i have embarked on yet another fellowship application adventure...one question that I have been marinating on for a while is,
describe an encounter wiht a creative work (film, play, book, music, etc) that had an impact on you....
i amazed at how much trouble this question has been given me...
of all the countless movies books and plays, have any of them actually changed me in a lasting way? if so, how?
i am really not sure i've read any work of fiction, seen any film or play, or heard any music that has had that kind of lasting impact on me in since i've been in college. i've been in lit courses, but the book-a-week pace precludes the faintest possibility of developing meaningful relationships with a work. the only books i could read slowly in college were my science text books--they may not have all been works of art, but at least i could develop a relationship with them.
maybe i'll talk about The Colossus, that Sylvia Plath (dammit, i still can't remember whether it's PLatt or PLath) poem I read and read and read for three months in eleventh grade, or that Checkov short story (I want to say the Darling, but that doesn't sound quite right) that I hated the first time, but was amazing by on the 15th or 20th reading....
maybe i'll write about the niggun that elizabeth brought with her all the way from South Africa, which is now spreading wildly up and down the east coast...

i meditated in adam's morgan at the house of steve, who i met this shabbat at the zoo minyan. there were a few people there, and there wasn't a ton of jewish content, or any content for that matter...he took us into it, and took us out, but most of it was sitting silently on some cushions in a house i had not seen except in candellight, surrounded by other silent people i did not know, keeping as still as i could, and breathing....stillness for that long shakes lose the tracks of time, so i am not sure how long it was, but i'll bet it was at least a half hour. then we blessed and ate grapes, and i could really feel the effects of my meditation. it sounds hokey perhaps, but it was very intense. i sat there with the grapes in my hands for a while, just enjoying how cool they felt in my palm. then i blessed them, and put them in my mouth, and held them there, and bit down very, very slowly, so that it took me some 15 minutes maybe to eat three grapes.
i want to be able to live like that. taking fifteen minutes to eat a grape. taking three months, as we did in 11th grade rabbinics, to read a single sentence.