Bread on the water

Be it a new day, a new month, a new season, a New Year --- I'm all for it!  I like the idea of a clean page, a new beginning!

With yesterday being Rosh Hashannah, Jewish New Year, I made it a point to claim the newness and to do my personal participation in the ritual of Tashlikh.  Meaning to "cast away," the ritual invovles tossing bread upon the waters as a symbolic action of casting away one's sins with the intention to return to one's true self.

I gatherd my bread, tore it into pieces, placed it in a bag and headed to a bridge over a creek in a nearby park.  With each piece of bread tossed, I named the sin and threw the bread into the water.  It was quite freeing to toss and then watch the bits of bread land in the water and be carried downstream.

Alas, one piece of bread landed on a rock.  The water flow was not swift nor high enough to move it. When I finished my bread-toss-confession and release, that piece of bread was still on the rock.

Hmmmmm....what did that mean and what to do? 

I hoped a duck would swim by and eat the piece of bread and in doing kind of become a "scape duck" upon whose feathers the sin and blame was placed. No such luck there and it's also shaky theology.  I took it as a nudge that I still have a lot of work to do in moving forward and freed from that particular misgiving.  

I'm a work in progress and every day am thankful for grace.