Moving Through Days

Finding anchors in the flow of time

When you are hit with something hard and unexpected, it can unmoor you. Knock you down. I know others have described similar experiences like being slapped in the face. The ground pulled out from under you. A loss of your connection to those things that you have counted on, taken as givens, assumed would always be true. 

Even if we intellectually know that life is uncertain and filled with unpredictable challenges, that idea can feel just like an idea, until it hits you like a wave.

Looking back on the past few months, my relationship to time has been punctuated by moments that shifted everything.

Being told that my EKG in the emergency was not normal.

Hearing the concern in the pulmonologist’s voice when he showed me my chest CT.

Reading my lung biopsy results.

Meeting with the oncologist to learn about my treatment ahead.

Each one of these moments loosened my connection to normal time. With each successive interaction, I floated farther above my normal life, away from my routine with its predictable components and expected plans. So much that I had planned for and focused on before fell away. My mind became uncluttered in a strangely clarifying way; I could only focus on one thing, really. I had little energy for anything else. It all became hazy, receding into the background.

But without my usual attachments, I grew more withdrawn. Isolated.

When I teach, I often begin by asking my students a question that one of my teachers would ask: 

What is your makom (place) right now, today? Where do you find yourself? What are you holding?

This question is meant to be understood spiritually, emotionally, psychologically.

When my teacher began class with that question, it offered us an opportunity to ask that of ourselves before we began learning: from where were we coming? What were we carrying with us into the learning that day?

It was always a gift - to take a moment to locate and ground ourselves in this moment in time. 

And so I often ask my students the same thing, at the start of a class. Even when we show up to a class together at the same time, we are all arriving from different places, with different spiritual baggage in tow. It helps the learning process, I think, to name our makom, with honesty.

Since all of this began, I have been trying to remember what I teach and teach myself - remind myself - to use the practices I share with students.

Feeling increasingly unmoored, I came back to that question: what is my makom? Where am I in this moment?

There are so many ways one could answer that. But in order to get more grounded, I leaned towards the very literal. Where am I in time right now?

I always find so much nurturing wisdom in the Jewish calendar, so I often start there. The Hebrew month, the cycle of holidays, the moon’s stage. All are meaningful locators. 

When the scariness of all of this began, we were in the Hebrew month of Cheshvan. Mar Cheshvan. The “bitter” month because of its absence of holidays. Yep. That bitterness checked out. The nature of that month, in a way, gave me permission to feel horrible about what had just hit my life. I was very scared and angry, and during Cheshvan I sat in that. That’s where I was, and I allowed that to be. 

But we soon moved into Kislev, and with the coming new month of Hanukkah, I started to feel more defiance and a bit more courageous - which is what Kislev gifted me. An invitation to look for light everywhere, in secret and bold places. And I began to notice it and record it and share it, so I might encourage myself to lean more and more in its direction. Looking for light buoyed my heart and reconnected me to others and the world outside my home’s door.

With the start of 2025, all I felt was winter. Gray, cold winter. 

That was my makom.

A few years ago, author Katherine May published a beautiful book that changed my relationship to winter. In her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times,  she talks about her own personal struggles and her use of the concept of ‘wintering’ as a spiritual tool to retreat in order to heal and gather strength. 

Every winter, I return to that book and let May sanction my retreating during this season, but this year, its importance took on new depths. 

I really needed time to rest and retreat and withdraw a bit. I knew that if I didn’t, I would not find the strength to do what I had to do to heal.

My makom is winter right now. I’m sinking into winter.

And Irish poet and author David Whyte gave me further reassurance that retreating was permissible and important, as he writes in his book Consolations:

Hiding is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, he held bud of a future summer rose, the snowbound internal pulse of the hibernating bear. Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world...Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children, or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named...Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

I appreciated some time to hide.

But winter is also the preparation for what follows it, as author Jarod K. Andersen writes in his heartbreakingly beautiful book Something in the Woods Loves You:

The bare trees. The gray sky. The stillness of absent life.

These things are the surface of winter.

But winter isn’t an ending.

Winter is the deep breath before a song.

Yes. That is also true, and also what I needed to remember. That my rest and retreat is opening up space to gather the strength I need to move through these next steps, and they are also the precursor to renewal. I need that vision of the horizon as much as I need to see the ground under my feet.

And now we are in the Hebrew month of Shevat. That month of listening deeply, closely to the natural world so that we can begin to hear the sap rising underneath the cold bark of the trees. It is a month when new growth, new possibilities start to stir - even when we can’t see them. It is a time to plant seeds. And to trust that something new will bloom if we can be patient.

That’s where I am today. Opening to rest and retreat, and, at the same time, planting the seeds of what I am trusting will emerge in several months. 

Remembering that we move through arcs of time that give us space for different stages, different stopping points.

Feeling the Bitterness. Looking for Light. Retreating. Seeding. Trusting.