Welcome to Ma'yan Tikvah

Shalom,

Welcome to Ma'yan Tikvah. I would like to share with you a little of my journey to Ma'yan Tikvah.

I was born into a family rooted in the natural world. Both of my grandfathers were farmers. One remained a farmer until the end of his life – still in his eighties going into the field with his horses in the spring to plow the fields and plant the rows of corn, just so. The other turned from farming the land to exploring the land – the whole world. Taking his wife, his son, his daughter (my mother), his dogs, and sometimes his goat, he hiked and boated from the Adirondack Mountains to the Colorado River, from Baja California to Lapland, from North Africa to Palestine, recording his days with his camera and his pen. When he returned home, he traveled around New York State showing his lantern slides in schools, and introducing scores of children to the wonders of the world beyond their daily experience.

My father was a scientist – a botanist, trying to find a way to prevent diseases of wheat plants, in an effort to make the lives of farmers easier. He was also a gardener, with a huge vegetable garden, as well as a small vineyard and an orchard of apples, pears, cherries, and peaches. My mother is an artist. She began her artistic career as a photographer, and both of her most meaningful series of photographs are rooted in nature – one is a series in black-and-white of trees, a study in light and darkness, and the other is an amazing series of abstract color photographs, all taken in the natural world, on several of my mother’s long tramps through the woods of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.

My own spiritual journey took me far from my family and the world in which I was raised. At the age of 37 I converted to Judaism, finding at last my own spiritual home, a place to heal the pains of my childhood that came hand-in-hand with the delights and the joys. In the ensuring years, day by day, I have grown into my Jewishness and into my own sense of myself. In January of 2005, in my last year of rabbinical school at the Academy for Jewish Religion, I had the amazing opportunity to travel with a delegation of rabbinical students from eight seminaries on a service mission to El Salvador with the American Jewish World Service. While there, I experienced illness that was related in part to the heat, but the incredible gift that I received as a result was a healing blessing from a Mayan priest who had come to speak to our group about the Mayan people, a blessing whose energy was translated into a form that could touch my soul when the other students then said a Mi Sheberach, a traditional Jewish healing blessing, in my name. Due to my illness, I missed his presentation, but the next day one of the other students showed me pictures of Don Fredrico with his face lit by the fire before which he demonstrated a Mayan ritual. When I saw that picture, I saw not Don Fredrico, but the face of another old man, one of whom my mother had often spoken, one she remembered from her childhood.

It was a story I had heard many times, about her family’s trip to Baja California when she was 10 years old. They had traveled through the desert by foot for days, and just as they were about to run out of water, they arrived at the spring that my grandfather had remembered from a single visit there once before, twenty years earlier. During that trip, an old Indian by the name of Vincente joined my mother’s family for a time and traveled with them. My mother tells of sitting around the fire in the evening, watching his face in the firelight. She tells of the snow that fell, and of her concern for Old Vincente, who slept out under the stars while they slept in a tent. She tells of her mother assuring her that the old man would be OK, that he was comfortable in the desert at all times. She tells of the wonder and the impression that this man made on her, of the sense of his oneness with the natural world in which he lived, his closeness to the Earth which she saw reflected in his face lit up by the firelight.

When I was eight years old, my parents bought part of an old farm in southern Wisconsin, and from my childhood are many memories of the out-of-doors. Exploring the creek that ran through our property, searching for wild berries, wandering through the fields with the dogs, sledding down the hillsides and through the woods in winter, caring for animals in the barn, planting flowers and harvesting vegetables – all of these and many more are my memories of living in the country as a child.

My own life took me far from the Midwest and far from the land, as I moved to Boston and lived first in the city and then in the suburbs. But my love of nature never died. I began my career as a high-school science teacher, with biology as my specialty. When my children were young, I often took them walking in the woods – it was a place of comfort for me during a difficult emotional time in my life. Always I could retreat to the woods to find peace in my heart – even if only for a moment, for I spent many years locked up emotionally. It was only as I worked my way through the pain of my early life that I was finally able to remember my childhood with joy, and to return with a full and giving heart to my love of nature. Only then was I able to meld my new spiritual self as a Jew to my love of the natural world that I inherited from my grandparents and my parents.

From Don Fredrico, I received a blessing that is one upon which I must act – a blessing of connecting me to the Earth at a deep spiritual level. And so it is that I have launched Ma'yan Tikvah – A Wellspring of Hope – with the intention that the core of this community will be rooted in prayer close to the Earth, and with the recognition of the connection between Mayan and Ma'yan. Through prayer we are able to reach our deepest selves – our pain and our joy, our strength and our weakness, our love and our anger – all of this we touch when we truly enter into prayer, and thus it is that prayer has the power to push and pull us into change and transformation. By bringing my ability to pray and to lead in prayer into the fields and woods of the conservation lands of MetroWest Boston, I hope to bring more closely together the two aspects of myself that are most important – Judaism and my connection to the natural world, and by doing so to increase the power and the strength of what those prayers are able to accomplish within myself and within others.

But my desire is not just for us to pray outdoors together, but to pray indoors, to study and learn together, to work together to heal the Earth and our communities, and to grow together in knowledge and spirit. I invite you to join me.

I look forward to seeing you at Ma'yan Tikvah.

Rabbi Katy Z. Allen