Y-H-V-H shalam (Jerusalem)

Words have no solvency in my Higher Ground, so I take the Lawd's name in vain... anyways. While in Jerusalem ('86), my friend & I were staying in this lousy youth hostel, and I, up 'til then, liked the headiness of coming out of situations from smoking cigarettes or pot (& in this case we had done a hit of blotter a piece--I promise I am not advocating using), because it gave me a sense of being impelled to do something different now that the later moments had arrived--& anything with direction or movement was bound up in positivist vibrations--mine & how I was tied into some worldly abstraction. The thing I noticed in dwelling on such a small world was how loud my inner voice seemed in galloping toward assumptions, that of release. I would be like, damn if I could smoke now this place wouldn't seem to be such a drag anymore, instead of seeing the diversity in the change of my conditions, as mundane as they seemed to be -- like figuratively sitting before the wall, in order to gather its relevance. Man, I want those walls now / its a better fight than the one against oneself.*****
Some thing vital was needing expression, but unformed in my mind's eye then-at age 21. Intrinsically I felt a need to attempt at conceiving what about me was Jewish in identity, as a young person. I could not draw upon an experience & just say, yes that is what makes me Jewish. So now I'm left with the desire of desperation's brain--desperate to get to the abundance of experience in a way that the void of ignorance would seem negligible. This takes active thinking, & reaction to the outward fact, which means nothing unless one becomes an observer, and believes in its value to your condition i.e. complacency. Yes, but my whole point starts out with being without experience (e.g. not having a Bar Mitzvah, like my 3 bros.) and with a goal of essential clarity--a desire to make it right. But this is the grit of knowledge as advantageous w/o any need for a particular balance between extremes, (say living in a chasm straddling secular on one hand, religious on the other). No decision (or conflict assumed) meant immersion, rather than bouyancy. The bottom of the ocean has just as much vitality as the gravid waves.