Today’s Omer theme is compassion and lovingkindness in humility and grace. (See comments below for more on the Omer)

Before and after meditating today, I read chapter 56 from the The Lao Tzu (See comments below for full text)

There is an easy pitfall to the value of humility. Sometimes we say that humility means “being nothing” as opposed to “accepting our smallness in the face of the enormity of everything”.

The second thought is a clear one for me about this week’s theme of humility and grace in the Omer Counting.

Grace and humility is that beautiful and awe-inspiring feeling of laying back on a grassy field and looking up at a star-filled night sky. Slowly allowing oneself to get lost in the motion of the cosmos, feeling the earth and our bodies slowly revolve and move through the sea of space, merely one speck amid a nearly infinite grandeur.

And yet, we are still not nothing.

Seeing our smallness clearly can be a kindness because we can begin to see our proportional place in the world and have compassion for our worries that everything we do, every good or ill action we take, is so consequential. To be given a sense of our smallness can be a kindness.

[From The Lao Tzu (Tao-Te Ching) as found in Wing-Tsit Chan (translator and compiler), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, (1963), page 166, slightly adapted by Jonathan Freirich]

56.
One who knows does not speak.
One who speaks does not know.
Close the mouth.
Shut the doors (of cunning and desires).
Blunt the sharpness.
Untie the tangles.
Soften the light.
Become one with the dusty world.
This is called profound identification.
Therefore it is impossible either to be intimate and close to them or to be distant and indifferent to them.
It is impossible either to benefit them or to harm them.
It is impossible either to honor them or to disgrace them.
For this reason they are honored by the world.

About the Counting of the Omer in the Jewish holiday cycle:

Today is twenty-nine days, which is four weeks and one day of the Counting of the Omer - a time when many Jews note each day between the Second Day of Passover, the celebration of freedom, and the next major holiday, Shavuot, or “weeks”, when Jews celebrate the covenant given at Mount Sinai. Each of the seven weeks and each of the seven days in these weeks correspond to a particular “sefirah” or “sphere”, or perhaps better, “a divine emanation/human aspiration”. These themes allow us to reflect on the days as we move from liberation to revelation in the Jewish calendar.

Today’s Omer theme is compassion and lovingkindness (“chesed” חֶסֶד) in the week of humility and grace (“hod” הוֹד).