the nature of names

This morning when Ari woke up, I wrote his name in the moisture on the window, and he looked at it and said, confidently, "Ari!"

It probably was a good guess but I still thought it was exciting.

He knows certain letters pretty well and others sort of well. For example, he knows "O" fairly reliably if you say, "What letter is this?" and point to O. He will answer glibly and happily, "Oh!" (It is very cute for the doting one.) But if you give him the alphabet and say, "Find the O" he will only find it half the time.

It is so interesting. You can almost watch those neural networks forming. The receptors lighting up and lighting up again, trying to form stable pathways. At least I think that's what's going on. I keep trying to get the Roommates to explain it to me, and they try, but my neural networks just slog along sluggishly, refusing to fire when I ask them to, so my understanding of our neural chemistry is, uh, limited. But I'm trying! It's tricky starting all over again and again, and once again, at 40, but I am indeed trying.

Rosh Hashannah services were so soothing for so many reasons. One, which may not sound good, is that I didn't take Ari the first day. It was wonderful to do something spiritual for a whole day. I took him the second day, and that was pretty relaxed too, not as I thought it might be. We left after the Shofar blowing and then we got to see a little of Auntie Papaya and Yona. Which reminded me of the old days, before we had four boys between us, when Auntie Papaya and I went and did tashlich at the duck pond. (I don't think that counts, but oh well. We didn't know or care about that then.)

The first day actually started out hard. I don't know if you could tell when you read my last post, but my knickers were kinda in a twist over this whole bailout thing and, well, the panic that is setting in cross the nation among all of those who read the papers and who aren't just following the news about the Rockefeller phony kidnapping guy. I sat in services on the first day and for the first hour or so I spent a fair amount of time fretting. First, I worried about how we could go on with these things when the world was coming apart. Then I thought, well, is there something better we could be doing than praying? Sure, some sarcastic parts of me replied. But the repetition of the familiar Hebrew songs and chants was irresistibly soothing. I found myself thinking that Jews have survived so many calamities. Surely we can survive economic meltdown and global warming.

I didn't bring Ari on the first day and I wondered if perhaps I should have. Other people paraded around with their babies in their arms--waiting for the shofar blowing. I knew that if I had Ari there would be no quiet dandling on the knee and eventually--slowly--I found myself making peace with that. A recognition not unlike what happens after sitting on a retreat. A unclenching, a retrenching from doubt. Acceptance, is what I think they call it. Earlier, I had also found myself cycling through the liturgy, breaking it all apart, deriding that which I didn't think was true, etc. I was thinking how religion was getting into all these messes, to start with, and how I didn't want to be party with all of that confusion and pain. But then, as I started to relax, I just melted into the recognition that humans are religious animals--at least many of us. We just are. So we can, in a William James sense, just accept our own religious psychology and have a progressive understanding of what it means to be spiritual beings having a human experience, rather than clinging to a rather idolatrous fundamentalist view. I don't need to exclude myself from my fellow humans. I really don't. I can let myself belong.

It is such a peaceful thing. To take my place in the nature of things. Like Ari, when I see my name, and recognize my place, it gives me joy.