I stood on the mountain peak and could see for miles. It was quiet, the sound of the air moving and also still, as it swirled around me. Below me, things happening, creatures were living, little particles of dirt were turning over and over, but I saw none of this, just the panorama before me, close and far.

I called from the mountaintop, my voice echoing all around against the magnificent mountainsides. Always speak your truth.

Later, there was a tugboat tethered by rope to a dock. The water was calm, the sun setting beyond the horizon line in oranges and yellows. No waves to rock the boat. The boat tied to the dock. I was the only person there. The water was dark and still. I had no idea what was beyond the distance.

Familiar faces at my fence, clinging to the fabric of metal workings, begging to be let in. Go away, I told them. I cannot be bothered by you. They screamed but at some point I simply stopped listening. Trespass.

And then the bucking horse, unbridled, kicking its nose to the sky and its feet to the dust, a storm cloud of dirt kicked up in a swirl around it. It was angry and fierce and unwilling to be tamed. As the cowboys wandered in aimless circles, confused around the campfire, I watched from afar, understanding perfectly.

The man’s beard was orange and white. The bird alighted on the branches of an evergreen, whose pine needles were orange. And orange is the second chakra, the chakra of creativity, of taste, of water, of self-acceptance and emotion and the energy of love.

Go the place you would least expect to travel, the teacher said. Subject yourself to the light which will illuminate what is right for you.

I looked at the purple lantern on my desk, the papers in neat piles, the open window issuing sounds so similar to that mountaintop. The distance is near. I understand. It’s all good. Perfect, even.

And the rain came down. It was a steady flow that began before the sunrise after a night of surprises and momentary wakefulness. The rain trickled along the window screens and created puddles on the pavement. In front of the school, pollen-filled pods had created a carpet on the cement.

She couldn’t have anticipated the order of events over the course of those warm-weather days but she rode them like a surfer experienced in the art of understanding ocean waves. The Sabbath rest bookended by exertion - a gathering around the decorated table with bread fashioned from the hard work of her hands. A hike along the sloping greens, intoxicated with the scent of pine needles and fertile soil. A ponderous few moments in a Japanese garden where she recognized the soothing qualities of smooth round pebbles beneath her bare feet and the clay-tinged water advancing over steppes.

So many familiar colors but in any given moment, they took on a different depth.

Every year, the rains came. And every year, it was as if the first time. Just like the first snow, and the first swim, and the first stroll through the farmer’s market, and the first tomatoes from the garden.

The garden had yet to be planted but she knew it was just a matter of time.

You know the answers, she told her best friend.

I know. I’m not ready to hear them.

Everything I need to know is right under my nose. Signs are everywhere, if I’m willing to see them.

I keep hearing the word ships in relationships. I keep hearing about anchors, sailing metaphors, take to the water, feel the wind in my hair, the sun on my shoulders. The water came into my life a year ago and it’s taking me along on its currents, the flow, the steady rush of going somewhere, never stopping. Water as the source of life, where we begin, never-ending.

Every message that comes to me is important. The only thing that works against me is me. We get in our own way.

Be more playful. Listen. Let go. God is sprinkling magic dust on your crown chakra.

In truth, there is nothing in my way. Ever. I am always in control. I can tell the spirits to speak more softly or slow down or withhold their message until I’m ready to hear it.

The pain on the left side of my throat as I channel heaven: my voice is clear, people hear me, but I am not listening.

Listen to the message. Don’t interpret. Listen to the words exactly.

Higher purpose. Look for the light. Where is the good? Because it’s always there. How does the information come to me? The opposite of fear is love, is trust. Trust trust trust.

The world is an illusion. Answers are everywhere. Self-evident. The core of the matter. Tree of life. Anchor, ships, sailing on the plentiful seas.

A boy stands at the mailbox in a striped shirt and jeans rolled up at the ankles, Converse sneakers. I think they’re red. He is shadowed by the leafy branches of the tree above him. He holds a skateboard at his feet and a Beagle - is it Clancy, my grandparents’ dog from the 1970s? When I call to him, ask his name, who are you?, he disappears into the shadows.

A kitchen bowl on the counter. Late morning sunlight. We are about to bake so the children will awake to the scent of something handmade and good.

And then I’m looking at a lake though the water is murky. I cannot see into the deep. In the center, it’s dark. The fishing line extends for a far reach.

And then the Indigo Girls are singing, “I’m trying to tell you something about your life.” The light filters through tall trees. A skyscraper apartment-building looms above me on that bend in the road from Evanston to Chicago. Everywhere I turn, voices calling to be heard.

At the end, the scent of someone familiar. Either soap or cologne or a mingling of a soft touch. I know who it is. My eyes are closed but he is there, I can smell him on my hair. I open my eyes. Just me. And it is quiet in the night.

Winter runs off into spring. Thunder-splash as the serene still pond shoulderse into the canal and plummets over abrupt cliffs. All thought drowned out to the music of water crashing into a tidy stream.

But it doesn’t even out for a distance. Instead, the rush continues along the throat of the river until the fingers of the banks on either side calm the flow into steady on forward.

A river never really ends. It shortens and falls, grows bigger with snow melt, then narrows once again in the thick of summer.

We know this familiar story. It comes again and again, like a toddler at bedtime choosing the same books. But each time, the words alight in different ways and the cadence of the mother’s voice is never similar, only familiar.

I’ve walked the flowering paths of spring so many times. I’ve basked in the glow of summer twilight and bare shoulders against the scratchy grass. I’ve huddled into the folds of autumn color as if it happened only once and every winter, I marvel at the snowfall as it comes down.

Soon, asparagus stalks will spear the air and ask for picking. Soon, morels will sprout around moldy old tree trunks. Soon, the schoolhouse doors will open wide like the throat of the river as it becomes a full-on lake and the children will pour out in abandon and ecstasy toward the endless summer.

But now. This moment. The scent of dirt paths and the call of waking birds. A murky pond gulps with the life blooming beneath its surface. The rumble and shudder of trucks come to placate the lawn.

I sit in the silence and caress its fingers. Last summer Dog Mountain, this summer an unnamed path, equally beautiful, offering inspiration new and imagined.

In the aftermath of childhood, the rebellion is small. For most people, a walk down a different street, a few too many drinks in college.

And then, the path converts to familiar trails - suburban avenues and wide residential streets, ploughed for snow in winter and in the summer, peppered with the clarion calls of children in sun-lit afternoons, the sounds of easy seasons echoing among the leafy trees.

For others, the path demands definition. Like spokes of a wheel, so many directions to go and which to choose?

A thousand metaphors speak in the dawn of spring. A door closes, a window opens. Sometimes what seems like a tragedy actually signals good things around the corner. You don’t know what tomorrow brings.

Once, I sipped wine on the carpet in a Virginia farmhouse. We were scattered around a low-ceilinged room, papers open on our laps and books bent back to save favorite pages. In full-on night, the darkness cloaking the small house whose eaves creaked and cats sat on windowsills watching, we read our words like drops of our own blood.

Mornings there, the coffee was sweet and rich, made as it was with river water. The foothills arched up from the valley in which the house sat and the sun rose over their shoulders.

With peaked knees, we sat on the balcony deck outside the kitchen and drank in the sun.

The cows moved aside as we walked up the hills to the cresting arches and sat under leafy trees to put our thoughts into words. They were beautiful times, the words a secret language between people from disparate stories.

Every spring, I think about trucking the children across state lines back to Peg’s farm. It would be different, I know. Maybe the hills would seem smaller or the words less significant or maybe, in the midst of children needing their mother, there would be no words except for the simplest ones.

I used to take the turns of curving roads so fast, leaning into the music on my radio. When I drove there at night, I raced the screaming train.

Now, when the waters are pressing mightily, wrote Yehuda Amichai.

It’s just one week of eating different foods to remember a time we never lived. Just a week of difference and we ache in its midst.

Today, the sun is shining and it promises to be warm. The children are waking slowly. A last day together with nothing pressing against the doorframes. Tomorrow, life as usual.

the watches that stopped telling time,
and how much breath,
a whirlwind of breath,
to sing the small song of spring.
(Yehuda Amichai)

Zesting the blood oranges, then squeezing the black-red juice over the whole chicken, skin and all. The halves stuffed inside for flavor, for aroma, for seeping through the skin and meat to the bone.

Olive oil drizzled over top and spices - garlic, onion, salt, pepper, paprika. Baked at 350 until the juices run clear and then tearing the pieces away from the whole, slicing thin pieces of meat into the juices.

Broccolini sauteed and simmered with garlic until crunchy-soft. Mushrooms - baby bellas and shitakes - soft and fragrant. A salad of shredded cabbage, salted pumpkin seeds, scallions and avocado, dressed in balsamic vinegar.

The kids came home with hugs. The table was set for dinner. But first, chocolate lollipops and Mamma Mia on the TV. “You got it from the movie store,” they exclaimed as if it were the greatest gift.

The baby nuzzled the mother’s cheek repeatedly. The older children kept climbing into her lap. The bath swept in current and wave. The baby peed on the toilet for the first time. There was calm. There was synergy. They were home.

…he hears the cheep of winter birds searching the snow for crumbs of garbage and knows exactly how much light and how much darkness is there before the dawn…he thinks of places he has never seen but heard about, of the great desert his father said was like no sea he had ever crossed and how at dusk or dawn it held all the shades of red and blue in its merging shadows…he had come to live for those suspended moments… (Every Blessed Day, Philip Levine)

Before they returned, she hiked through leaf-covered muddy paths, the trees bare enough to gleam the sun onto her face. It was beautiful and whole and she turned her face to seep it in.

Before they returned, a voice on the line from so many years before familiar in its folding. They shared a name though they were not family and he spoke of his three-year impossible love. She remembered the sound of the river rushing past the window at his house where she slept. She kept it open at night just to feel the pace of the river moving on its way.

She had climbed the Big Horn Mountains and eaten cheese and sausage by an ice lake, in which she saw a bear claw floating. She turned away because there was so much else to see.

Before they returned, late afternoon sunlight walked in through the open door, announcing what was forthcoming, establishing the day. The house isn’t so bad, she told herself, and thought it again when the daughter bounded in, her blond hair bouncing and the door swinging slowly closed behind her. The now is good, she told herself as the children collapsed into her open arms. Rich enough for me.

I never learned to really love. The love for my children was the closest I came and all these years, what I mistook for romantic love was infatuation, lust, desire, yearning. An attempt to fill the silence with someone other than myself. An attempt to avoid the silence altogether.

Only the love for my children did I give fully into, instinct and pleasure, fear mixed with dread and desperation and admiration at the sheer miracle of them. Of wanting to be near them, to smell their softness, to brush my lips along their pillowy skin and watch their eyes kindle in daylight.

The only fears inherent in loving my children are the fears of misleading them, of losing them, but never a right fear of rejection. I knew from the minute my soul touched theirs that I would snuggle into the moments, trail my fingertip along their little hands, drink up the looks they gave only to me.

If I am to do it right, I give myself entirely to my children, to infuse them with such a sense of fullness that wherever they go in the world and whatever they do, they will walk tall and speak loudly. It was never a question.

So why, then, have I never given myself over in abandon and without thought to the love of another, a peer, whose soft touch and gentle voice illuminates the night?

I don’t know and I won’t attempt to force an answer in this blog.

What I do know is the light is shining bright and I can smell the day. I am content in the not knowing. I am thirsty only for moments.

I have long insisted that the journey is the destination. I believe it even if I don’t live it entirely. And now, I face an uncertain future recognizing that all futures are uncertain and the only definites are the here-and-now which are very much worth living slowly, deliciously, in full sense and voice.

The sheets are soft and comforting. In the silence, the warmth of an arm and a hand trailing over mine are all I need. A simultaneous laugh, even the belly-shake of a shared joke, is enough.

A burst of flavor on the tongue like a watermelon jelly bean or a bite of Jaffa clementine.

In my hand are little perfect glass marbles, glinting the reflection of the light. They are smooth and small and if I turn my hand over, they will fall amid the carpet and I will be down on my knees in search of them. I hold them gently, feeling the cool roundness on my palm. I don’t know when I’ll put them down nor where, just that right now, these perfect little orbs are gifts for me to ponder and that’s exactly what I am doing.

I used to worry in the darkness about what might happen, the what-ifs of the non-existent future. It never occurred to me that the worries were pointless, that nothing I could turn over in my mind like a towel folded to go into the closet would make any difference for the day to follow or the one after that.

The worry filled the silence and helped me avoid recognition of the empty hours in which I sat. I filled my days with people and noises, but not meaning, not purpose, not focus. This was a long time ago and yes, I still ponder the moments and the meanings. But far less and far more quickly.

When I walk beneath the pine, I stop to savor the scent. I listen to the music from my iPod without measuring the words.

Last night, the moon was full from my window, the air milky cool. I lay in my bed a long time, hugging the pillow and imbibing the silence. It was a long, lean night and I almost did not want to climb from my bed this morning except that my eyes were alight and my ideas like a waterfall.

Sometime in the midst of it all, I realized that I had missed the point so many times. Making love is the path to merging with a true love; I never realized that before now. The highest form of utter connection, of interweaving souls and spirits.

My vision was obscured for decades, my path cluttered by fallen pine cones.

I am balancing easily, like a plane lifting off. The silence is blue and soothing, water on the horizon. The seas are calm, a lover’s hand waving me closer.

It’s good. It’s all good.

Observant Jews everywhere are in overdrive right now to prepare for the holiday of Passover, which begins Wednesday at sundown. The biggest obligation for those who observe this very meticulous and symbolic holiday is eliminating chametz, or leavened food products, from their homes - including crumbs between couch cushions, old pretzels fallen under car seats, and forgotten biscuits in coat pockets.

It’s a big job and one that I did tirelessly and without question for the last 10 years.

Time advances and life circumstances change and each year it is as if it’s the first time we face a particular holiday or season. Nearly a year ago, the ink on my divorce judgment was wet. The judge stamped his approval and anointed my ex and I no longer united.

Of course, that was the legal technicality. The deed had been done long before.

Last year, we muscled our way through an arduous holiday, aware as we all were of the impending forever-change. This year, it’s a different story.

My children will leave Wednesday with their father for the first celebratory days among his family in Canada. I will return to my family’s Passover table for the first time in a decade.

I have not searched for crumbs. I have not taped cabinets shut. I am not lugging the very-heavy black metal trunk full of glass Passover dishes up the basement stairs. I have paper plates in my cupboard and a couple boxes of matza.

I read once that the chametz, or leavening, is symbolic for arrogance. It’s an analogy I like because it adds meaning to a menial task. We search out every last piece of self-imposed grandeur and bid it farewell before sitting down to a fine-laid table and recounting the stories of our ancestors, trying for connections among the pages.

So what does it mean if this year, I have no energy nor interest for ferreting out the little last lost crumbs behind the nightstand?

Maybe nothing. Maybe something. Maybe it’s a dynamic dark-night search for a new meaning as I and others on the path of the boldly just-divorced summon the strength to define ourselves as if for the first time.

This holiday is supposed to be about the children. The focus of the seder table, the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the dilemma and the salvation we are encouraged to reduce to terms that the smallest child among us can understand and find meaningful.

My children will be away from me on seder night and in that I will have to find meaning. It is possible but ironic. As ironic as the children forgotten in the family rooms and backyards while mothers feverishly scrub the chrome to gleaming and wrap ovens, tables, counters and cushions in plastic lest they carry some imagined taint of long-forgotten leavening.

As a last word, I think of the sheer passion inherent in making bread. Every other week of the year, my children and I take yeast, water, flour and salt and swirl them into an elasticy mass as yet inedible.

It requires time, patience and understanding to nurture the dough to elevation, then to shape, then to baked perfection. It is a process that is worth undertaking and one which yields more than simple sustenance.

All of that is cast aside and left on a shelf to wait until this approaching week is past. The holiday of Passover is said to be the seminal moment in the history of the Jews.

Juxtaposition. Dichotomy. Self-imposed anguish. You figure out the answer for yourself. I’m already on my way.

As the sun crests over the treetops each morning, bakers arrive at my favorite grocery store, Hiller’s Market, to create something from nothing. It is the oldest of tasks, and the most basic. To bake bread is an element of independence that so many of us are just not familiar with, so accustomed are we to rushing through the aisles and purchasing items ready to eat this very minute.               

I did not grow up in a house where bread was whisked from flour, water and yeast, then left to rise in the mid-day sun. I did not as a child have the experience of standing at my mother’s kitchen counter and pummeling an elastic-soft mound of dough. I have made it one of my most important missions of motherhood to spend time shaping loaves with my bare hands and introducing my children to the art of living by the work of our hands.               

I have come to believe bread is the foundation of the family table – if only because in most parts of the world, it is the staple, the elemental expectation of a meal. In our country, we have loved and been tormented by bread – whether because we believed it to be the source of our fattening or a soft, smooth indulgence to be ingested over a low-lit table with people we cherish.               

A hundred years ago, the Pillsbury Company issued A Book for a Cook with the following quote: “Good bread is the great need in poor homes, and oftentimes the best appreciated luxury in the homes of the very rich.”               

It’s true. And so when I am still asleep and the artful bakers rise from their night-dusted homes to travel to bakeries, I am grateful. It is a seamless operation, this creating something from nothing. It is a simple pleasure to indulge in a fresh loaf of just-baked bread or a small pastry dripping with decadence. In these times, when we are sitting at the edges of our comfort and hoping for better times ahead, a small affordable indulgence is exactly what it takes to surmount one difficult moment.               

Into the industrial mixer goes flour, water, yeast that has bubbled to frothing. Sometimes eggs, sometimes butter, sugar, nuts and spices, fruits and onions and seeds. When the implements have finished their repetitive pounding, it is time for human hands to turn the mass of elastic dough onto a flour-dusted counter and massage it into rising.               

This task is not something that can be wholly automated; it requires tending by human eyes and guidance by time-worn fingers to reach perfection. It is a reminder that each of us is and will always be necessary to the day, even as we worry that automation will make our blood-born skills obsolete.               

Bread dough rises on racks and in pans and eventually makes it into shapes and forms and into the standing oven for timed baking. This process occurs again and again to satisfy shopper requests for freshness. Bakery shelves hold the oven-nurtured flavor of something made by hand and with heart.                

A fresh-made loaf of bread is a packaged promise of taste, aroma and texture, a gift to the senses, an attempt to satiate the soul, and the starting and ending point for many tables.               

This kitchen staple juxtaposes the all-important opposites of crumb and crust. It is a food eaten with grace or animalistically torn by the hands. It is one of the world’s oldest prepared foods and perhaps one of the only commonalities between many world cultures. In slang, bread or dough refers to money, giving a universal connotation to this humble creation.               

And it has religious significance, too. In churches, the sacrament of the daily bread represents a fusing of holy and mundane. When it says in The Lord’s Prayer, “Give us today our daily bread,” that means more than a bite to eat – it means the very necessities of life.In synagogues, bread launches holiday meals and also indicates travails, as when it becomes the focal point of the Passover holiday.               

Bread has even been the focus of political campaigns – it was central to the Bolshevik platform – “Peace, Land and Bread”; the undercurrent of Indian everyday lives – “roti, kapda aur makan” (bread, cloth and house). Bread was the central topic to free trade debates in 19^th century Britain and it played a starring role in the Magna Carta.               

But it is a food and not even a decadent one! Bread – so basic, so inconsequential, so essential. It is basic chemistry, mere sustenance. It is art and it is endeavor, backbone and accessory.

When I bought my first serious heavy sharp kitchen cleaver, I felt like I could conquer the world. So, too, when I baked my first loaf of bread, I experienced a certain power over my destiny and my family’s salvation that I had not known prior.

The culinary expert M.F.K. Fisher once said, “The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.”

I see it in much the same way. We’re all contemplating back to basics these days because that’s where everything begins. It is the end of

Michigan as we’ve known it but the beginning of a new frontier, one where we can and will conquer the insecurities of the day, if only we have the patience to let the yeast ferment and allow the dough enough space, time and warmth to rise.