Samain Bare Aspen Moon
And so. Thanksgiving 2017 has entered history. Though. Here’s what I thought about while falling asleep last night.
Working on my kabbalah presentation for December 6th, I’m trying to link up the Great Wheel and the Tree of Life. So, I got to thinking about time. The Great Wheel is a circle and marks cyclical time rather than linear. How to explain this to a chronos saturated worldview?
Here on Shadow Mountain the sun has risen again, Black Mountain is lit up and we can see easily. Daytime has come again, yet we’re in the same spot. Yes, this means that our spot traveled approximately 25,000 miles and has arrived back in the same position relative to the sun. That’s one day. That’s always one day. It’s not the “next” day; it’s the turning of a planet, very rapidly, around its axis. Today is a day just like what we call yesterday and what we’ll tomorrow, but in fact no time has “passed.” Instead we have experienced a physical phenomenon with illumination consequences.
Next. This month. A month marks itself out by the phases of the moon. Forget the calendar, which, confusingly, strings months together as if one month is different from the other. They’re not different. They’re simply the transit of our moon around its planet, changing its phase as presents different aspects to the sun and to our point on earth’s surface. That’s a month. And “next” month will be the same.
A year. Today, this morning, we are at the same point on earth’s orbit we were a year ago. This is true every moment of every day. A year is never completed, it is always underway, bringing us around and around the sun, always, as long as the sun remains its current size. (Yes, I know celestial mechanics can define all of these things much more precisely and that each day, month, year is also in transit as our solar system tracks along in its expanding orbit and our galaxy, and its local group and its super cluster also move at unbelievable speeds. This just ratchets up the thought experiment to cosmic levels, doesn’t change the point.)
In a year the amount of the sun’s energy shining on a particular, let’s say three meter, patch of land changes due to the earth’s current 23.5 degree tilt. This change in energy per three meter square alters the temperatures which in turn drive seasonal changes. The Great Wheel celebrates those seasonal changes, especially in the temperate latitudes, as we go, again and again, through the cycle of growth, harvest and fallow time. This is not a “new” fall; it’s the same season we had last year at this point on the earth’s track around the sun.
So. Each day, each month, each year, each season is not sequential to anything but the human mind. We think of history as in the past, we think of the future as somehow ahead of us, yet each historical occurrence happened on a day, in a month, in a year, not one in the past, but one just like the ones we’ve been through to get this Black Friday. The same will be true of the “future.” The sequencing, the marking of chronological time, is a trick of the mind, a need we have to organize space as if it passes along a linear track, one thing in front of the other, but no. We always only have this day, this time of the month, this point in earth’s orbit, all of which repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat.
I know, it took me awhile to fall asleep.
The tree of life, the kabbalist’s notion, posits a continuous act of creation with divine energy pulsing up and down the tree of life, from the crown, keter, to the physical world, malkuth, passing through the three triads of intellect, emotion and instinct. This understanding does not require chronos as the act of creation never ends and travels along a process of instantiation, into malkuth, and then back up toward the unity of the ein sof, up and down, up and down, until somehow God is repaired.
In the way I’m thinking about it now, the link between the Great Wheel and the Tree of Life goes like this. A day divides into light and dark, a month into new moon and full moon, a year into a fallow time and a time of vitality and growth. Likewise, a human life divides into a time of vitality and growth followed by a period of declining physical strength, then death. Each life not prematurely ended by trauma or disease, follows this path, not just human life.
Just so the seasons. Just so the month. Just so the day. Just so, I think, the flow of divine energy up and down the tree of life. As it becomes instantiated in malkuth, divine energy becomes actual and experiences a time of vitality, a time of being. Note that this applies to the inanimate as well as the animate. Our sun, our planet, Shadow Mountain all have ends, too, a period of existence in their current form that will, as changes occur, cause them to wink out, send their material essence back into the pool of material from which they started.
The Great Wheel is a metaphor for this cyclical reality, one built into the nature of our universe. Matter goes through a fallow time, then a time of growth and vitality, only to return to a fallow time where it can pass back into new forms. This is divine energy on its way up and down the tree of life, winking on, then off, traveling from the physical world which we know, back to the source of matter found in the crown of ongoing creation. Then, back down again.
Yes, that’s what I thought about on my way to dreamland last night, Thanksgiving night.
I spent time before the trip to Tony’s working on my kabbalah presentation for December 6th. This will take some doing since kabbalah is a quintessentially Jewish discipline and I want to focus, somehow, on the Great Wheel. According to the Tree of Life, the sephiroth (spheres) arranged as in this illustration reveal a path by which the sacred becomes actual and the actual becomes sacred. The bottom sephirot malkuth is the world which we experience daily, the place where all the power in this universe (there are many others), funnels out of the spiritual and into the ontological. It is also the realm of the shekinah, the feminine aspect of god. In kabbalistic terms malkuth is the place where the limits of things allow the pulsing, living energy of the other spheres to wink into existence.
In one sense then the Great Wheel, focused as it is on this earth, can only be of malkuth, that is, of the sphere of the actual, the bottom circle below the hand of the kabbalist in the illustration. In another sense, since all sephiroth contain all others, what is of malkuth must also be of the others, the spiritual dna of the whole universe. So, if we take the Great Wheel as a metaphor for the creating, harvesting and ending of life, a cycle without end, then the Great Wheel is, too, a Tree of Life. That is, the inanimate becomes animate, the animate lives, then dies, returning its inanimate particulars to the universe which, through the power of ongoing creation, rearranges them in living form so the cycle can go on.
I really like cooking, used to do a lot more. It requires mindfulness and produces a meal for others to enjoy. Just popping up from my days of anthropology: 
We’re not like dogs in that fundamental sense. As Emerson observed, “The days are gods.” Another binary opposition is the sacred and the profane, like the holy and the secular, ordinary time and sacred time. We imbue, out of our speculative capacity, the passing of time with certain significance. The day we were born. The yahrzeit notion in Judaism, celebrating the anniversary of a death. A day to celebrate the birth of a god, or to remember a long ago war against colonial masters. We identify certain days, a vast and vastly different number of them, as new year’s day, the beginning of another cycle marked by the return of our planet to a remembered spot on its journey.
When we merge our speculative fantasies with the chemistry of changing raw food into a beautiful cooked meal, we can have extraordinary times. The natural poetics of wonder join the very earthy act of feeding ourselves to create special memories. Very often on those days we gather with our family, a unit that itself memorializes the most basic human purpose of all, procreation of the species. We don’t tend to think of these most elemental components, but they are there and are sine qua non’s of holidays.
Shame. It’s a quiet burning just under the skin, a turning of the inner face away from the self, embarrassed. What have I done? I suppose its power comes in the possibility that the person who acted like this could be the “real” me. And, it doesn’t have to be an egregious act to call it up.
Getting to the point here. I’m a student, probably since my first conscious thought. How the world works fascinates me. History, too. Literature. Art. Religion. Philosophy. Politics. Last night for example, before I went to sleep, I focused on my breath as I often do. I began to wonder, “OK. I know about inspiration, the lungs take in air, blood in the lungs binds the oxygen to the hemoglobin. But what about expiration? How does that work? Where do the exhaust gases, the carbon dioxide, come from? How do they get expelled? Why don’t the two processes interfere with each other?” Still don’t know the answer, btw, but I’m going to ask Kate at breakfast.
I shrank back in my chair, at least metaphorically, vowing, again, to keep my hand down. To keep that curiosity publically in check. To filter my thoughts, about whether they need to be expressed. Hard for me. I’m eager when it comes to learning and part of learning is bouncing ideas off each other. But there’s that balance idea, the sweet spot between curiosity and taking up too much space, the need to honor the contributions and questions of others, to not privilege my own at other’s expense.
The tree of life, the tree of immortality guarded by the angel with the flaming sword; the tree itself still growing in paradise, concealed by language, by our senses, by the everydayness of our lives; the path back to the garden often forgotten, the exile from paradise a separation so profound that we no longer know the location of the trail head and even harder, we no longer have a desire to search for it.
But here’s the trap. Metaphor, of course! I studied philosophy, religion, anthropology in college. Then, after a few years stuck in unenlightened instinctual behavior-the storied sex, drugs and rock and roll of the sixties and seventies-I moved to seminary. The trap tightened. I learned about the church, scripture old and new, ethics, church history. It was exhilarating, all this knowledge. I soaked it up. I remained though stuck in the intellectual triad, pushing back and forth between the polarity of intuitive wisdom, hochmah, and analytical thought, binah, often not going on to daat, or understanding. I learned, but did not integrate into my soul.
My heart knew I had gotten lost, in exile once again. In Dante’s words in Canto 1 of the Divine Comedy:
At the time of its crumbling another path had begun to open for me. Fiction writing emerged when, ironically, I began writing my Doctor of Ministry thesis. Instead of working on it I ended up with 30,000 plus words of what would become my first novel, Even The Gods Must Die. Irony in the title, too, I suppose.
Even so, I sat behind the barrier, the flaming sword, the metaphor trap. Beth Evergreen and Rabbi Jamie Arnold have started me on a journey back to where I began, immersed in the dark. Seeking for the light, yes, but happy now in the darkness, too. The Winter Solstice long ago became my favorite holiday of the year.
But. At Beth Evergreen I have begun to feel my way back into the fourth triad, the mystery I first encountered on the hard wooden pews in Alexandria, the one pulsing behind the metaphors of tenebrae, of crucifixion, of resurrection, and now of Torah, of language, of a “religious” life. I knew it once, in the depth of my naive young boy’s soul. Now, I may find it again, rooted in the old man he’s become.
Three nights in a row at Beth Evergreen. Challenging for this early to bed, early to rise guy. Though. Kabbalah fascinated me. I’m beginning to feel my way into the occult, again. The hidden wonders. This time around I may be able to actually hold at arm’s length the cultural vehicles and not resist the message because of the messengers. That is, kabbalah, in particular, has a poetic, evocative, confounding approach that speaks to my sense of absurdity. And, my in but not of relationship to Judaism also allows me a critical distance that I find very helpful.
This story works for me. The imagery is something I can relate to because I’m human. Honor is so important and so often gotten wrong. Think, for example, about the instance of DJT honoring America First; just as Kim Jong Un honors himself and North Korea first. Or the gang member who feels dissed, disrespected, dishonored. A sense of kavod would have prevented the shooting in Las Vegas, the holocaust. It would prevent child abuse and domestic violence. Harming another whose dignity and respect is as worthy as your own is just not possible.
Behind the wilderness. Everett Fox is a Jewish scholar who did a translation of the Torah into English while preserving the Hebrew syntax. He made some startling word choices, too, such as in this verse: Exodus 3:2 “He (Moshe) led the flock behind the wilderness–and he came to the mountain of God, to Horev.” Behind is such an interesting choice.
Behind the wilderness is the God who is, as Fox translates later in this passage: I-will-be-there howsoever I-will-be-there. It is this God whose messenger Moshe saw in the bush that burned without being consumed. This God’s name, a verbal noun composed of a mashup of past-present-future tenses for the verb to be, does not reveal. It conceals. It means, it does not describe. The messenger in the bush speaks for the vast whorling reality in which past, present and future are one, all experienced in the present and as part of which we are each integral, necessary and non-interchangeable.
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