A poem for Nissan, and an everyday reminder.
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מצרים לא יכול לִמצוֹא במפה מצרים לא יכול לִמצוֹא באטלס לצאת ממצרים היא כל יום לצאת ממצרים היא קפיצה נפשית אנו חיים בעולם של חלומות ועלינו להתעורר את עצמנו למקום חדש פראי ופתוח בתוך רחם פראי לִמצוֹא לא לבד אנחנו ברחמנות בתוך המקום שבו הדשא לא יכול להיקרא קש ורגב לא יכול להיקרא לבנה כדי לִמצוֹא את השם של(ך/נו) בחיי כל חייהם וכל שמשתנה במדבר מעבר החלומות של בני אדם |
Mitsrayim cannot be found on a map
Mitsrayim cannot be found in an atlas Leaving Mitsrayim is every day Leaving Mitsrayim is a mental leap We live in a world of dreams and we must awaken ourselves into a new place wild and open within a wild womb to discover we are not alone with compassion within the Place, where grass cannot be called ‘straw’ and a clod of earth cannot be called ‘brick’ to find (y)our name in the life of all that lives and all that changes in the Wilderness beyond the dreams of human ken |
A stream of flowers between fields of wheat (credit: unknown, copyright orphan)
This is pretty much how I understand the Exodus as allegory for a daily practice of being liberated from self-delusion.
“where grass can never be called straw” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
This poem that I wrote on this date last year (11 April 2016) is an argument for expansive interpretation over narrow translation, especially when encountering the language of myth and dreams. If language limits the extent to which we can think and dream, so too the broader language of symbolic associations through which meaning is invented. A surefire way to limit the capability of a myth as a vehicle for allegory and metaphor is to specify its setting and characters in history and geography. For this reason, I never translate מדבר (midbar) as desert, or מצרים (mitsrayim) as Egypt. It’s not that I oppose these associations. Rather, I want myth to remain potent, useful, and wise rather than irrelevant, obscure, or even mistaken for history. חג פסח שמח