After skimming around the subject but never quite landing on it for probably the best part of the last 30 years, I decided that maybe it was about time to actually study Kabbalah… A couple of months back, I had a dream and it was filled with Hebrew words that I knew by osmosis but didn’t fully understand… I quizzed a learned friend to interpret for me… then a week or so later appeared a course and so I signed up, thinking that maybe it would be wise as maybe at some point my learned friend’s patience would frazzle and fray under continued demands to act as my personal Babel fish… Though on running this theory past my friend, she did laugh and informed me that I’d forgotten to factor in her vanity and that she does enjoy being asked questions…
So with a course, of course, comes homework! and this is where I start to slide… I’m inherently lazy and to be honest, I have a strange relationship with reading, in that I constantly read yet seldom read a book in its entirety… and also I buy lots of books and it’s not unusual for them to sit unopened for 20-30 years and now I am getting to an age that when I see a new book, I ponder if I’ll live long enough to open it… So… I find myself sat with a reading list and I think – Screw it! Whatever I need to learn will find it’s way to me…
So you may or may not have noticed that this says part 2 and you may be wondering where part 1 is… yeah… part 1 didn’t get written… my homework arrived courtesy of Mr S leaving a newspaper article that he’d found at work, on my desk… I have notes and scribblings about that scattered all over the place and like I say… I am lazy… so they aren’t filed away neatly or stored and saved in any sane manner or manor… but they are there somewhere…
My homework for lesson 2, also arrived on my desk, via the hands of Mr S, in the form of a big pile of log slices, which he thought I’d like to use for pyrography…
Now the first thing I do when I work with pyrography is to look for the shapes that naturally occur within the wood as it’s easier to work with nature to enhance what is already there than to go away make a design and not be able to fit it to the shape…
So… as I looked at my logs and the life of the tree… my thoughts soon turned to The Tree of Life…
In my idle musings, I pondered… I look at the centre of the patterns which incidentally are seldom in the middle… but all start with this point and then a nearly perfect circle… it reminded me of an iris and before that existed, the twinkle in the eye that sparked creation… things that started with the idea of perfection…
But as you zoom out…
Then you see how as you move away from that point of origin, things are bent out of shape, the environment leaves it mark, as does the response and all that combines to make a kind of fingerprint unique to that piece which holds its history… but more interestingly to me… reveals a beauty extending from the heart that comes from the imperfections and the patterns that are made by life’s interactions…
A tree now in death opened up in depth to reveal many things… I took in the sweet citrus scent and how it made my senses whirl… aromas hitting my primitive reptile brain as I considered how I’d burn this still slightly damp piece of wood into its next incarnation…
Now… I may well be barking up the wrong tree… but it amuses me that in contemplating the life of and the tree and the rhythms played out across the logs, that I’d somehow found…
A Logarithm for The Tree of Life…
I can walk with that…
😉
The pure and blessed way 