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A SABBATH LIFE:
One Woman's Search for Wholeness
by Kathleen Hirsch
Published by: North Point Press
 About the Book
A successful writer and a committed feminist, Kathleen Hirsch, at age forty, finds herself searching for something more. How, she asks, can busy
women's lives be more spiritually alive and whole? How can we reclaim in our most productive years what we sacrificed to earlier ideas of success?
Unable to trek to Tibet or retreat to a cabin in the woods, she enters a season of reflection in the midst of her everyday life. A career crisis, the sudden death
of a brother, and the birth of her son, all in a year's time, deepen her probing. Hirsch examines the role of women's friendships and the definition of worthwhile
work. Her inner pilgrimage gradually moves her to seek out a range of remarkable women who are consciously trying to live in balance. They lead her to bold conclusions that will inspire many women who
are seeking realistic ways to live more multidimensional lives.
An Excerpt from A Sabbath Life
Copyright © 2001 Kathleen Hirsch
A DREAM
I am sitting in a room high above a city of hills. The light is turquoise and white, brilliant turquoise from the sea, brilliant white from the sun glancing
off stucco compounds that form a continuous epic of habitation as they descend to the place where they began centuries ago, by the boats where boys still dive for the day's food.
I am waiting. I am waiting without impatience or urgency. I look out on the hills in the distance and at the azure sea below through the open arches
that form three walls of my room. Above my head is the same unimpeded openness, the endless turquoise sky.
This room is my private chamber, and I dwell in it by virtue of a lifetime's
devotion to the sacred mysteries. My collection of seashells sits alongside my pens and paper and my wisdom texts. A carved chest at the foot of my
bed holds my needlework. My needs are thus more or less completely satisfied.
The simplicity and sensuality of the room mark it as a distinctly womanly
place. Indeed, the atmosphere of the dream, with its scent of incense and salt water, my white and azure robe, the lapis and opals that I wear in my
ears, all seem to suggest that in this room I sustain the deep truths of the feminine.
One detail in particular seems to affirm this. It is the bed. The bed is the
most beautiful object in the room. It is draped with a coverlet into which has been stitched a kind of compendium. In vivid threads and entwining vines,
creatures of the sea and air and land depict the tale of Eden.
It is more than an ornament, this spread. It suggests itself as a text, a
statement about the relation of the woman to the rest of creation, which one might learn to read, if given the time and the proper keys. As indeed I, the
dreamer, must learn if I am ever to become the dreamed.
The "I" of the dream is a different matter altogether. Not only is she at ease
among her books and the objects and creatures that are her companions. It was she who created them, she who stitched them. She is at once familiar
and Delphic, at home with the earthbound lessons of Eden, with the timeless mysteries of Greece, Byzantium, and Jerusalem. She might be in
Turkey or in India, in the East or the West. In my dream, they are one and the same. She transcends time and geography.
As I said, she is waiting. She is waiting for the arrival of a lover, or to stitch, or to read a page from the book of wisdom. All of these, the detachment and
engagement, the passion and the poem, the flesh and the page, are one and the same.
At the start of this story I am standing in a field of something that I can't name, taking in the heady scent of it. I do not have the names for any of the multitude
of things that grow or fly or flower in front of me. Not the fruit trees, not the flowers, not the birds.
For twenty years I have occupied the same room of life that I have called my
career. I have worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, on weekends as well. What I have achieved -- my relevance, my currency, my visibility -- has constituted my sense of who I am.
I am childless. My relations with my family and friends are minimal, defended, graciously superficial. My marriage is settled. My home with its collection of
handmade pots and art books, spare. I attend symphony, see the season's major art exhibits, and spend long country weekends with friends who do the same.
I do not know the names of the wisdom books that I would gather around me because, though once a student of poetry, philosophy, and art, I have become
a purveyor of facts. I would need a lover of the stature of my dream to stir in me the deep ecstasy that flitted briefly through midnight. I am no longer sure
of the names of my feelings, or the currents of my desires.
As I stand and gaze at all of which I am so appallingly ignorant in the natural
world, in the geography of my dream life, in the indistinct reach of my desires, tears come to my eyes and I hear the words of my beloved Proust:
"We must rediscover that reality from which we become separated as the formal knowledge we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness
-- that reality which there is grave danger we may die without having known, and which is simply our life."
About the Author
Kathleen Hirsch is the author of Songs from the Alley and A Home in the
Heart of the City and co-editor of Mothers. She lives with her family in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
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