Anastasia on vacation

Back next week.

Hope your Passover and Easter holidays were joyous.

A Touch of Springtime In My Soul

When I wrote of the fire in my soul on that cold, winter day in January, I did not have the foresight to know that our new “Climbing The Mountain Of Awe” GAME could bring a sense of springtime to that soul of mine.

I didn’t even believe – for sure – that I/we could ever bring our GAME back, again – alive.

Still when one has a passion for truth, one cannot be content with the mediocrity of the masses.

And, one does what one does.

Now here it is a 60ish, spring day, three months later, after only having played our new GAME two times. And, already I can feel the freshness coming alive in me.

I have no words to adequately express how much better I feel, already, because my GAME is back in action.

Oh, my! Oh, my! I am so grateful.

We are only at the very beginning. Only two GAMES played so far.

And, miniscule ones at that, only four hours long.

But I am feeling so much happier and alive; at home in my skin, like I have not been for years since I lost my eyesight.

(Whole entire week-ends playing our old Truth or Dare Game (formerly the Discount Derby) was one of the things I had hoped to do for my entire life until I lost my eyesight.

Game week-ends were the impetus to buy this mountainside site upon which we intended to build a retreat center to be our official GAME residence. That was our original intent out here.)

I feel as if I have had no single place for collective, genuine, thorough integrity -- and -- wholeness -- since I lost (1998) and then recovered my eyesight (2003).

I guess I’d been spoiled for twenty-five years plus by New Horizons Truth or Dare GAME and the therapeutic community that developed around it.

It sure was awesome!

(The awesome “Saving Centennial Mission” was an exception to the mediocrity of the masses.

What a blessing that experience was! Not a single person in those two combined congregations did anything less than go the distance with their integrity as we tried our best to save Centennial.

That’s how we won! The experience almost made a Christian out of me.)

Returning, finally, to work in 2006, my first real experience back in the mainstream world was the fiasco I named the “Middle East Crisis In My Backyard” (manuscript in progress).

As I have previously shared (Perhaps ad nauseam for you. For me, one of my life’s biggest teaching lessons.), that incident almost broke my heart.

So I may mull it over (and share what it taught me) for the rest of my life.

It was that awful!

And, that filled with lessons.

Gifts, perhaps? We will see.

I was, already, conflicted about my Jewish heritage at the time. But that situation dramatically exacerbated an already boiling dilemma; brought identity, culture and conflict in me to a full-scale bubbling force needing a channel for expression.

New Horizons Small “Zones of Peace” Project and the conversations model Sue and I developed out of being in the midst of the controversy -- and resolving it -- became that channel.

I’m grateful for the lessons learned. The biggest one being that I am so not alone in the embarrassment I often feel at being Jewish in the 21st century.

Wendy Elisheva Somerson (Tikkun Magazine, Winter 2011) expressed some of my conflicted feelings well when she suggested that the challenge for many American Jews is that we are struggling --

“to both love ourselves as Jews and protest what is being done in our names by the Israeli and U.S. governments.”

Somerson continued, sharing her experience that parallels my own --

“fearful feelings lie inside me, ready to seep out when I am least prepared. Trying to remain rooted in a positive Jewish identity while so many Jews are visibly supporting Israel’s immoral actions sometimes awakens my fear and makes my head spin."

That comes pretty close to summarizing, at least, half of my own “Former Anti-Semitic, Recovering Jewish American Princess” dilemmas.

Confusion which, I believe, I have come to terms since that “Middle East Crisis In My Backyard.”

Now I can openly, fully and honestly be the activist I really have been for decades.

This blog has also helped me a lot in that area too.

But, enough of my kvetching about things past.

It is springtime.

And, I am enormously grateful to, once again, have a GAME community.

Even if it is, only, at the very beginning of its budding, like the springtime daffodils.

And the blossoming cherry tree abloom today in my front yard.