Everything cracks open before it grows. From the big bang that created our universe, to the tiny seed that will become a mighty tree, to the deep spaces in the human heart that must fracture to love and be loved, breaking down to breakthrough is a law of nature.
The name for the land of the Jewish people’s physical, historical enslavement, ancient Egypt, is mitzrayimLit. Egypt. Because the Hebrew word for narrow is tzar, Mitzrayim is also understood as "narrowness," as in, the narrow and confining places in life from which one emerges physically and spiritually., which means “narrow straits.”
When our ancestors fled their captors through the water walls of the Red Sea, like a great stem bursting through wet earth, it was only the beginning of our journey to freedom. For freedom is something you build by allowing the breaking open, again and again. We sing the Mi Chamocha blessing to continue getting free.
Life is the spiritual soil that helps us compost and shed what doesn’t serve, as we squeeze up through the hard places toward the light. It is our great difficulties that help simplify, strengthen, and lift us back to the core values of peace, kindness, integrity, faith, and compassion. It is through the digestive darkness that we root to rise.
I believe we are in a great narrowness, so many of us confined to the isolated neural pathways and doom scrolling of our own inherited and habitually reified shame, scarcity, and fear. This resonates out to how we treat each other, constricted and inhumane.
It’s time to live out the answers to these questions: How can we use this time as an opportunity to let go of attachments to place and story? How can we allow the current inner and outer mitzrayim of the world to rupture and bloom us together into a garden of infinite love and unconditional belonging? I ask myself daily, how can I love myself, the earth, and others into freedom?
