This week will feature two incredible technological advances, one on the information highway, and the other on a structural highway. Apple computer has created the iPhone, the world’s most advanced mobile phone, iPod, and computer. You can talk, access e-mail and the Internet, watch movies, and listen to music. The iPhone sells for $500-$600 (depending on how many gigabytes) and requires a 2-year contract with AT&T.

Apple has launched an amazing marketing campaign; I looked at the promo videos, where someone is watching the Pirates of the Caribbean, and when the scene of the giant squid attacking the ship appears the viewer is seized by a sudden urge to eat Calamari. The movie is paused so the viewer can google seafood restaurants (even see sample menus) and make a reservation. The satellite-powered iPhone will allow you to keep in touch with anyone, anywhere and at any time. People will be camping out at storefronts on Thursday night to be the first to get one.

Also this week, the Chinese will begin to build a highway to the base camp at Mount Everest. This road will make the summit of Everest more accessible for the runners carrying the Olympic torch to the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing. These games will provide the longest torch relay in Olympic history: 85,000 miles in 130 days, crossing five continents, and the highway will launch the relay runners to the top of the 29,035-ft. summit of Mount Everest.

This highway will now make access to Mount Everest much easier for the ever increasing numbers of climbers. This mountain, sacred to Tibetan Buddhists, was once only accessible to those few who, upon reaching the summit, gave thanks for this launching point to heaven. We all know that with a maintained highway and permanent campgrounds, climbers armed with iPhones will be transmitting pictures, ordering in sushi and arranging for caterers to deliver champagne at the base camp Helipad after their successful ascents.

Help me Relatives — tell me I’m not the only one who, if I arrived at the most inaccessible place on earth, would just like to be there. I don’t want to be found in every moment, I don’t want to record it, transmit it or talk about it. I want to be quiet, awestruck, and feel it at the cellular level rather than transmit it.


Remember Mahatma Gandhi’s great admonition for staying healthy and in balance, “If you're going to be somewhere, be there.” The highway to Heaven is neither paved by roads nor available by reservation, you get there by yourself . . . in silence.

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I was in New York City last week with my wife and grandson. This trip is our gift to each of our grandchildren at the time of their Bar or Bat Mitzvahs. We took our granddaughter a couple of years ago, but it doesn’t matter how often I return to my hometown, I feel good when I’m here. This trip could not have come at a better time; I needed a break from my preoccupations with attachments, loss, and backward-looking melancholy.

I love New York—the energy of the City, the exciting pulse of its streets, watching great basketball at corner playgrounds, street performers, hucksters, Central Park, museums, and Broadway. We stayed right in the heart of the Theater District and walked through Times Square every night after the shows.

It’s also a chance to introduce my grandchildren to my New York family. My relatives here maintain an Orthodox lifestyle, but in spite of our differences in religious observances, we revel in our togetherness as relatives. After Sunday brunch, we strolled the old neighborhood together and then joined in with the 50th annual Puerto Rican Day Parade marching down 5th Avenue.

Leading the parade past St. Patrick’s Cathedral were Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez and her husband, Mark Anthony; and the Mayor and Governors of New York and Puerto Rico. In the background was the pulse of the throbbing salsa music. There were floats and bands, Taino Indian drummers, and thousands of costumed dancers. There were tens of thousands who lined the street, transformed by the music into an undulating mass of people in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It was a riotous carnival of colors, food and music.

I felt the rhythm moving through me and joined the dancing mob. The door to my spirit world is opened by dancing (drumming, chanting, sweating, and rocking can also do it). Dancing is the best way I know to get me completely out of my head and into my heart. It’s a feeling that flows through me and grabs me in a way I don't understand. If I let my body lose control, it moves by itself without my direction. It is in those moments of sublime ecstasy that there is no doubt, no despair, only a sense of transformation. In this state I can move beyond any limitations.


So I brought my grandson on this trip to awaken his soul, and, of course, reawakened my own with a healing dance at a parade down 5th Ave. In my ear, I heard an old Medicine Man whisper, I can teach you my steps but you have to be able to hear your own music….. You can’t heal if you don’t dance.

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My dear friend just lost his son, a man in the prime of his mid-life. When I read the obituary, and it said “he is survived by his mother and dad,” it made me cringe. The horror of having your children precede you in death overwhelms me. This young man had been suffering for a longtime and over these last months lived with his parents. In spite of their daily confrontation with his impending demise, it helped them find the courage to let him go.

My wife and I visited him during those last weeks, and it happened to be a time when he was completely lucid. He talked about his plans to move into his own place and that a photographer was coming to take his picture under the tree outside to give to his mother on Mother’s Day. This was a man who had not stood on his own legs for weeks but did just that a couple days later. He knew what he was facing, but he was not ready to let go of life. It reminded me of this story.

The Thohono O’Odham (the People of the Desert) tell this story about the time for letting go. Their mythical father is known as Pitoi; he came to the people to teach them how life was to be lived. Pitoi revealed to them the Man in the Maze symbol (see photo) and explained the center of the Maze was both the starting point, (birth) and the end point (death). As one walked this path called “how life is,” there were no wrong turns, only different points of exploration and learning.

The Creator knew that people would still be fearful when they finally peered into the darkness at the center, so the Creator made a small peninsula extending out from the center. The reluctant person facing death could move into that safe harbor and stay for as long as he wanted to. There, he could look back over his journey through life until he was satisfied with it and was ready to re-enter the darkness from which he came.


Don’t wait until the end of the road to take time out and sit in a place of contemplation. As we walk the labyrinthine path of life, we are always learning about attachments, losses, and experiencing new growth. Whenever you are looking at serious changes, find a safe harbor where you can review the events in your life and assimilate and integrate them until you’re ready to move on.

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On the front page of the Style section of the Sunday New York Times (5/13/07) was a photograph of a young woman dancing in a Los Angeles nightclub in a mini-skirt and a prosthetic leg. The thigh looked like an elongated crystal ball, and the lower leg had a spike attached to a sandal-strapped foot.

The woman is Sarah Reinertsen, a 32-year-old athlete whose left leg was amputated above the knee when she was seven years old, the result of the tissue defect she was born with. She is a track star who was a contestant on CBS’s Amazing Race; she was also the first woman to compete in the Ironman Kona on prosthesis and has competed in marathons in New York, LA, New Zealand and London.

Sarah loves to compete against the “able-bodied” because “I get a thrill when I pass 2-legged people.” Sarah says, “People will always stare it’s human nature and it’s tough to be this animal in a zoo.” She turns the tables though and says look at me, “this is who I am if you have a problem with that, it's your problem not mine. As soon as people stop looking at the disability as a total tragedy, they can ask about the cool leg I’m wearing.”

I was taught not to look at disabled people — “Don't stare,” my Mother would whisper. I never realized that my ignoring it encouraged the disabled to cover it up themselves. I learned this from my friend Michael Aronin, a great standup comic who has Cerebral Palsy and is severely spastic. Michael knows people look at him as he jerks around and talks a bit funny, so he disarms them. I heard him tell a group as he flailed out onto the stage, “I don’t like flying anymore, I get stopped in airports and they ask me if I’m a Northwest pilot. Kids will ask you anything, I tell them this is what happens to you if you watch too much Barney.” Michael says, “When people see me for the first time, they see I’m OK with being me. “


Sarah and Michael are teaching us all not to run and hide from ourselves, rather to say look at me, I am my own best friend. Or as the Zulu proverb teaches, if there is no enemy within the enemy outside can do you no harm.

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