cacophony

Today the silence is so loud I can barely think.

It crashes and echoes in my head, booming with furious empty noise. Circling around and around into infinity like a screensaver behind my eyes, hypnotizing, maddening. It hangs over me, a heavy white cloak, ominous with nothing. Thick and sticky with humidity, pressing on my chest, constricting my breathing, sufffocating.

Won’t someone please come scream in my ear?

patches for a quilt

For the first time I heard my mother admit that the Jewish beliefs she has fiercely pushed down for years and years are now fighting to come back up. She misses the traditions, she says.

As do I, I tell her.

And also for the first time I learned the progression of those beliefs and traditions. My mother explained that my grandmother had been raised in an Orthodox Jewish home; she toned down her beliefs when she married my grandfather. Thus my mother was raised in a Reformed Jewish home; she toned down her beliefs the moment she was out of my grandmother’s house. And then seemingly lost them altogether when she married my atheist-Presbyterian father. I was raised in a home without any religion at all.

Funny how it’s gotten more and more diluted with each generation. What does this mean? Is it indicative of something larger, something societal? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? A broadening of our minds, or a narrowing of our souls? Where do we learn values and morality anymore? And where will it go with me? My Judeo-Presbyterian roots can’t possibly become any more diluted than they are…

I’m thinking perhaps the pattern will have to take a turn with me – I think this as I feel the beginning tugs of a quest to fill that part of myself back up…with something. I tend to think myself a decent person, with a good upbringing and good values, but my spirituality has no backbone at all. And I don’t believe in anything.

Well, that’s not entirely true. What I don’t believe in is God The Father. Nor do I believe in Jesus The Savior. I don’t believe in Virgin Births. I don’t believe that Man Was Created In God’s Image. I don’t believe that I have a soul but my cat doesn’t. I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell or, for that matter, Eternity.

And I don’t even entirely believe in empiricism.

What I do believe in is the law of cause and effect. And I believe in fractal theory. And I believe in the cycle of life, death and rebirth. And I believe that the questions we ask determine the answers we find: I think that questions such as why are we here? and what happens to us after we die? and what is the meaning of life? simply beg the question; I believe that notions of “meaning” and “why?” are human constructs derived from the language we use (language defines thought: I believe, also, in “linguistic determinism”), and I think that “life” is not necessarily about any of these things.

(Once when I was fourteen, at the ocean one warm and windy night, the meaning of life was revealed to me in the constant and forever rhythm of the waves coming in and going out; the path of silver moonlight, the wind whipping around me…I tried to write a poem about it the next day, but by then it was gone – that sort of meaning can’t be compressed into words and it defies the mechanics of memory.)

These are the things I believe. And no one will convince me otherwise. But such beliefs lack structure. How do I find meaning in them? How do I apply them to day-to-day life? Where do I find principles and integrity in these sublime and abstract notions? The best I can come up with is some sad existentialist response that none of it really matters in the end anyway, so why worry, why care?… But that’s a pretty limp way of living. I’m looking for something more robust and definitive…

I’ve taken a recent interest in Buddhism – not as a religion, per se, but as a way of thinking. Tuesday I went with a friend to a meditation “sitting.” Sitting still and thinking nothing is harder than one might think. I fell asleep. Maybe I’ll do better next time.

And I’ve been thinking (not actually doing yet, but thinking at least) about attending services at the Unitarian Universalist church in Harvard Square.

Little by little perhaps I will begin to fill those vacant spaces in my soul back up. Give my future offspring something to work with, to build upon, rather than to further dilute. A patch-work quilt of beliefs and structures and traditions. And I guess the traditions, for their part, will just have to live on in my kitchen…my Grammy’s blueberry pies, my Nana’s motzoh ball soup, my mother’s baked orange juice chicken, and a little Cajun gumbo of my own thrown in for good measure…