in the book of life, may your name be written in the adventure section.

In 2008 around this time, I went to Madison, Wisconsin, to stand in a beautiful bookstore and weep like a river, like a weeping willow, like a woman who is reading a story aloud for the first time and realizing how very much it means to her. A man named Paul Wesselman came from the very back row silently to the front to offer me a tissue and it was a woman named Jodi Cohen, who invited me there in the first place, who came to where I was at the podium and held my hand.

Jodi had taken me that afternoon to a Jewish senior citizen home where she leads the elders in song every Friday. I sat and listened as dozens of old, old people sang from a deep place of ritual we all urge toward. Heavy and resonant, guttural, felt.

And then someone spoke these words that I will never forget: “We are in the Jewish High Holidays,” she said, “in the 10 Days of Awe. And in the 10 Days of Awe, we remember that the first time something extraordinary happens, we call it a miracle. But when it happens over and over again, we just call it ordinary.”

Yes. The first time, extraordinary.

This is what 37days is all about: reclaiming what is extraordinary in the ordinary.

And so as we begin the 10 Days of Awe with Rosh Hashanah this evening, it is only fitting that it was Jodi herself who sent me this beautiful photograph of a magical butterfly apple today with a note that included this beautiful sentiment: “shana tovah. may you be written in the book of life, in the ‘adventure’ section.”

shana tovah, my friends. may you all be written in the book of life, in the ‘adventure’ section. or the ‘joyous’ section. or the ‘happy’ section.

With thanks, as always, to Jodi.

(from September 2009)