***Warning, warning!!!***My most metaphorical blog entry so far to date

I haven't cleaned for Passover at all and I'm not planning to. Frankly, I don't know where to begin.

I usually love this yearly ritual, scrubbing the vegetable drawer in my fridge with baking soda until it's white again, tying up bags of clothes we've outgrown over the winter to give away, dustbusting under my couch cushions and in the crevices between my floorboards. Opening the windows, airing the home, letting the spring air flow in.

Throwing out half-eaten boxes of crackers and gluten-free snacks I thought George would like but he didn't.

Rather than doing the physical work the holiday demands, I'm trusting in metaphors this year. I've been so spent physically the last few weeks, I'm cherishing my energy coming back to 100% in my body and I'm not willing to do anything to f--around with that at the moment. No one expects me to do much cooking or cleaning anyway and I'm embracing a slackerish acceptance of myself.

But living in metaphor is happening effortlessly and unconsciously. Each year at Passover, every Jew is supposed to feel like he/she is personally liberated from being a slave in Egpyt; each one of us is called to cross through a miraculously parted Sea, headed to the unknown place called Freedom.

And here I am leaving Egypt, in Hebrew "mitzraeem", a narrow place, and it's true, I really am. I am leaving the narrow place of fear and shock that I have been living in since the 16th of February when I was shaving and felt this weird little thing jutting out from under the pocket of my arm.

I'm leaving that narrow place, where I went from lab to doctor from doctor to lab with a nauseating numbness. I am leaving the place where I would stop driving my car and call a friend from my cell phone because I couldn't talk about it but needed to cry. I am leaving the place where I was waiting, for days on end, for biopsy results, for surgery results, for consults. I am leaving the place where I imagined my life without me in it.

I am leaving it, I am taking a step into the water of freedom, it feels cold and inviting, it stings the numbness out of me, it teases me to swim in, to swim out, to swim as far as I can. The sea is not parted; it is whole. You're alive, it calls. Alive.


It is the water of freedom and I am crossing through it in slow, metaphorical time. At moments, I see the shore on the other side, at moments, I only see water stretching ahead of me, meeting horizon.

I see the me, though, in my vision. I see the me there, in a way that I never could before. I see myself naked, bald, I see my scars. I see my strength like a light coming off the water, both within me and outside of me, coming up through the water and down from the sky. I feel myself being held by the water, I feel myself letting go, trusting the tide.

It is exhilarating, this effortless floating to freedom. See the woman, who was a slave, who is me, who is moving through the water now, for a moment she thought

she was losing everything

and now she is floating and laughing wildly, calling out to whomever can hear her

I lost everything! I lost everything!

and the water makes love to her

and pushes her

along.