East vs. West

Rocky Mountain National Park

About three minutes after Tanya and I began our hike from the Deer Ridge Junction Trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park, my breaths became labored.  My lungs recalled before I did that I had, over the course of two days, shifted about 9,500 feet in altitude.  The result was my requiring three hours to cover an easy five miles, my pace reminiscent of an elderly rehab patient.  Maybe with a walker I could have moved a bit more briskly.

That said, it was a glorious Shabbat:  the weather was beautiful, the scenery lovely.  When we took a rest and snack break, a majestic bird of iridescent blue (I've concluded, after a few minutes of Googling, that it was a Steller's Jay) was gracious enough to hang with us for a while and I fed it some sunflower seeds.  Another highlight from yesterday was sitting with Tanya at a rural, stream-side coffee shop, sipping our drinks in the sun.  

It was nice to be a Westerner again for a day - here in Boulder for CU Parents' weekend.  Not that living in the West means being able to live a life of leisure.  It's more of the outward focus - the value on the physical and the natural.  

My huffing and puffing along Deer Mountain trail served to remind me that this is no longer my element.  I have chosen, at least for now, to cast my lot with the heady and driven inner-focused culture that is the D.C. area.  My struggles for breath on the mountaintops of Western Colorado brought to mind the struggles I am having adapting myself to the mores of a more traditional, more structured, more detail-oriented East-coast Judaism.  Simply asking, "Is it meaningful?" is not sufficient in an environment that is more concerned with, "Is it correct?"  

I suppose my life is in line with all the Jewish world right now - metaphorically homeless and dwelling (or at least eating) in sukkahs:  temporary and fragile backyard huts, open wide to the elements.  We are all wanderers for this week of Sukkot -- all living uneasily between things, all teetering on the edges of established societies.  

We traditionally read on Sukkot from the book of Kohelet:  הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל
"Breath of breaths, all is breath," is one way to translate.
It could mean that everything, being transient, is meaningless.  I can't and don't accept that particular interpretation.
Breath is transient and unseen and it's also the foundation of all life.  The oxygen we breathe so often goes ignored by us, but does that make it insubstantial?  At 10,000 feet, having been working on acclimating to sea level, I can feel Kohelet's meaning.  "All is breath," is about the unique significance of the transient, the dependence we build (wisely or unwisely) on a particular environment, and about how the totality of life can be seen as the stringing together of small and momentary triumphs, disappointments, adaptations, encounters and revelations.