Each year since I started Ruminationville, I have made an inner commitment to reflect on the 12 months leading up to its birthday on January 14, when this year on that day the earth will have completed 5 or so orbits around the sun.
At times, especially over the past few weeks, I have found myself wondering what would happen if the site simply disappeared, signed off, said sayonara. Maybe fewer than a handful of you would miss my blog for a very little while, but before long it would be as though it, and I, never existed. This is not an unbearable thought, though, since, try as most of us might to deny how little we matter in the scheme of things, the naked truth is that we matter little in the scheme of things.
Yet I deeply believe there is a purpose to every life on this fragile planet — both on an individual and at a collective level — and I somehow feel that, were I to go dark, I would not have finished fulfilling a piece of my part. Still, I find myself becoming restless here and wanting to try something new, learn something new, be someone new.
On this last point, I do not mean to suggest that I would wish to suddenly wake up a blue-eyed, blonde-haired 20-year-old with white, straight teeth. I mean that I wish for continued spiritual growth — evolution, if you will — and out of that maturing a change that, through me, shines itself brightly in this darkening world.
This year, I find myself wanting to light the menorah of my ancestors — my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and all those who came before them. Always I have felt compelled to participate in Christmas festivities because not doing so meant feeling even more of an outsider in a world that, by and large, does not welcome its Jews into the fold. Tonight, as I light the first candle of Chanukah, I will think of my forebears with reverence. And I will honor, too, the sacred Christ that resides within me, within us all.
ruminationville 