Last night I took my camera on my walk to take pictures of the 115 year old synagogue down the street. The front of the synagogue faces the sunset, so looking at the back of the building the sunset was glowing through the windows,
The last photo doesn't even capture how beautiful the warm glowing windows were last night.
"If you have no family or friends to aid you…turn your face to the Great West and there build your home and fortune"
-Horace Greeley, New York 1841.
"On to America. No relief has been brought to us…. Because servile hordes and sordid minded people have not understood and do not understand the spirit of liberty, we have to suffer… Let us go to America!"
-Leopold Kompert, Jewish Author, Vienna, 1848
"I lived among trappers and Indians, but always as a Jew. Did I need grander temples to worship in? In the murmurs of the pines I hear the psalms of David: the fragrance of the incense is as of old, the winds speak to me in 'His Voice."
-From The Sounding of the Shofar – sermon, Rachel Frank 1892.
An estimated 200 Jews fought for Texas freedom and at least three Jews died at the Alamo. Wyatt Earp's girlfriend/wife was Jewish. They worked on railroads, came with everyone else during the gold rush, and were frontier scouts. Levi Strauss came to California via Cape Horn in 1848 to invent Levis jeans. This is all from Jews and the American West,
http://www.jewishmag.com/84mag/usa7/usa7.htm
Last Friday I was sitting in a meeting and the topic someone brought up was one of those that can easily go really wrong, which was intuitively knowing the right thing to do. The story was someone knowing the right thing to do, not really doing it, and then it being clearly too late. My thought was that the topic should be regret, which is a resentment against yourself, but it turned out to be spirituality, which quickly turned into religion. I quickly slipped into my favorite character defect, judgement, and could hardly sit in my seat, I was so irritated.
So, Monday morning, I get some payback. I hate when someone brings up a topic that I decide to judge and then within a few days it applies to me. Joe had not told me to do much more than bring in packages, he gets lots of packages, and feed cats. He did not talk about the cat box, or if there was more than the one downstairs, but by Sunday I thought I should clean it out. They use that funny cat litter that looks like green pellets in a huge, tall box, but it looked hardly used, but I did not investigate too hard. I let their cats in early Sunday evening because it started to rain. I do not know if they had a party Sunday night, or if they had already done some damage, but Monday morning I guess they came home to a huge mess, cat pee everywhere. I know this because I thought they were to be home Sunday night, but they were not, and I tried to call Monday morning and left messages, but did not hear from them, so I went home on my lunch on Monday to feed the cats if they still were not home. They were both home cleaning.
Now I feel like a bad cat sitter. I did as they asked, but I knew I should do more, and it wasn't like I was too busy, I was a lazy ass all weekend. I got raspberries and a gift certificate and they got a wrecked house, although I think their cats are happy, Pierre was sitting on my porch to greet me when I came home for lunch Monday.
Anyway, the topic is still regret, the source of the knowing doesn't matter, and I know what to do with regret. My theory is that regret is a resentment against myself, something that I did not do that I know I should have. I can make an amends to my neighbors, but I also need to make one to myself. Everyone deserves a break for a while, but mine has gone on way too long, and it is past time to get busy doing the things I know I should be doing.
The only thing I have been faithfully doing is the Five Tibetan Rites, every day for almost three months, and they are really starting to pay off.
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