Easter and Passover in the same weekend. Mighty themes to contemplate: leaving bondage, resurrecting. New life. Freedom—mine and that of others without which mine is not complete.
Then this morning, on Easter Sunday itself, I found a dead mouse floating in the toilet of my downstairs bathroom.
To even mention such a thing might seem to sully this auspicious day. For maybe three heartbeats, I deemed this an unfortunate sighting, an inauspicious incident compared with today’s theme of rising up and being the Light. But very soon after, I sensed that finding this dead mouse in my toilet just might be an experience of grace.
I have decided to write into the experience in order to enter and explore it—my exploration of the as-yet-unknown to be illumined by the beam that writing can shine.
I sense that finding the mouse today is a gift meant for me; but perhaps through my writing about the experience, this may also be a gift for others? Should this odd gift, and what I sense may be its accompanying lessons, touch just one other soul, then it will have been worthwhile daring to share.
But before I share what emerged, I want to share an image of what I posted on FB shortly before sundown on Passover:
So what rose up as I contemplated the dead mouse?
When I was in kindergarten, my family lived on a chicken farm. In the public school that I attended, the children called me dirty Jew.
They pulled off my hat to search my hair for horns, having been told that Jews are devils. They held their noses and said PU when they walked by me. Few if any in the school lived on a chicken farm; certainly none spoke the strange language of my home.
Nor did any of my classmates eat stinky foods like those I brought in my lunchbox: sardines and cream cheese or tongue and mustard sandwiches—on pumpernickel bread, no less. Every Thursday, I brought in a cold, shriveled brown Kosher hot dog wrapped in aluminum foil, contrasting vividly with their steamy, fresh cooked, plump pink Oscar Mayer wieners.
The list of our differences and all the ways I wished I were not me went on and on.
Then one day, I felt a warm lump just above my knee, pressed between my tights and my leg. I had felt the warmth under my snow pants in the overheated school bus. I imagined a sock had somehow gotten stuck there.
I waited until the bell rang and the line formed to descend the cement steps to the basement home of the kindergarten classroom. This time, instead of taking off my snow pants in the big open space near our cubbies as usual, I went into one of the small stalls housing the girls’ toilets.
Slowly I peeled the snow pants, until I saw the lump sticking out under my tights. I lifted my skirt and peeled the tights down, a kind of sickening feeling growing in my stomach. I wanted to throw up the minute I saw it, but I held back.
There was a dead mouse in my tights.
I knew instantly that what “they” said about Jews was right . It was all true. We were filthy and stinky. We should feel ashamed. This was proof.
Even though I now knew for sure what “they” already knew, I did not want them to have more proof. I had to get rid of the mouse, I thought desperately. I got some toilet paper, took hold of the mouse, tossed it into the toilet and flushed.
It would not flush down! No matter how many times it swirled around the bowl, it would not be sucked out of view.
When the teacher knocked on the door of the small stall and asked if everything was all right, I told my first big lie. “Yes,” I said. “Everything is all right. I just have a bad bellyache.”
I finally got the mouse to flush. (I prayed really hard). I left the stall, hung my snow pants on a hook and returned to my seat in kindergarten class, not letting my eyes meet the teacher’s.
I knew from that day forward who I really was. And I knew shame.
I kept from my parents, who had lived through the Holocaust, the tight secret of truth I kept hidden in my belly: there was something filthy about me, about Jews in general—and particularly about me. That Jews were so disgusting as to have dead mice in their tights, and cockroaches in their kitchens, helped explain to my five-year-old mind why Hitler and the Nazis had punished us as they had, why my four grandparents had been murdered before I was born, why the neighbors threw stones at me on my bicycle, and why I was treated as I was in school.
Clearly, something had to be really be wrong with us. Somehow we must deserve all this.
As time went on, my mother suspected and denounced my shyness and my love of being alone under the willow, as “an inferiority complex.” (She had probably learned the term in Reader’s Digest; she liked to read about piss-sigh-chology—which is really how she said it, the “ch” pronounced gutturally as in Chanukah.)
My parents condemned my being shy and liking to be alone as dangerous weaknesses. My father literally pushed me into situations to teach me to be strong, “a survivor, not a coward.” They insisted that not only was I not inferior, I was actually better than others. (Very confusing!) They tried to shame me out of “feeling inferior,” being shy, and relishing solitude.
All my parent’s efforts did little to free me from what over time became an internalized sense of never being or doing enough. The biggest and ultimate failure was not being able to take away their pain, to ease the suffering and loss they had endured in “The War.” Instead I made it worse just by being me.
After years of practicing meditation and tuning into what some refer to as the Inner Self, and others describe as Buddha nature, Christ consciousness and by other names for the nameless, I now experience a wiser, truer, and more self-compassionate perspective, including ever-deepening lovingkindness towards myself. I am able to feel and live in greater freedom than that dear child was able to feel or express. I cherish my freedom and believe it my sacred responsibility to respect the freedom of others.
Fast forward
So what about the dead mouse in my toilet today?
It reminds me.
It reminds me that today there are others, everywhere and of all ages, who are feeling dirty, wrong, unworthy and ashamed. I am reminded of my longing to help reduce this kind of suffering. Such feelings may be suffered by those enduring poverty, violence and the deprivation of homelessness. But desperation, feelings of abandonment and unworthiness and are also experienced by those with wealth who are poor in love.
The dead mouse also reminds me to consider where I may be still casting shadows on my goodness, doubting being adequate, denying my essential, unconditional value. I now know and trust (most of the time) that I am not good and valuable in direct proportion to what I accomplish or do not accomplish though this may still be my mind’s yardstick at times.
To find a dead mouse where I could not miss it on the very day “He is risen,” is perfect. I embrace “He has risen” as the invitation for all of us to rise together in love and renew our world.
We cannot, I believe, transform our world without transforming ourselves from the inside out, without bringing the old shames and blames into the light of Love. As we recognize and abandon, with compassion, the old habits of bondage, we free ourselves to live the love our world so needs right now.
True confession: I tried to flush the mouse down the toilet today so that I would not have to deal with it otherwise. It did not work. It may have worked to flush it out of sight all those many 60+ years back— after which I carried that dead mouse of shame for decades to follow. But not today.
Today, shortly, I shall head back to that bathroom, open the lid of the toilet, fetch the mouse and take it out to the field behind my farmhouse where it will one way or another (via being a meal for another creature or directly) decompose and return to the earth.
As I rest it on the earth, I will let rise and dissolve into the daylight, the memory of feeling less worthy than a mouse. I will pray that such feelings painfully harbored by others might be surrendered and in their stead that love arise and envelop those suffering the illusion of being unworthy and unloved.
Now, before I go and fetch that mouse from its toilet captivity, I offer this prayer:
May the love held captive due to fear, judgment and shame be freed to bless our world. And may each of us who have been graced with some measure of freedom from bondage bless others with our deep respect and loving actions.
G'Mar Chatima Tova
I close with this customary greeting whose literal meaning is: "a good final sealing." I will add to that: May you know the love of which you are made. What better than to know this?
With gratitude,
Ani
Your comments make this blog a conversation!
I would love to hear from you.
To avoid spam all comments are moderated by Ani. So if you don’t see your comment show up, not to worry; your comment will be up within within 24-48 hours
Oh, Ani. This is such a moving story. It’s so extraordinarily well written. I can’t even imagine the horror of having the mouse against you in your clothing. And to have this chance of resurrection on this day of all days—of transforming all that old anger and shame and fear by the simple act of treating the dead mouse with love and respect…of treating you with love and respect.
Thank you for giving me this gift.
Dear Ani,
Thank you for your sharing. It is profoundly beautiful, and helpful.
Jeff
Ah, Jeff. Thank you for receiving and for writing me! So moved to know that it was “helpful” in some way… I truly was reluctant to share it and am relieved to feel it received as a love offering.
I know that there is beauty even in what seems like darkness, when we bring light into the experience; nonetheless, maybe because of the spiritually correct position of “letting go our stories,” I hesitate sometimes to share painful stories and experiences.
Thanks for reflecting what you have!
Ani
I was almost middle-aged when I first heard the term “internalized homophobia.” I can attest that it’s real, and very much like the internalized anti-Semitism you describe so eloquently. It’s impossible not to take on the judgments of the culture we grow up within. Thank goddess for grace. I send love to your child self, and love to you now.
Annie, I am so grateful that you have addressed this dimension of internalized shame.
I am sorry for what suffering you have experienced and for the suffering of all those who have turned against and, at times, abandoned ourselves within the containers of conditioned prejudices and worse…
Yes, thank Goddess for grace!!!
My child self is deeply grateful for the love you send, as is me now. May our Lovc extend to and embrace all those who are still suffering with internalized shame engendered by others.
Love,
Ani
Dear Ani,
Thank you so much for your essay on “The Auspicious Weekend of Passover and Easter” which I found deeply moving and shaming. Shaming, not to you, but to myself as a member of a religion which has treated you as an individual so hurtfully and inexcusably as a child, and your people many times in past history so cruelly and viciously.
I was a child of ten in London when “The War” ended, and we saw on the newsreels the opening of the Concentration Camps. I remember vividly to this day the sight of those people like living skeletons with skin stretched over their bones, the piles of corpses stacked like firewood, the shower heads in the gas chambers. I’ll never forget. And I do not forget how other nations besides the Germans, including the Christian church, turned away Jewish people seeking asylum, and stifled the reports.
Nothing can make up for those actions.
I am glad at least parts of the Church these days is trying to behave differently and to see differently. Members of the Protestant denominations in Amherst have gotten together with the Rabbi of the JCA, the Imam of the Mosque, and Buddhist monks from the Temple in Leverett to present programs of prayer and support on non-sectarian occasions such as after the great Tsunami in Japan.
My own church, Grace Episcopal church, held a discussion group during the six weeks before Easter this year on Simon Wiesenthal’s book “The Sunflower” presenting many viewpoints on the idea of Forgiveness, and trying to put ourselves into Wiesenthal’s place. The Hebrew Scriptures are part of our “Salvation History” which is read on the Great Vigil of Easter, and which must include the story of Creation from Genesis and the Crossing of the Red Sea from Exodus, as well as 3 other passages from prophets such as Isaiah, Ezekiel and Zephaniah. They are a part of our foundation which we honor.
I admire the way in which you have, in the past and in your present essay, presented Christian Feasts such as Easter in a tolerant and enlightening way. I always remember how in one session of writing in your home, we drew a crayon at random from a Crayola box, and were asked to write on our color. Mine was Olive Green. For some reason I was inspired to write on Jesus’ last night in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, without mentioning his name but referring only to “he”. You were the only one who recognized whom I was writing about, when that isn’t even part of your tradition.. i was so impressed by your tolerance and understanding.
God bless you, Ani, for the enlightenment you bring to the world.
fond love,
Janet
Wow, wow, dear Janet. I am so moved by the depths and reverberations of your response!
A girl of ten in London and even younger as bombs were dropping overhead and you had to take shelter!
I recall you describing in some of your writings when you were part of a women’s writing group I facilitiated. As I remember, the way you wrote into those intense, terrifying experiences, while conveying the terror, chaos, and your perspective as a child, were also illuminating somehow and as you reflect about my piece, thus included a kind of grace.
And, as regards the travesties of the church and religion, as Penny Gill wrote above: being human, and I would add, religions are sometimes glorious and some times not so. The current actions and practices you describe reflect more of the grace, clarity and wisdom. How good that faith communities are building bridges and unifying in their Love.
I am grateful also that you mentioned, Simon Wiesenthal’s. “The Sunflower.” I bought the book and have been wanting to enter it. You have moved me closer.
Janet, I remember your vivid and compelling writing and, if you wish it for yourself, hope that you will write more into your wealth of stories and experiences!
Thank you so so much for taking the time to read and reflect on my words. DEEPLY appreciated.
With much love and God Bless You, dear Janet.
Ani
Thank you for sharing you. So much from a dead mouse. Blessings to you, dear Ani.
Karen
Thank you, Karen, for reading and commenting!
“So much from a dead mouse.”
As Lynn said just above and others have suggested: it is our looking with the heart that turns something like a dead mouse in the toilet (or in one’s tights) into a gift—and a blessing.
And speaking of blessings, thank you for yours.
Ani
Dear Ani, what an amazing story… thank you for sharing so vulnerably. May all the mice karma be completely burnt off now! What teachers they are, what every minute is, if we can let it—if we can look and look again and see clearly. With the heart.
Ah Lynn, one of the keys, if not the key, to healing and transformation: to look again and again with the intent to see clearly—with the heart.
And yes, how every moment, including encounters with dead mice, can be our teachers. If pain is not our teacher, how much more painful…
Much love and another deep bow to looking again and again with the heart…
Ani
Beautiful piece, Ani. May your prayers that everyone everywhere who feels shame be free of it and be able to replace it with love and compassion come true. Love, Lyn
Harilyn Rousso
Author of Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back
http://www.harilynrousso.com
Dear Lyn,
Thank you so much for adding your beautiful prayer to my prayers!
With love and gratitude,
Ani
oh, dear Ani…tears now for that little girl, the mouse, the desperately shrunken children in your kindergarten classroom…oh, to be a human being – glorious some days, not so glorious so many others. So appreciated this beautiful essay…blessings to you, all blessings..
love, Penny
Penny Gill
Author of What in the World Is Going On?
http://thewisdomteachings.org
Dear Penny,
A meditation teacher of mine spoke of certain kinds of tears being a bath for the heart. That’s how your tears feel.
I am also moved by your describing being human as “glorious some days, not so glorious so many others…”
And for your compassion for the children (and by implication, their families)—amen. Hopefully those children (or at least, some of them) taught their children something else when they became the parents.
Thank you, Penny!
Ani
PS. Writing about some of those children teaching their children different values has sparked an idea for another post. Won’t share more for now. Stay tuned. 🙂
Dear Ani,
Your story offers and is an offering to painful anguish arising to the freedom of compassion and love. Your words penetrate my vision and insight on this early spring morning of April as the dove catches my eye and as my heart trembles.
Thank-you for transforming reluctance to writing—-
Megan Moore
The Center for Functional Nutrition
http://www.healingdigestiveillness.com
Compassion and love are the ultimate transformers, Megan, are they not?! Even anguish, held in their embrace, becomes freedom, vision and insight.
Thank you for the tenderness and vulnerability (for I sense it coming through your words) contained in your embodied response.
With love,
Ani
Dear Ani,
This is so beautifully written.
Your reflections cause the reader to open and experience not only your inner past impressions, but to almost automatically look at one’s own such feelings.
We have come so far…..no going back.
Sending you much love,
Katy
Katy,
I love “We have come so far…no going back.” Past suffering and impressions and all…
Love back at you!
Ani
What a profound essay on uncovering our dark places and transforming them into beacons of Light. Beautiful!
Amen, Meira (whose name has the Hebrew word for “light” as its root). In this piece as in others, I had thought about, and experienced, entering “a dark place” with the beacon of light that writing with awareness and the desire for illumination casts. But I had not thought, as you put it, of the dark place becoming “a beacon of light.” I so appreciate that reflection on the nature of transformation. Thank you! Ani
Incredibly beautiful, Ani. Brave, beautiful, and inspiring to tell such a deep truth about the reality of our world and your experience.
May many blessings unfold for you through the telling. I know that other hearts will be touched.
much love,
Nanette
Thank you, dear Nanette, for reading, commenting AND for your blessing that blessings unfold for me and others through this telling. May it be so. <3 Ani
Dear Ani,
Your piece about the mouse intrigued me. I am a fan of the way the Native folks deal with animals and the wisdom that can come from them to us. So I went on line to Mouse – A message from one of our Spirit animals and this is what I found:
“If mouse is your animal totem, you have a gift for paying attention to the minutest of details in everything you do. You can easily discern which details are the important ones and which one do not need your attention. Your heightened awareness of your surroundings allows you to spot danger long before others around you.”
Ani, I send this message with the hope it will give you another way to process what the mouse caused you to feel and how that feeling made you frightened and full of shame.
Reading about the horrible things that happened to you in your formative years brought tears to my eyes. Nevertheless, when I read your writings and the way you tell your stories, I fully admire the way you capture my attention and the way your stories help me to know that no matter how hard life can and may be, we have the ability to take charge to overcome any trials and tribulations we have experienced.
Thanks loads for sharing such an intimate story about the mouse you encountered as a kid.
Dear Ruth,
Thank you for reading and commenting on this post! And also a very special thank you for searching out the mouse totem! I can definitely relate to the traits mentioned.
You wrote: “your stories help me to know that no matter how hard life can and may be, we have the ability to take charge to overcome any trials and tribulations we have experienced.” I was initially reluctant to share this post and finally did so for the very reason you describe above, with the desire to feed hope and inspiration!
Thank you again, Ruth! Many blessings,
Ani
I support you in living dangerously and sharing your writing with a wider audience. The world deeply needs your wisdom and will benefit greatly from your life lessons.
Oh Nancy,
That means a lot to me! I was so reluctant to share this lest it seem too this or that. All the spiritually correct talk about “not telling our stories” lest we get overly identified with them. But what you say is just what moved me to go ahead and take the chance and share this—for example, the possibility that my learning, my living with and through shame into the light of self-love, might benefit others.
I receive your support and encouragement with a deep namaste,
Ani
Dearest Ani,
Tears are running down my face as I take in and appreciate the grace of the true meaning that these holidays should hold. I am deeply moved by your capacity to express all that you have with such transparency, openness, and self reflection. Your exploration of finding the mouse “today” and inviting it to lead you to your kindergarten experience and back left me awestruck. The way you evoke your deeply held, early, devastating experience to an unexpected reenactment, and then move into a transformed journey is blessed. It is made holy through your deep linkage to spirit that so intimately accompanies you in your heart and that dedicates you to transfigure your own humanity and the humanity of others through your dedication to deeply communicate this truth.
Thank you, dear Caryn, for reading with your heart’s wisdom and for taking the time to comment here as you have. These words you wrote: “transparency, openness, and self reflection,” really capture how it felt to dare to enter the experience so totally, with the witness that writing can provide.
And yes, yes, we are able to transfigure our own humanity and support that transfiguration in each other. Is that not part of the message of resurrection?
Thank you, moist-hearted one,
Ani
Symbols from long ago. So much learning from two small mice. How blessed to know that the one who rose again did not bring shame but liberation instead. Full circle. Very auspicious.
That you immediately wrote into the experience is your gift to our world.
Big sweet hug for you from me.
🐀 🧘🏻♀️💕
Hi Heidi,
Thank you for reading and commenting! “Full circle.” That is what I felt also as I was engaging, no holding back, in this exploration.
And you nailed it: discovering the mouse in there, after first blinking my eyes in disbelief, my initial repugnance altered and (though still feeling sick with cold I have not been able to shake), I knew right then I needed to write into this. It was a call…
My relationship with our prolific field mice here in Hatfield might be permanently changed. Though I still prefer they stay in the field? 🙂
xo
Ani
Ani,
Wow. I know I have more words. They just haven’t come yet. Reading about you as a child made my heart ache. No child should have to experience that hate. Interestingly, I thought of you just yesterday. I was returning from visiting my daughter, Amber, in Maryland. I drove near Vineland, New Jersey and thought of you. I was near Vineland where these things happened to you.
Happy Birthday, my friend.
Actually, dear Scott, had I grown up in Vineland, most of what happened to me and our chicken farm in terms of virulent anti-Semitism might not have happened. There was a pot WWII refugee settlement in Vineland and the schools had lots of Jews in them. (The first wave of Jewish immigrants to Vineland were the post WWI Socialists). My parents could not afford a farm in Vineland, so they bought a stand of dilapidated coops in Elmer about 12 miles out of Vineland. My elementary school was in Franklinville, where we were the first and only Jews—and not a desirable element among the population. So it was. Helped to form my heart…
Much love to you, my friend.
PS. Been in Ireland lately?! Or Poland? I am going to Scotland in June! Maybe we can talk before then?!