Imbolc Anniversary Moon
“Look at the candles. Choose one. Focus on receiving the light from the candle. Let your thoughts go. When they intrude, come back to the light of the candle.” Sounds like a meditation seminar. It wasn’t though. The speaker was Rabbi Jamie Arnold at Beth Evergreen last night. This was during last night’s shabbat service.
Had I not attended the kabbalah session on Tuesday I would have missed a key point. Kabbalah originally meant receive. It now has the connotation of tradition, teachings received by students over the centuries from kabbalistic sages.
Too, another key idea of kabbalah is that of a broken world. Shards of light, of divinity, of the sacred scattered from the vessel chosen by God to be the other in a newly created universe. That vessel could not contain the light and shattered into the matter that forms our world. This means that each part of our cosmos contains that light, a spark we can access in our Self, our soul, which is pure awareness. As pure awareness, we can attend to the light of the world.
As masked souls-our always state, we have to learn how to see the light. The service at Beth Evergreen offered mediation styles for that purpose. The second focused on following our breath and punctuating it while visualizing the Hebrew letters forming the tetragrammaton, one of the names of God. This was difficult for me since the shape of the Hebrew letters are distant memories. My Hebrew class was in 1974. Still, the breathing and its pauses on the inhale and exhale was meditative in itself.
I’m staying open to learning from this ancient faith, a tribal religion sustained by its traditions and the difficult history of its people.
Earlier in the fall when I got up to feed the dogs Orion stood over our fence between the house and the garage, in the southern sky. Still in the southern sky he has moved on since then until he now resides over Black Mountain, several degrees further west. As he moves, he serves, as many constellations do, as a celestial clock of the Great Wheel. The further west he goes, the deeper into winter we are. Weather doesn’t always synch up with his movement any more, but that’s our fault, not his.
Looked at Orion on the way up here this morning. He warms my heart like a familiar friend, a friend who comes for the season. I have greeted his return each autumn for 48 years. We first became acquainted during the 11-7 shift at Magnetic Cookware in Muncie, Indiana. I worked there as a security guard. When I see him in the southern sky, I smile.
No wonder, in a world lit only by fire, that the stars were the work of gods. We might think we know them better now, now that we can identify their chemistry, understand their age and locate them in a 3-D universe, but that’s only a material, physical way of knowing. Important in its way, yes. Perhaps even key to the future of human existence. Still, very different from that night beacon lighting the way to freedom for escaping slaves. And, very different from Orion as my friend and companion for 48 autumns and winters.
This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.
Friend Tom Crane found this. Those of us who were Buck Rogers fans, or read Asimov and Heinlen early on, those of us who followed Star Trek in its many permutations have been so damned lucky: computers, satellites, walks on the moon, mars exploration, a human-made object leaving the solar system, discoveries of exoplanets and gravity waves and the Higgs Boson, quantum computers and now. Ta-dah. Tractor beams.