New Beginnings

We think of Jan 1 as a new beginning, but today I was thinking of how many more new beginnings there actually are.Today I am making a new beginning in staying true to spending some time blogging every day. Certainly, Spring is a new beginning, with the little green buds peeking out of bare branches, and the leafing of trees, but each season has its own new beginning as well. In the Summer, we begin to have longer days, we begin to think of vacations, we start to harvest the crops that we have planted earlier--even urbanites have pots of tomatoes that are delicious right off the vine. In the Fall, the kids start back to school for a new school year, a new beginning to make a good impression on new teachers, new friends. There are new schedules and new arrangements. My cousins just took their oldest son to college and got him settled in, while the kids at home are beginning to see how life will be without their oldest brother there. The college boy is beginning life without his parents to consult every day; he is starting the most independent part of his life, and he is beginning to see what life is like without his two siblings close by every day. The kids at home have more room, and the kid away has the world at his feet. For us Jews, although it is the seventh month of the year, it is a new year, the season when our Torah is wound all the way back to the beginning, and we begin the cycle of reading all over again, so that with maturity, we may gain new insights. Each year, when we begin again to read the words “In the beginning”, I feel chills run up my spine. It is a new beginning: A new year in which to do a better job that the one we did last year, a year in which to be more aware, more helpful, more grateful. We will be passing through a period when people send each other cards that say “May you be inscribed for a good year”, because the imagery is that G-d will write your name in the book of health and life and wholeness, or not. There are ten days between the opening of the holiday, and the time when we say that the gates are closing. Those ten days are, or should be, days of contemplation, days during which we reflect on promises not kept, on behavior that may have been dishonest or hurtful to others, and on the asking of forgiveness of those we might have wronged in some way. Another new beginning, yes? So we reflect and we pray, and there is a new day, each day to do a better job than we did the day before. But in order to begin again, we must rest and regenerate and reinvent. In the same way Winter is the way the world rests, we sleep. It too is the beginning of new thinking, of the creation of new cells that we need to live and be vital, for if we never rested, we would always be in a tearing down process. The most delicious apples need cold nights to be sweet the following harvest, so even though I have lived in California most of my life, I know that there are crops that need to be buried under a layer of snow for a time to be optimum during their new beginnings. Every day we humans have the opportunity to call the moment from which we open our eyes a new beginning. And surely there is something that we can find in every day for which to be grateful. And that in itself is a new beginning.