W hen I gaze down upon hundreds of hues of green or up at a buzzard spreading its wings and gliding across miles in mere seconds when the scent of grapes heavy with juice creeps into my senses when the sunshine penetrates every cold dark place within me and the rocking motion of the horse lulls me and quiets all the noise inside my head I’m transported. I can sense the universe. I can feel Hashem His closeness His constant embrace. I feel loved I feel safe. And I feel… me. Alive and connected.
If you’re anything like me when you open a siddur or Tehillim and daven there are times you have more kavanah and times you have less. And then there are those times when you are so totally connected to Hashem so present. You feel with your whole being how real He is and you wonder what took you so long to feel this way and you spend the next week or the next year or decade trying to recapture those feelings that connection.
That experience is rooted in spirituality — ruchniyus. It’s the understanding that I’m part of something greater than myself and I feel simultaneously very big and very small. This feeling is heady and powerful and its intensity often makes me cry. Not tears of sorrow but of a realness so acute that I’m deeply moved and the tears just come.
The thing about spirituality is that you can’t go out there and aggressively grab it. You have to seek the connection lower your defenses and allow it to seep in.
