One will take me. I’d like the folks left behind here to know that I am not gone when that happens. In my tradition there is a teaching that the only thing you can take with you to the other side are your mitzvot. I use the translation of this word here as deeds of loving kindness or rightness. So, if my deeds of goodness follow me and come with me, I should do a lot of them! It’s not a reason to engage with mitzvot, but rather a consequence of living my life as if I was already in Heaven, a place where kindness and beauty reign. There is plenty of Hell here on this planet. I have never been afraid of going to such a realm, I just want the suffering on this planet to be done. So, I orient towards Heaven on earth, bringing beauty, goodness, love, warmth, comfort and delight into this time and place. My need to walk this particular path is coded in my core. I feel pulled and guided by that force constantly.

Taking a retreat from engagement with the folks I love and who I just know and encounter on a daily basis is a radical step. I am interested in a specific kind of departure from the norm. I want to explore leaving this world consciously. If I dip into the absence/death-well, while I am still living, I get to practice to navigate territory that is very uncomfortable for all of us. This choice, on my part, about why I need to do this is so complex. I am not talking about taking my life. I have never felt inclined to do so and I doubt I ever will. Looking at death in depth and consciously, is different from venerating it or reaching towards it.

If I were Hindu, I would just say I was going to spend some time with the Goddess Kali and that would make sense to folks who were steeped in that tradition. Buddhist practitioners engage in years of contemplation and “practice” around death. There are complex meditations that involve envisioning your death, the death of those you love and death in general. In the modern secular world, we have a fascination with vampires, zombies and ghosts. But engaging with those ideas as entertainment or story-line is very different than looking at the reality of death head on.

I’ve been looking at it literally with my head on (using my mind and body to be present around death) all of my life. Over fifteen years ago, when a dear friend became ill with cancer, her final wish was that our community endeavor to bury her according to Jewish tradition. This meant engaging in study around traditional Jewish practices and creating a Hevra Kadisha locally. Hevra Kadisha translates literally as Sacred or Holy Community/Society, most folks think of it as the Jewish Burial Society.

The service of a Hevra Kadisha is done anonymously and involves preparing a person for burial according to ancient beautiful Jewish practices from Torah. In my 49 years on this planet I’ve gone from fishing for gravestones in a stream (see Jubilee Part Four) to gently preparing those who have died to enter the earth.

We enter a river of blessings in this process as well as doing the heavy lifting, purifying and cleaning. I do this work with four or five other people mostly in silence with only specific prayers recited as we engage in the various tasks. We bathe and cleanse and lovingly robe folks in simple linen garments modeled along the lines of the High Priest from the Torah. We wrap them tight in a shroud, like a cocoon and place them in plain wooden boxes. We place broken shards of pottery over their eyes and mouth to signify that their soul has broken free of its physical vessel. We lovingly praise and honor their physical bodies as the homes of their souls and we ask forgiveness if anything we do while preparing them wasn’t done properly. This service is considered a mitzvah/commandment/obligation that is of the highest order. In my community, we do this for free. In all Jewish communities, if you do this work, you are actually doing it for the person who has died, and they cannot thank you or pay you, which is why it is considered to be a very special mitzvah.

My service with the Hevra Kadisha has brought me in contact with death in real time and with real humans whose bodies I have engaged with. I have also had the privilege of being present with folks as they were dying and on their journey across the “River Jordan.”

The Other Side of Birth by Helen Redman, 1994
The Other Side of Birth by Helen Redman, 1994

Intrinsic to my need to go on retreat is a concept called L’Shem Shamayim: for the sake/name of Heaven. Underneath my desire for stillness is a strong and always flowing current of connection with the Divine. I need to see what it is that the next phase of my life is supposed to be oriented around and towards. I need to find out what I can do for or in the name of L’Shem Shamayim and for the world to come/Olam Ha-Ba. This idea of a world to come can be interpreted to mean tomorrow or the world we create, not just the world on the other side of life, but that is also part of its meaning. So, taking time away to explore through prayer, through meditation, through engagement with solitude and nature and through active study are all ways for me to connect to Olam Ha-Ba.

In this world, which we call, Olam Ha-Zeh, I am also taking time away to get still and see what unfolds in a place that is less stimulating and full of others and their needs. I am often seen as the “spiritual” one in my family, in a group or gathering. I do not like this, when it separates me from others and makes me seem or look different. While I am happy to be seen as a woman engaged with Torah, with Holiness, I do not want to be the placeholder for Holiness in other peoples’ lives. I want everyone to engage and have relationship with what is Kadosh/Sacred/Holy to them.

I also don’t want connection to a spiritual reality to be seen as something that can only be done in a big way. Folks who are quieter or less obvious and vocal are just as capable of connection with the Divine as I am. There is no singular or right way to connect or be engaged with spiritual practice. Although there are tried and true and well-researched and practiced spiritual technologies and teachers that can improve our ability to connect and experience Holiness or Deep Mystery.

“The root k-d-sh occurs nineteen times in Parashat BeHukotai, the last reading from the book of Leviticus, in which there are altogether 152 occurrences of this root. The Torah nowhere defines the concept of kedushah, what we might call in English “holiness” or “sanctity.” Nevertheless, the use of this root has developed extensively, so that today we speak of making kiddush on the wine, or of reciting the kaddish and the kedushah in the synagogue service, or of marrying a woman through kiddushin (the ring ceremony), and we behave as if we understand the concept of being kadosh (holy) which is present in each of these actions. We tend to forget that holy is a divine (transcendental) concept, and therefore, like the concept of G-d, is above human comprehension.”-Dov Landau

As a Jewish woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a sister, as a grandmother, as a friend, and as a daughter, taking a year off from my family and friends is a very intense thing to do. It will be a death of sorts. This is time of absence and death-like being away from those I love is a risk I am willing and need to take. I do so knowing that while it will be hard for those who love me and who I love, it can also be a blessing and an opportunity. Getting up close to and intimate with absence and death or separation is a very hard thing for most of us to do. Taking this path consciously, for me, and hopefully for those who will miss me, is a way to flow into and explore THE RIVER of space and time, beyond our physical bodies and all their coverings and ways and means. I’m looking intently towards and across that mysterious “River Jordon.” I have no desire to cross over yet—but I am very curious about the territory.

to be continued…..

~byline from the original piece published in the Mad River Union on August 13, 2014:

Nicole peeks across and around all kinds of corners, rivers and edges wherever she abides and she endeavors to speak of this as she walks along the way. Sometimes, she can be found in her home in Bayside, but you are just as likely to encounter her swimming at Big Lagoon or meandering along the aisles of your local health-food store.

Jubilee Part Four: Preparing Others for My Departure, Death and Distance

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Moroccan Wall/Gate/Passage
Moroccan Wall/Gate/Passage

I finished yet another fast, from sundown on Monday, August 4th until sundown Tuesday, August 5th. This year, that day was Tisha B’Av. The Jewish day starts at sundown in the evening and goes until the following sundown. “…And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” B’reishit/Genesis 1:5

As my Rabbi Naomi Steinberg says:

“Every year in midsummer the Jewish calendar brings us a challenge – the holy day of Tisha B’Av, the Tenth of the lunar month of Av, the day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Temples in Jerusalem in 586 BCE and 70 CE, and also the day when the Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and driven from Spain in 1492.”

It’s a really, really, really bad day. Many years either Hiroshima or Nagasaki day is also falling on or around Tisha B’Av. I used to fast on those days when I was younger, before I ever connected with my Judaism. The thought of eating or drinking on a day when so many innocent people were murdered just has never been something I could stomach. When I learned of the Jewish fast, it was one more link in my chain of connection to Torah and to Judaism.

This is just always a VERY horrific time of year. It has been for Jewish people for thousands of years. It is Now in Israel, it is Now in Palestine, it is Now in Syria, it is Now in Somalia, it is Now in Afghanistan, it is Now in Pakistan, it is Now in Nigeria. It is NOW everywhere that folks kill and maim and wound each other for reasons that have never and will never make sense to me. While I seek out and look for understanding and guidance around death, I have never wanted to encourage or support killing. I am always and still a pacifist.

Even so, death has been part of my journey in life from the beginning. My mother was six months pregnant with me when my almost two-year old sister Paula Andrée Barchilon died. I came into the world with death at my heels and connected to a sister who left the earth before I entered it. We crossed and have crossed paths, all my life, in a liminal space, in an other kind of place.

Maternal Echo by Helen Redman, self-portrait of my mother with me in utero two months after my sister Paula's death.
Maternal Echo by Helen Redman, self-portrait of my mother with me in utero two months after my sister Paula’s death.

So, death has never been far away or to be avoided as a subject of exploration and study. I used to go to the cemetery where my sister was buried as a young girl. It was a quiet and special place for me, almost a secret place because it was never crowded with living folks and it was calm and ordered and beautiful. When I was a young teen my dancing partners and I used to go there in the summers. We would try to restore the graves that had been vandalized. There was a small creek running through the graveyard and idiots would break off grave-stones and throw them in this water. We would be in our leotards which were very similar to one-piece swimsuits and wade into the water and try to heft these pieces of gravestone out of the water. We would then attempt to locate the grave they went with. I remember doing this as if it were yesterday. I also remember sitting at my sister’s grave and talking to her.

I wasn’t born yet when she died, so my relationship with her was completely something happening in my heart and soul. She was my first angel, my first guide beyond this world. This connection to death started in the womb, but has continued in me as a beat that I was tuned to and interested in. All my life I have sought out knowledge and information around death.

I have also studied how other culture’s navigate and approach death and the afterlife. For almost all cultures there is something beyond this world. It is only recently that the Religion of Proof in Physical Evidence has come to the foreground of many folks’ ideas about death. I have no need to change anyone’s mind or convert anyone. People believe and engage across a great divide and along a continuum from absolute rejection and negation of anything Holy or Divine to complete engagement and relationship with Holiness. Death is a part of that dance, regardless of what you believe or don’t believe. We are all going to die as are the people we love and the ones we hate. Death is a sure and constant reality.

One of the underlying reasons for my Jubilee retreat revolves around my desire to prepare folks, as best I can, for the eventuality of my death. I hope it is fifty years from now. I’m in reasonably good health and don’t anticipate leaving this earth anytime soon. Nevertheless, I don’t know the pull-date on the Nicole Andrée Barchilon Frank label.

As I contemplate taking a retreat to look at death more fully and to give folks an opportunity to encounter my physical absence, it is with a heavy heart and a desire to grapple with something completely impossible. I need to have the freedom to yell, rage and engage with the Divine around all of this. I cannot do that with anyone other than the Holy One and I need the space and time, one needs in an intimate relationship, to tackle really hard issues. It’s not a short conversation.

…to be continued….

Nicole writes to you about death and life from her very active home in Bayside, where she will now attend to watering her garden and doing the laundry (two very mundane but solidly of this world kinds of tasks).

This piece was originally published in the Mad River Union, on August 6th, 2014. It has been slightly altered for this post.

Jubilee Part Three: Beyond the Veils of Illusion in this World

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Two young Jews, my brother Paul and I, in Morocco, in a Moslem garden, at the inner pool.
Two young Jews, my brother Paul and I, in Islamic Morocco, in a garden, at the inner tiled pool.

I fasted from food and water on Tuesday July, 15, this year.  I don’t always observe this particular traditional Jewish fast day.  For practicing Jewish folks the 17th of Tammuz this year fell on July15th. This is a Jewish day of mourning when we fast and meditate on the destruction of sacred territory and the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem. This is the exact same territory that folks are currently violently hating and killing each other over.

There was a call for a joint fast and prayer vigil between Jews, Christians, and Moslems for Peace. It was open to all peoples who wished to join in, not just members of these three religions. I participated here, in our little hamlet, and joined in spirit with my friends in Israel and Palestine. All over the world there were folks engaging together in this activity, but it wasn’t front page news anywhere. I spent several hours in prayer in the morning and actually went through the older more traditional siddur (Jewish prayer book). It took me two hours to complete the morning prayers. I also cried and did my own personal prayers. The traditional Jewish fast for this day is from all water and food between sunset and sundown. All practicing Moslems observe this kind of fast for the entire month of Ramadan, which we were still in.

This territory of violence and harm seems to be perpetually cycling in the Holy Land and it certainly looks like and feels like it has not really changed despite the several thousand years of time between now and then. And yet it has or it is changing all the time. People are also coming together in love and solidarity across great walls and divides, now and even in the past also. If you study history you know it is not simple and always polarized.

There are shades of color and depth to every narrative. This is true in the past and today. Some people in the world are guided by love, caring, a desire to learn, grow and improve and they work to help and heal wherever they can. There are also people in the world whose lives and hearts are constricted by wounding, fear, violence, poverty, hunger, greed and rage and they create more hurt. Often we are some of both, in fact mostly, we are all of the above. If you only listen to or look at the narratives of wounding, hate and violence you begin to think this is all that is going on, or has ever gone on and you give up hoping and growing.

For some reason we think all the horror on the front-page is the story all the time. We look for the bloody, gory, ugly, painful stories first. We are drawn to them. This may be based on some deep primal self-preservation instinct. We need to be aware of the dangers around us so we can stay safe and keep our families and communities safe. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking emotionally stunts us, makes us anxious, and keeps us looped into a flight or fight pattern. This is well-documented and not just some rambling thought from me. You can read all about this in Dr. Daniel Goleman’s 1995 best-selling book Emotional Intelligence. I consider his book to be a must read for anyone who wants to understand the way the human mind and emotions work.

So, our need to be safe precludes our higher functioning and higher thinking. We jump and run or go right into a fear or anxiety place. This is a human thing to do. If we have been traumatized, and who hasn’t on some level or another, in childhood or in a war, or an illness or any painful hard time, we create a groove, a tire-track, wheel-rut that takes us immediately to that place. This is not the place where we reason, where we breathe, where we remember to call a friend or that what we are feeling is disproportionate to what is going on. This is the pure fear place. When you are actually in a war zone, it is intelligent to pay attention in this accelerated and highly sensitized way, it may save your life or the lives of those you love or who are near you. Living this way all the time takes its toll though and is not good for anyone.

People in marketing and advertising know you need to stimulate folks sexually and/or engage their primal fears. If you are successful in doing this they will buy your product or your story-line. We consume in fear more than we do when we are calm. We hoard and grab and gather in greater amounts when we are worried. So, if you stimulate this tendency in humans with a constant beat of horror and fear around the world you create an atmosphere that lends itself to folks consuming more than they need to and believing the story they are being told everyday. They literally cannot see beyond the blood and sex veil.

For me, and for many others, stepping outside of the circle of news and information is one way to avoid this wheel rut pattern in my mind. When I actually am not fearful or overwhelmed with sadness and grief about the grotesqueness and wrongness in the world, I start to see something different. I cannot do this when the violence and hate speakers are on loud, or if the television or the facebook or twitter streams are jamming my heart and brain.

I can only do this when I push back this veil, this screen that is playing these loud and angry and yes also real picture of things going on. When I manage to do that, something else emerges. I realize that really 99% of the folks I have ever met are GOOD people. The really angry, violent mean people are a tiny percentage of the world’s population. They are powerful and they wreak great damage, but they are not the majority, they aren’t even close to it. We feed the beast by believing it. When we have the courage to reach out towards those who are different or who look like our enemies, something entirely different happens. We no longer want to go shopping or hide; instead we want to think and be still and feel. This kind of shifting is what needs and must happen for peace and love to grow, and the only way I know to do that is to stop walking on the wrong path and to invite others to join me. We just have to turn, to do a Teshuvah. Teshuvah can be translated to mean turning or re-aligning, it is normally just translated as repentance, but the Hebrew  has much more depth and cannot be parsed into a one word translation. Real teshuvah is a game-changer.

Is there any way that my veil parting efforts and path-shifting can manifest in some way to help others get off the misery-fear road? All my prayers start with wanting all the suffering and pain of the world to stop. My prayer and need for peace is cell-deep in me and in most of the humans I have ever met or encountered through their teachings. To answer this question, to see if there is something I can do that is more than just being present for my family, friends and community, I have to get away from this loud and in my/your face constant stream of ugliness. This doesn’t mean I think it is all ugly here. I live in paradise, Humboldt County, U.S.A. in the 21st century. There are hospitals, antibiotics, organic gardens, community, beauty and love all around me. There are also murders, rapes, betrayals, violence, stupidity etc… I try and avoid the latter and if I do engage with these elements it is as a counselor or helper to someone who has been hurt. We can change and grow, switch the channel, and emerge even from extremely difficult circumstances. I know so many folks who have.

So, part of why I need to get away on a Jubilee retreat has to do with wanting to exit the story that most folks on this planet are currently on. I want to see what story exists beyond this one that is currently obvious and playing out on all of our communal screens and minds. Is there some other narrative thread that I can connect to so strongly and so well that I can return from sanctuary and solitude and be able to share it and offer it? I cannot know until I go looking. So, I am consciously turning off the well-beaten path, as so many others have done before me. I am going on a quest to see what is real that is not tainted by someone’s agenda or need for me to eat, drink, be afraid, consume or vote one way or another. My own agenda is something else entirely, and I am sure I will spend a great deal of time having to navigate whatever territory it throws up, but as I turn and align with being fifty I am no longer a novice at looking at my own stuff. I’m ready for this challenge and hungry to begin….to be continued…

—byline—

Nicole parts the veil from her beautiful home in Bayside, where she has no television and where she does live in a kind of bubble of her own making of good food, love and kindness, she endeavors to stretch the bubble to include all those she encounters and prays every day for us all to live in a bubble bath of Epic and Glorious proportions! She invites you to jump in with her here in these pages.

This article was originally published in the Mad River Union on July 23, 2014, it is slightly adapted here from the original. It is number three in a larger series. Please see My True Heart Opens and Quaking for the Divine if you are just arriving to my site for the first time.

Jubilee Part Two: Quaking for The Divine

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Nicole, in her red riding hood cape, age seven in Morocco
Nicole, in her red riding hood cape, age seven in Morocco

This is the second of several installments in the Jubilee Retreat Series, the first one is My True Heart Opens and should be read first.:

Seven cycles of seven equals forty-nine. In the Jewish tradition, this is very significant. Since, every seventh day is the sabbath and every seventh year is a Sabbatical called the shmita. The Jubilee (Hebrew yovel יובל) is the year at the end of seven cycles of shmita, So, my forty-ninth birthday was last September. My birthday is always around the Jewish New Year/Rosh Hashanah. I will turn fifty this coming September, so it is my Jubilee. I have been planning to go away for a long retreat for many years. I have told all my family members and most of my friends about this for at least ten years now. Since my youngest is only seventeen (another number with a seven in it), I cannot actually take my Jubilee retreat when I turn fifty. I am determined though to start on my Jubilee year-off before I turn fifty-one.

Both of my parents are Jewish by birth. Neither of them are Jewishly observant or religious. I wanted some connection to the force moving within and around me, to Holy Presence, and since neither my father nor my mother had any relationship to religious practice, nor any connections to Jewish community, my father chose the Quakers also known as The Friends. My father took me to Quaker meetings as a child. He liked them because they were mostly silent, they were educated, there were lots of intellectuals, and they were pacifists. I was in heaven from the first time I sat in Friends Meeting. Here, finally, were a bunch of folks/Friends all communing with and in relationship with Holiness. They were not discussing it or trying to argue against it, they were simply sitting in stillness and waiting for the voice, the still small voice, within them to make itself known.

I am anything but still, small and quiet. I was a slender young girl, but I was never quiet. The Boulder Friends Meeting was my first spiritual home. I would sit in meeting and, of course, The Divine would start talking to me. I would sit on my hands, try and be calm and as patient as a young girl can be, but eventually I would have to stand up and shaking and with tears streaming down my face, share how much The Holy One loved everybody and how beautiful they were. This was the most common theme that seemed to be coming through me. It is still my most common theme and my forever “good news.”

I was a young girl when this was going on and I felt as if I was the only child doing this kind of thing. Usually, the elders would speak or occasionally someone older would share something. I became a favorite of the elders and also made tremendous friendships with the other children at meeting. These friends were different from any other friends because I was encountering them in a spiritual context. They were truly Friends with a capital letter “F.” I spent years with the Boulder Friends Meeting and going to the Inter Mountain Yearly Meetings in New Mexico during the summers was one of the highlights of my early teen years.

The Boulder Friends Meeting was also home to Elise and Kenneth Boulding. These were two maverick human beings. Married for forty-plus years by the time I encountered them. They were white haired, tall, strong and beautiful. Kenneth was originally from England and a world-renowned and respected economist and Elise was originally from Norway and was a professor at Dartmouth prior to being in Boulder and also a world-renowned Sociologist. Both of them were intellectual giants. They had five children, all grown, by the time I met them as a young girl. Kenneth had written many books and several long love poems/sonnets of love for his wife. These were just the best and most wondrous people. Kenneth would sometimes speak after I did at meeting. When he spoke, you knew the voice of Wisdom, and Holiness was coming through. He was gentle and kind and had a slight stutter sometimes, his hair was like pictures of most mad scientists, white and wiry and going in ten directions at once. He was well over six feet tall. He had a strong accent and an extremely distinct voice, which was forceful and strong, even with the stutter.

He would often speak about my sharing as being a gift and he likened my young tears to tears of baptism. He would affirm that all of us need to experience this love and joy of Holiness, that the tears were a place of cleansing and newness and youth. He made me feel at home. I am crying just thinking of these people and this time in my life, when I was honored, even at the young age of eleven or so, as a person of merit and depth with something to share. In school, I was perpetually taunted and teased. At home there was still pain from my parents divorce and so much confusion. At Meeting, I was heard and seen and honored and not for anything I did, but for the voice of love and hope inside of me that couldn’t help but bubble up as soon as I got still and quiet in communion with other folks sitting still and waiting for inspiration and connection.

The first time I learned of the idea of a year retreat was when I was a young girl. Elise Boulding was a mother and an inspired feminist, professor, peace activist, and she wrote many books. My mother is also a feminist and artist and she collaborated with Elise when she was writing a book called The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time, first published in1976. My mother, Helen Redman, did the illustrations for this book. My mother and Elise worked together and I remember sitting at Elise’s table one summer afternoon with them both. Elise was speaking about her retreat, her year long silent retreat. What was this busy mother, grand-mother, author, professor and extraordinarily busy activist talking about? How could she have taken a year long retreat? But she had. Elise and Kenneth were very deep thinking and deeply feeling folks, their relationship to Holiness was not casual. Elise Boulding planted the seed in my young mind that a mother, wife, maverick thinker and activist, could retreat from all of that to seek stillness and connection with Holiness.

This seed, planted so long ago has been growing since then. It is now a veritable oak tree inside of me. I will always love my first spiritual base, my Friends from Boulder and New Mexico. I still love Quakers and the Friends Meeting and feel at home there. I am no Quaker though, I’m just too damn loud and very definitely practicing and in love with my Judaism now.

Imagine my delight when I uncovered that the Jewish tradition, which any well-versed Christian Quaker (like Elise), knew, has retreat practices related to the Jubilee Year and to daily meditation and stillness. There are instructions in the Talmud that suggest one should take time to get still and calm for an hour or so before beginning prayers and then do the prayers. After the prayers one is also instructed to sit in stillness and communion for another hour or so. If you do this the three proscribed times a day, that’s about seven hours of prayer and meditation. Not really something the average person is doing, but it is still there as the model of what should be done; an ancient instruction to engage in daily meditation and retreat.

There are also teachings about how a man should take a retreat when he is fifty to re-assess his life and prayer practices. I’m not sure a whole year is specified, but again the seed is there. There are lots of fascinating and deep practices related to the Jubilee Year. All debts are supposed to be forgiven, all land is supposed to revert to its original owners, and many other amazing and not easy to do things. To my knowledge, these practices were rarely observed, and alterations and amendments were made. Who wants to forgive all their debts? Who wants to give their land back to the original natives? Who are the original, original natives? How far back does one go, etc..?

I know that I need a retreat year to be by myself with the Divine only and I’d love to have all my debts forgiven, or at least take a break from thinking about them! It is also very hard for me to find my own sense of what is MINE to do and be around others. I am looking forward to the time and space, a luxurious amount of both, to go deep into the great mystery and see what I find and how best to serve Holiness, my family and community on the other side of fifty. Please stay tuned here, before I go away, and follow me to know more abut this adventure as it unfolds. To be continued………….

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Nicole writes and remembers, with tears and laughter, from her home in Bayside she dedicates this teaching in honor and memory of her greatest teacher Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, May his Memory be for a Blessing. He came into this world on August 28, 1924 and left it on July 3, 2014. This piece was originally published in The Mad River Union on Wednesday, July 9th, 2014