Hi

Hey. It's me again. So today, I had a random urge to burn incense and dance. I compromised by blessing God for creating various scents (borey miney bsamim) and smelling cinnamon, followed by basil. I preferred the cinammon, which is funny, given that I played a cinammon-loving hippie in a Purim speil once. (It is youtube search-able, if you know my name.)

I am not a hippie, but I do beleive in appreciating the beauty of this world, and so often, we forget the beauty of things we experience everyday - like the smell of cooking spices - so it is important to take time to remedy that.

I once heard a speech from Rabbi Riskin in which he said the first question asked by God to those entering paradise is, "Have you taken pleasure from My world?". That stayed with me.

Meanwhile, today was a big day for me because I am more than halfway done with a Hebrew novel I am reading 'The trumpet in the wadi", by Sammi Michael. A lot of the book resonated with me; because this blog is not completely anonymous (as in I advertised it on my Facebook page), I am not sure how comfortable I feel sharing the reasons that it resonated with me.

In general, it occured to me, that it will be hard to blog about my life in a not completely anonymous forum, because I need to protect people in my life, and the need to protect the anonymity of others will by its nature ocassionally limit what I can or can not say. But such is the price for open-ness, I suppose.