While I was getting ready to write this column, several earth-shakings were rattling around me. For instance, I’ve just spoken by phone with a dear friend. She is facing the moment when the medical team has run out of Things to Try and her husband’s dangerous illness may be tipping off the Edges of The End. 

Meanwhile, on another front, judging from my sources, the breaking news re the new American anti-semitism are so extreme, bizarre and unfathomably wicked that well-informed, credible observers are marking the end of the American-Jewish Vacation from History. It’s back. The damn thing is back. We thought we had left it behind.

And yet, and yet – despite this in the foreground and that in the background – my own story has lately acquired some unexpected features. These brand-new and still-to-be-assimilated features are what I’ll be reporting and sharing with you here.

For openers, I’ve become aware of God’s Presence to a degree from which I’ve felt blocked from realizing – self-shielded? – up to now. One of the accompanying changes is an intensification of perception. Particularly out of doors. Like the moving aside of a curtain to disclose the stage lit up behind it, this change has allowed me to notice a world more intensely colored and heart-catchingly beautiful than I’d been able to see before. Or perhaps had not seen since I was quite a small child. 

A second change, just as surprising, is a new-found ability to roll with the punches. Here’s one example: in recent weeks, lo and behold! I’ve been unceremoniously dumped by a woman friend of twenty years. I don’t know if more “ceremony” would have made the dumping any better, but the lack of ceremony (peppered with a slew of phony excuses) makes it pretty abrupt. This is actually a new one in a lifetime of experience with women friends. Ordinarily, I’d call it shocking. The next thing I would normally have done is to brood over it, turning it up and over in my mind, trying to think of different ways to reconstruct and construe what happened. 

Instead, I’m taking it in now the same way I take in plain facts like the changes in weather in the month of March. Where before I would have felt the dumping as my responsibility to repair or cure, instead mentally I let her go as soon as I saw what she was up to. Not worth thinking about. So … I don’t. Go figure.

Then there’s one more change, the third change, which may still be ongoing. At present, this one seems unfinished, though perhaps they all are. It’s hard to define, but it’s something like trust in the working-out of life, without having to keep it all under control, and without feeling never- sufficiently-caught-up. 

As it happens, I took up riding again this week. Normally, if a horse dumps you, at least it won’t be with phony excuses. So I can describe the third change as a sense of riding with a looser rein. I note somewhat less background fear of the uncertainties of life, the ones that may lie ahead. More of a feeling of faith in the prospects of life, trust in the future in a broad sense, riding the flow-in-time-and-space, going along with the dynamics of life. 

The upshot of all these changes? It seems to be an enhanced tolerance for my own life rhythm – 

its ebb and flow,

its native nature.