Through the Branches

Last week, I had the blessing of co-leading a retreat on embodying the five levels of soul, as part of a wonderful adventure in embodied kabbalah called "Embodying the Great Mystery," a program conceived and created by my dancing spirit sister, Simona Aronow. "How," one of the retreatants asked, at the beginning of our week together, "are we going to embody these levels of the soul, if the soul is essentially non-material to begin with and we're moving toward more and more dissolved layers in our awareness?"

Good question, I thought. The realms it opened led us to bracing dives into the very nature of body itself, bouncing us from energetic muscularity to blissful floating among layers of consciousness expressed through solidity, fluidity, vapor, and light. Much like the photo above, taken at Point Lobos on the Monterey Peninsula, we practiced perceiving layer upon layer, "running and returning" between states of solidity and dissolution, aerating our physicality as we played in the "white spaces" of beingness.

The poem below, written as the finale in a series of 49 poems, each inspired by the dual qualities of one day of the Omer count, speaks to the mystery of Malkhut sheh'b'Malkhut, Presence within Materiality, Materiality within Presence. As Rabbi Yoel Glick writes, "The Kabbalah is not a logical system that can be mastered by the reasoning mind. It is a body of wisdom that teaches deep truths that are embedded in the fabric of creation."  A body of wisdom. A wisdom of body.  

This very moment
two thousand miles away
a friend receives
a stem cell transplant
seeding fresh, new blood
and hope for years more
music-making,
simple meals enjoyed
with wife and kids
and friends,
laughter, tears
more stories
stretching down the years
 
a miracle
so extraordinarily
ordinary--
no more or less
than the parting of
a sea, or a
mountain blazing
fire,
or a Word, unspoken,
being heard--
that these tiny sacs
of protein and water,
the body’s own,
injected into hollow
spaces at one’s core
could yet become
both throne
and crown
of living!
 
Thank Goodness
Thanks, Presence,
streaming down the ages
revealing living Torah
through each stick
each leaf
each stone
through the marrow
of each bone!
 
                         Malkhut sheh’b’malkhut
                         Sovereignty/presence within sovereignty/presence 

​                                                         ---Diane Elliot, 2017