An end and a beginning

As the Jewish High Holy Days end, another year begins.  After today's marathon Yom Kippur services that literally occupied us until 7 PM tonight, I feel like I have fully experienced the rehearsal for death offered by this day of intensive prayer.  But I have come away with a renewed appreciation of life and all its possibilities.  It's that squeaky clean feeling of a new slate that is so intriguing.

I could talk about so many experiences today -- both as the member of a larger community and on an individual level -- but instead I will simply leave you with Mary Oliver's poem, which our rabbi Esther read at the beginning of today's service:

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.