I love that you had smoothies and flaky croissants with cherry preserves for lunch –at a woodstove heated greenhouse! With dirty fingers! That one line in your post paints a beautiful picture. I can almost taste it, and I can certainly see the colors.

And I love that you read Neruda poems to your new cat and I love that you told off the haters in one of your other posts.

You’re alive!

So, the poem I sent previously talks about fearing death (or whatever it is you fear) and a silent voice saying you’ll sleep on old shores for a while but not to fear because one clear morning you’ll wake up to find your boat tied to a new shore.

I feel I’ve found mine, and you’re on your way to yours. We’ll drift, like little cuban rafts, many more times than we’d like, but we’ll inevitably find our way again. Always.

Daba el reloj las doce… y eran doce
golpes de azada en tierra…

… ¡Mi hora! -grité- … El silencio
me respondió: -No temas;
tú no verás caer la última gota
que en la clepsidra tiembla.

Dormirás muchas horas todavía
sobre la orilla vieja
y encontrarás una mañana pura
amarrada tu barca a otra ribera.

I love the vision of you with the daylilies. And on the faux European getaway. \o/

Re: Yom Kippur — you’re actually quite aligned with Jewish tradition here. One of our most central and classical teachings holds that for sins between us and God, Yom Kippur can atone; when it comes to sins between us and us, then Yom Kippur cannot atone until we’ve done the work of repentance and apology. In an ideal world, we’d spend the weeks leading up to the High Holiday season reaching out to one another and making amends where they’re needed. Yom Kippur is a kind of day of catharsis — a day to set the world aside and sink into the contemplative inner work of figuring out how we need to realign our course in the year to come. And God is always listening — whatever we understand “God” to mean — whether it’s Yom Kippur or not. But the day itself doesn’t hold magical powers; it’s what we do with it (and maybe more importantly, what we do leading up to it) that has the capacity to transform us.

Pro Tip for commenting (from one who has lost LOTS of lengthy replies:

After writing your heartfelt epistle and are prepped to post, ALWAYS do a CTRL – A, CTRL – C (select all, then copy) just prior to posting. That way it’s all saved to your clipboard and can be retrieved with a simple CTRL – V to paste it back in the box. (Or for those Mac users, use the “Command” button in lieu of control.)

Also, totally unrelated, inner flaming nerds are teh hawt! I’ve never done WoW, but my own inner D&D geek sees your flaming nerd and wants to give you a high five or somethin’.

Your Oktoberfest experience reminds me of somthing: I play World of Warcraft (yes, I embrace my inner flaming nerd) and there’s an in-game, two-week-long holiday going on called Brewfest. during said holiday, you (as your character) get “drunk” [the game is programmed to blur your screen, make you swerve drunkenly and speak with a slur] and run around Azeroth doing crazy things to earn tokens, which you exchange for Brewfest souvenirs (like the blue hat I got the other day, or the miniature pink elephant I got two days before that). The music is exactly what one would expect for Brewfest.

I like picturing you tending the lilies with your loving hands, immersing yourself in the moment.

I like your idea of a more open Yom Kippur. It could even stand to be more frequent; why not view each new season as a fresh opportunity to treat each other with renewed respect, gentleness and open-minded acceptance?