To live in ignorance
to live in the dark
to live in the Absence

To accept my inadequacy and yet see You
and be present to You in the darkness
Your feeling Presence
in the coursing of time
now another calendar year
by which I mark the passage of my failure allowing it to gently wash over me like a light cotton wisp

Maybe we need do nothing
for powerless we are over ourselves, over politics and world events despite intimacy of imagery on our TV, the forces of nature and history overwhelm us like our own rage and intolerance.

Maybe just maybe
being present to the flux of time is sufficient now that I cannot change the world nor even myself those ingrained defects of character that persist and haunt me like a plague or a recurrent infection.

Just to be present Shabbat comes in and leaves witness to it all the horror and the majesty

Another year
hard to believe
a step closer to my mortality
being "gathered to the fathers"
I think of my ancestors a lot recently
how deeply I am connected organically to them lying in rotting graves and crematoria despite my knowing nothing of them.

As time flows through me it changes
it experiences itself differently
like water flowing thought a machine
a distillery maybe
neither better or worse for the chemistry, just different

If I am, were able to remove the moral and the piety from the equation what is left is just water, just me, experiencing it all, the flux of time.
and maybe that will be sufficient to say I have lived adequately without judgement day for that too requires an enduring of sorts albeit different the suffering of being and being present to others and self.
the toleration of the inner critic the sense of inadequacy that pervades all and the knowing of how fragile it all remains.

This too is an endurance.