I used to worry about everything. Anxiety gripped me like a fist late in the night, when I wouldn’t sleep, would toss and turn with pinballing thoughts and fears.

None were based in any sort of reality. I worried about money but had always had enough. I yearned for success and I’ve had quite a lot. I wanted love and had enjoyed a stream of boyfriends and crushes all through my life.

And so you might imagine my surprise when I discovered that the answer was so damn easy. I began studying Vedanta in April and the words on the page have transformed my life.

Swami Parthasarathy, my teacher’s teacher, is coming to Detroit in October to launch his latest book, Governing Business & Relationships.

“With no effort to build the intellect people have lost the art of thinking. As a result their lives are based on groundless belief and superstition.”

Question everything. Turn it upside down, look at its origins, discover its authenticity or lack thereof. Figure it out for yourself … do not blindly follow anyone or anything.

This morning, the sky dawns gray and cloud-filled. It will be another hot day. I am doing the work and there is much to do. Next week, the Jewish new year is upon us, sudden, soon, too early for so many as school starts on Tuesday, and the new year the next sundown.

So many moments to mark. But with meaning? Ask yourself why you do what you do. The answers may astound.

It is the most reflective time of year for Jews, and I have always been reflective. When I was observant, I found Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur impenetrable – long, introspective, soul-pounding hours of synagogue prayer and forced reflection, bookended by extremes: too-huge meals that lasted for hours or no meals at all.

The days between the two holidays are called the Days of Awe. What is awe-inspiring to me, though, is the herd mentality of the time. Go to synagogue because you always do. Listen to the rabbis admonish from the scriptures, that this is the time that God decides who will live and who will die, who will be inscribed in the Book of Life.

And then ask yourself – what do I think of all this?

Ok, this might be too heavy for a late-August blog post and nothing that you want to consider. Fair enough.

I choose to live my life in a permanent state of reflection and inquiry.

But broach the topic, even for a minute, late at night, when no one’s looking. And see what you find.

All the trappings are just that: traps.

All the externals are insignificant when faced with Life’s greatest meaning. The only problem is, most of us don’t even get close to glimpsing, let alone actually living in, the true meaning that is at the core.

“Divinity is the core of every person.” The Eternities, Swami Parthasarathy

“The goal of all religions: to discover your true nature. Draw the Divinity out of the matter layers that veil It. The word religion means that which binds one to the origin.”

So the question remains: do you believe the origin is outside of you, distant, unreachable and to be feared? Or something innate in every single being, something deep and profound and which has no recognition nor relevance in material goods or concerns?

And here’s one to ponder: all argument, all anxiety, all fear and all discomfort reside in Attachment.

I can hear you protest. I’m not attached. And of course you try to belive it. But we both know it is fear talking, not the truth walking. We are all attached to something or someone and the simple fact is that we are attached to multiple somethings and someones and those attachments weigh us down, prevent us from breathing.

Not literally.

You breathe in and out all day long, sometimes in quick staccato gasps because of panic or worry or desire. I’m talking about the elongated, purposeful breath, the one that slows you down and energizes you all at once.

We are all guilty of wanting to be first, best, most important, most beautiful. There is something in that list that rings familiar for each and every one of us, but the ultimate truth is that all that is subjective is subject to wither and die while all that is objective can have no impact nor peril on the steps you take, the progress you make.

Have you ever climbed a mountain? It is the perfect metaphor for ascending life’s challenges. My lovely boyfriend Dan sent me an essay recently that likened climbing a mountain to any challenge one faces in life and here’s what I remember from it:

Prepare. Listen to the stories of others who’ve gotten to the summit before you. Get yourself in shape for the climb is always longer than you expect. When you get there, and along the way, stop frequently to appreciate the views. After you’ve done it, tell everyone about it. Share your experience, tell your story. And move on to the next mountain. One is never enough. We each have a job to do.

Life is a series of mountains and if we cower in the shadows, at the base, looking up and wishing we could feel the clear air and inhale the minty sunlight at the top, we will never actually get there. When you are afraid, you stop yourself from truly living.

What are you doing right now? Stop to experience it, to remember it, to appreciate.

And then move on. You’ve got mountains to climb.

I read recently that one of the major problems the human race faces, at least here in immediate gratification America, is a desire to run from the valleys and seek only the hilltops. I understand this urge all too well and I also understand the writer’s assertion (sorry, I can’t remember where I read this) that no other animal species seeks to avoid the low points – they just ride the wave because that is the ebb and flow of life.

Oh, I think it was O Magazine, the current issue. In any case, today I hugged my sweet children goodbye for their last day of summer camp, knowing they will go to their father’s house at day’s end and stay with him until next Friday, when I scoop them into my minivan for our family’s annual Up North trek.

It’s only fair that they spend long uninterrupted time with their dad. I cherish it, I know. And when I filed for divorce in 2007 and rode the crests and valleys of the process through until it was final in May of 2008, the moments I feared the most were these: when my children would be away from me and I would miss them, hearing the lonely echoes of a house too big for just one person.

Mostly, I don’t sit and pine in loneliness. I am way too busy, way too involved in life itself, in swimming laps and taking yoga, in meeting friends and spending time with my love, in working working working, to catch up and make up for the times that I devote both eyes and full moments to my little ones. And this coming week, I have a full schedule, with moments of exploration, of fresh air, of contemplation, and of rest. It is well deserved and much needed and they, too, will enjoy the distance, for then the reuniting is ever so sweet.

But right now it’s a moment. I almost cried as I drove away. The trees were full over the road and the air thick with humidity. It is gray today, as it has been all week, and all these emotions like a pinball game shoot at me – guilt over the need and the desire for work, frustration at trying to please three very demanding individuals all at the same time, sheer gratitude for the gifts of my children and of my life, and sheer exhaustion as I collapse at the end of a very full day into the sweet dark of the night.

This week, I reunited with my dear friend and mentor, Susan Shapiro. She gave a reading at Borders in Birmingham of her new book, Overexposed, and I was surrounded by writer friends I hadn’t seen nor shared in their energy for way too long. I left that night brimming with energy for words and stories, for the community of storytellers, for the vibrance of the way words connect and my desire to connect them.

The next morning, I awoke early and wrote for more than an hour, discovering in the deep corners of my computer files three almost-complete book manuscripts and an array of essays that could seriously see publication. I was energized, awakened, by the old me – the one who sat on the bushy carpet at Peg’s farm, sipping white wine from a plain glass and closing my eyes to ingest the poetry being spoken. I was back in graduate school, writing my heart onto the page and sharing it with people who cared about the words and the silent pauses.

And so in this swirl of emotions, my week commences and it ends, it ebbs and it flows, in the natural course of life. Someone once said that, if we didn’t experience disappointment, we would never really know joy. I think he was right. But still, the parting is so bittersweet.

“I want to move to the country, Mommy.”

Eliana, cuddled up in my bed, as we watch Hannah Montana transform into Miley Cyrus back at her grandma’s house in Tennessee. The twang deepens. The grass shines with vibrant green. A horse gallops along the most open meadow, no end in sight.

I used to want to move to the country. In fact, at 24 I wrote a poem about how if I could rent a U-haul, I’d move my life here. Here was Staunton, Virginia, and I was on the porch with a steaming cup of coffee at Peg’s house, looking up at the mountain lift from the valley of her property.

My grad school prof read the poem and cocked his head. “You CAN rent a U-haul – for $19.99. What’s that about?”

I stayed in the city, thinking that I yearned for the country. I was young with no ties to anywhere and I could’ve moved there if I’d wanted to. Now I’m older, with three children, an ex-husband, a business, and family all over the metro area. All these things like weights tying me to where I am.

I could move to the country but then I’d have to drive a half-hour or more each day to take my kids to their wonderful school, Norup International. What do I really know about living in open fields, with animals and woods all around?

What is it about the country that pulls us? The open spaces? The absolute quiet? The supreme beauty all around? The chance to start anew and not get caught up in the busy-ness of the city?

I used to say that being an Orthodox Jew stopped me from living where I wanted to go. But I’ve removed that impediment. Now I say, when the kids are grown, or maybe when they’re ready for high school, that’s when I’ll go. And the destination gets further and further away.

I used to have a swing in my backyard from which I’d watch the nature preserve and the kids playing until snow fell. Last winter, the squirrels ate through the fabric and so I had to take it apart, limb by limb, and leave it at the curb on garbage day.

This season, no store is selling plush swings and so I have nowhere to perch.

Every so often, the memories of Peg’s farm on weekends when I lived in Washington come rolling back. We’d drink wine in glasses and sit on the carpet with our pens and notebooks in front of us. We’d read poems just-written and my grad school friends, who’d come from Pennsylvania and West Virginia and New York, would close their eyes and just listen to the way I read the words, the way they rolled off my tongue and up from my heart to put my raw emotions out for all the world to see.

That’s poetry.

Or maybe the poetry was in being there, those weekends, in taking photos at the river in Goshen and eating pancake at midnight at the Waffle House with Peg’s teenage son and his angst-filled friends.

Now her kids are parents themselves and I haven’t been there in a decade. Or longer.

A man I knew from them came calling again and then disappeared into the ether. The person I was then has returned stronger, in fullness, without the anxieties of youth and without the trappings of a decade of orthodoxy. Is it ironic that I’m dating someone who grew up in Virginia?

Eliana and I are going to the beach on Tuesday and I am ready for the moments to tumble forward, heel over toe, sand over salty water, buckets of crabs and late nights with margaritas on the porch.

Recording the moments. Living a life.

It’s always on a Saturday morning, with the window open and an owl I can’t see but can only hear cooing his hello, that I find the time to write.

Is it that the week turns into a maelstrom of to-dos and tasks? Or that, in the euphoria of the kids returning after a week with their father, I can’t even think about putting words into eternity?

Of course it is. I used to cringe when someone said there are writers and there are doers – what do you mean? Can’t I write AND do?

Of course I can. And I do. But when I am so full in the life is happening right now moments, I don’t want to break away to record it for posterity. I want to BE in the here and now.

Which is the approach I take to business, too.

We can no more bemoan the past than belabor the future. Neither exist, silly. It is only the here and now, the what’s in front of my face that matters.

Yesterday, my children came back to me after a week with their dad. I missed them crazily and when they returned to my embrace, I was reminded of all that is good and wonderful in this world.

These are the moments that make meaning. We talk so philosophically, my children and I, that we infuse our very being-together with meaning and purpose and perspective. And they’re still only 4, 6 and 8.

In every moment, there are so many gifts, my friends. We have to see them otherwise we are fearlessly arrogant, wasting time worrying, complaining, lamenting.

Life is what we make of it. Business, too. It’s all the same. Approach each moment with love, passion and purpose and you will never go wrong.

Every day, we’re starting over, though most of us believe there is a thread of continuity between yesterday-that-is-finished and today-that-has-just-begun. I believe that every moment is new, uncharted, yet to be discovered.

This blog post, for me, is like the very first one. A couple months ago, my blog was hacked, giving readers a warning message and scaring many away. I don’t know the root of this trespass, but I know it took great lengths to fix it and make my blog safe to read and to visit again.

And then the past is gone and the hack a distant memory.

The blog is safe again. I can tell my stories.

I’ve written this blog for several years now, begun as a way to motivate myself to write regularly and turned into a haven for thoughts, feelings and experiences. It’s a strange thing, a blog – a private journal for the world to see.

This blog, named for my dream of opening a cafe that would bring people together, has chronicled my own new starts again and again, which is why I am convinced of the truth in my first statement: that every day, we start anew. Truly.

And so today…I have the gift of teaching poetry to patients of Children’s Hospital of Michigan this afternoon and before that, meetings with clients so wonderful and interesting, it is a joy to do this work. The house is quiet – the children gone to their dad for the week – and the meals are simple.

They will return Friday for a Sabbath dinner I have yet to imagine and a reconnection I can taste. And then a calm weekend of the four of us in synergy, as always, my little sweet angels, the best gifts of this life.

Over the weekend, I discovered places I’d never known and ingested the movie, The Kids Are All Right. Did they mean the kids are fine, or the kids are correct? I love double entendre. The movie, it held enough meaning and questions and things to ponder to render it a success in my book.

And so. It is a quiet Tuesday morning with only a few birds calling out my office window. The sun is rising in layers. It will grow hot of course and the grass will yearn for water. It’s almost the dog days of summer.

But we are lucky, you know, as the world keeps spinning and the opportunities arise from ashes. Make it a good day, my friends, and please, keep reading.

I think we were sold a bad bill of goods on freedom when we were growing up.

I think most of us thought freedom meant the ability to run crazy, run wild, do anything and everything without any repercussions or negative effects. When in truth, freedom is the ability to make choices, to have options, to walk down any road, to think for oneself.

To practice a religion that not everyone else practices.

To eat different foods. To buy food anywhere, at any time. To earn as much money as possible – or as little as you need to scrape by.

To live in the city or the country, with the person you love, regardless of gender, belief or religion.

On this, America’s Independence Day, I am reflecting on the meaning of freedom for so many reasons. This summer, I am free from worry and anxiety because I have found a fascinating and true course of study: Vedanta.

I am free because I get up with the dawn to study and I try to reflect at the end of each day to gain objectivity and free myself from attachment to people, to material goods, to drama.

This morning, as my children and I drove past the Huntington Woods parade on our way to the Birmingham Farmers Market, I mentioned how lucky we are to live in a land where have so many freedoms. And I mentioned how much I dislike it when certain populations here in America do not recognize the 4th of July or Thanksgiving because they are not holidays in their own religious tradition.

I won’t trash particular schools or sects here, but many of you know what I’m talking about. Schools that are in session on Thanksgiving and individuals that hide inside when a red-white-and-blue parade goes by. Because it’s not their primary focus, their religion.

But the very fact of living in America is the gift of being able to observe as we choose, without excuse, without penalty. People can leave work in the middle of a normative week because of their self-chosen religious holiday and not lose their jobs. They can not eat at employer functions because the food does not meet their personal religious standards. That’s the freedom of living here – and for that, we should all be grateful.

Tonight, we are joining old friends for the Huntington Woods fireworks and I dare say, fireworks are the best expression of this notion of freedom.

Exploding shapes and paintings of vivid color against a peaceful night sky, as if mere words cannot dare to convey all the passion and emotion we have in the face of being raised on a landscape of supreme freedom.

Enjoy your lakeside celebrations and your barbecues. I will. But keep in mind, we are here and we are as good as we are because we have never had to endure the force of fear that keeps so many people in this world in a cave of ignorance. God Bless America.

When I lived in Ferndale, seemingly in another life (before I was married, before I was Orthodox, before I had kids), I read the New York Times every Sunday. I turned first to the Weddings pages and read the stories of how people found each other, how people found love.

I imagined then that I would meet someone one day, the person I would marry and build a life with, and we would, together, read the Sunday NYT together – over coffee, with 94.7 Sunday Morning Over Easy on the radio. We wouldn’t talk, we’d just pass a section to the other when we had finished with it, and between us would hover that unspoken contentedness that I imagined, yearned for.

That did not happen with my marriage.

Perhaps I should have seen it as a sign of incompatibility. But the image faded from mind and I delved into what would become my life for eight solid years of less-than-happy.

So now…the old image is back and I realize that I am finally living it.

It’s Sunday morning and Dan is still asleep. Outside, the birds are chirping their morning song and inside, the scent of the dinner we made last night together lingers.

Yesterday, we strolled the Royal Oak Farmers Market, selecting swiss chard, fresh eggs, patty pan squash and heirloom tomatoes, for slicing and sauteing in my kitchen together.

It was Chris Isaak on the CD player and candles flickering on the counter and every few steps – he at his cuttinb board, me at mine, or both of us flitting between pans on the stove – we’d brush past one another and stop with a subtle smile and a nestle into the other.

On Sundays, at Dan’s apartment, we read the New York Times.

Just now, I flitted to the newspaper’s website to glance at the weddings featured there, and I watched a video of how one couple met. In San Francisco, in 2002, they found each other and realized all the things they liked and believed in matched. They started working together, living life together, inhabiting the same air.

It’s like that with us, though our children complicate the picture, certainly.

Until you find that person, that one whose presence makes everything more colorful, more breathable, more beautiful, it’s impossible to imagine it. It’s not mere love – it’s not mere companionship.

It’s a grounding in the idea that I-belong-here and we-were-meant-for-each-other. Everything else stands still.

Ok, I’ll stop waxing poetic about my midlife boyfriend. But truthfully, there are no words for that merging of two minds, two souls, two bodies – it’s a miracle that it ever happens, a precious gift that opens one’s eyes to all the possibilities in Life.

It’s amazing how the senses can take you back.

This morning, I placed my nose close to the hot cup of Elite coffee, swirling from the spoon and lightened by milk, and suddenly, I was back in Jerusalem in 1996, spending Shabbat at Heritage House.

It was a time when I didn’t mind sleeping on a bunk bed and carrying my belongings in a backpack. I allowed myself to be compelled by the crowd of girls in long skirts, flowing down the stone steps of the Old City toward the Western Wall Saturday morning, thrust forward into the sunlit day by the enthusiasm of a millennia-old observance of this single day of rest.

I lit candles on Friday night with the girls in the hostel and listened to their rhetoric about the sanctity of the day.

I ignored the gender separation and fully tasted the thick, chewy, sweet Yerushalmi Kugel late morning in the top-floor apartment of a rabbi in a fur hat who spoke only Hebrew and Yiddish. Sitting with the girls and women, in skirts and long sleeves on an 80-degree day, I watched as they marveled at the fact that it was the rabbi himself who made this noodle pudding every week and invited strangers to hear his Torah discourse from the privacy of his home.

I was there. All from inhaling the scent of a cup of coffee in my summer-cool kitchen, where the windows were open and the only sounds came from the birds and insects outside.

And I was there when the slight pull of my window shade startled a tall, smooth deer to leap over the fence and out of my yard this past Friday morning. I knew suddenly the source of the death of my garden vegetables, I knew who had been snipping down the green beans before they could grow to full height.

And suddenly I didn’t mind.

The deer was so beautiful, so innocent, so lean, how could I mind that he is the reason I will not harvest green beans this fall? So what! I have so many other options for produce and for nutrition; he does not.

Some say that if you don’t love everything, you don’t love anything, and I’m beginning to see this as true. We are at our best moments when we strive to love something or someone who has given us trouble, made our lives difficult.

But you know, it’s not hard anymore. I almost love those individuals or instances more than the ones that are easy to love.

It is easy to love my little boy in his soccer-ball pajamas, his knees bent into the soft covers at night, his pudgy hands lacing around my neck in a hug. It is easy to love my beautiful, sweet daughter, and my earnest, book-engrossed older son.

It is easy to love my sweet father this father’s day, with his ham radio and his infinite knowledge of history and science and the way the world works, and it is easy to love my mother, whose enthusiasm is as innocent as the morning dew and who cherishes her family so much.

I won’t enumerate here the ones it’s not easy for me to love. But I will say this: I am learning to love one and all, learning to see the beauty in the dog’s defacation on my sidewalk and the turncoat former friend. For compassion reigns supreme, and everyone is fragile in some way.

For now, I will return to the sensory identification with moments from this life and hopefully today, find new ones that will bring me back to this single instant in time.

The air was heavy through the open windows, held in the caress of the coming rain.

It had been a perfect night, a night of quiet, a night of rapture in a book, of not being able to put it down, of not wanting to turn out the light. And when she did, she lay awake under mounds of blankets, the fresh air a single repetitive kiss on the top of her nose, the only part she dared to bare to the wind.

And then she slept.

It was a long, comfortable sleep and one which arched into morning, as the sun rose gray in the rainy shadows and she hit the snooze button not once, but three times until finally climbing into the day.

And then it was a new day.

There is always a new day, she thinks. The house is quiet in the dawn, the kind of quiet she can inhabit.

Could this day be like a seamless stream, one project drawing her to the next, one meeting subtly turning over into another? She was tired from driving from distant points, across a town dotted with construction barrels and slow-moving cars.

She realized, in the hopeful dawn, that hers was a life of proposals and promises, of projects and starting-overs, constantly, every day. A to-do list that would never be completed, for she kept adding, gratefully so, to its expectations.

A filling life. A satisfying life. A life of gratitude and of service and of opportunity and of gift.

And in those first moments, before she began to cross off items, before she began to accomplish and satisfy, she reflected on the way the river tumbles through the dam, and down the steppes. How it buckles over itself and makes that fast sound, the sound of being in a hurry to get to the next place.

But of course, the water is not in a hurry. It can’t be. It is, rather, forced into its fast pace but a series of tightenings and then, eventually, it always spreads out into a meander.

She liked that analogy. She inhabited it, turning to the window to look at the sky.

The clouds seemed to move as fast as she remembered that river. But the story always intensifies in memory.

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