NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: YES WE CAN: Marc Gafni

My son Eytan is visiting me from his homeland where I live with my family. Even as I live for a period of time in the United States, and my home is here now. I love America and am American in every fibre of my being. Even so, if that time will be for ten or twenty or thirty years I will always live in my homeland and it will alway be my home, my destiny and destination.

He came for a three week visit. He is returning after four days to re-join his friends.

He had to choose. He said Yes.

May God bless him, protect him. I love him with all my heart and soul. May my love, which is God’s love, and the love of all who know him carry him safely to his destination and then safely home to his destiny. Yair, his brother and my self all spoke this morning. I promised them to do everything I can to be easily available to them, to visit our homeland during the coming years, as often as I can, as soon as I can.

My heart is open.

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!!

YES!

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

~Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It was to this that Emerson referred to when he said, “Love is the affirmative of the affirmatives.” Love is the universe shouting out a joyful yes when our names our called.

Yes.

In Hebrew the word yes — Kein — means integrity. Yes is the ultimate affirmation of our integrity. The question of your existence is whether you can say yes to the adventure that is your life. That is self-love! When you wake up to a beautiful day which is simply divine — when you eat a piece of carrot cake which is just out of this world then you experience the universe embracing you with a resounding YES. e. e. cummings always succeeds in capturing life’s little quintessential affirmations. I quote:

I thank you God for this amazing Day:
for the leaping greenly spirit of trees
And a blue dream of sky; and for everything
Which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes

In an interview, John Lennon dotingly tells about the first time he met his wife Yoko Ono. He had heard that Yoko was having an art show in London. It was to be quite a happening. He recalls admiringly the moment that got him hooked:

So I went and there was a little white ladder that led up to the ceiling. There was a little hanging magnifying glass and something written on the ceiling. So I picked it up and looked through it at the writing. And what was written was “YES”. If it had been something like, ‘rip-off’ or something negative I would have left…. But it was positive and loving and so I stuck around.

The rest is history…quite literally. The greatest of love affairs can begin with a simple imprint of Yes.

We live in a “No” culture. As my friend Michael Lerner once wrote, we have a surplus of powerlessness. We think it is not possible.

When an idea or new direction comes up our first response is why it can’t work. We are brilliant at it. Even the most simple minded person becomes a genius when it comes to saying no. We can think up twenty reasons why it will not work before we can think up two reasons why it could work. We have all become Dr. No with advanced degrees in how to say no.

We were not born this way. Remember, we come into this world trailing clouds of glory with a core knowledge of our omnipotence, beauty, infinite power and infinite potential. And then we hear a chorus of voices for the first ten years of our lives and the only word they seem to be saying is No No No.

We gradually come to associate maturity with saying No. But somewhere deep inside the Yes remains, an eternal child of the soul. We know on the inside of the inside that yes is the answer.

As Yoka Daishi tells us,

When it is “Yes,” a young Naga girl in an instant attains
Buddhahood.
When it is “No,” the most learned Zensho while alive falls into
Hell.

One of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century is James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce spends reams of pages portraying the main character, Leopold Bloom’s ‘No’ reality in the streets of Dublin. Joyce maps masterfully the life of the archetypal human whose life is a series of unnecessary losses; the deaths of Bloom’s son and father, his daughter’s leaving, the passing of his youth, and finally the adultery of his wife. Yet in the last scene of the book, Bloom returns home to his sleeping wife.

Never mind it is a recently desecrated bed. Never mind he sleeps with his feet at her head, and his head at her feet. It is still home, the erotic haven of the insides. The book ends with a crescendo of Yes. As his wife feigns sleeping we float along in her stream of consciousness… finally concluding with reminiscences of the early ecstatic hours of her and Leopold’s love. It is a definitive return to Yes.

and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes
and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Of course, the Yes here is sexual. But more than that, the overwhelming perfume of this sexual Yessing signifies hope, promise and possibility in the most expanded erotic sense. This final Yes has magically transformed the seven hundred plus pages of modern existentialistic No’s.

The high priest entering the Holy of Holies once a year says Yes with his every step. The cherubs murmur to each other, “Yes, yes.” The Temple of Jerusalem was built with Yes stones. The Presence of God is a great green light, that says Yes, Proceed. The universe an open Entryway, crowned by a neon “Yes” sign. It is as Wallace Stevens reminds us:

AFTER THE FINAL NO COMES A YES!

On that yes the future of the world depends!

marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
share comments below or on info@marcgafni.com