Over the past 9 months or so, as I’ve been researching about Akasha and the Akashic records for a book I’ll be writing, I’ve been studying the Kabbalah. Yes, they are connected. 🙂 Plus I’ll hopefully be putting out a class on Kabbalah for DailyOm.com sometime this year. Sooner rather than later, but I still have a bit more research to do.
Something that I realized through all the writing and the notes and the notebooks is that I need a means to work with this material tactically. Maybe it’s because I’m Native American and therefore my spirituality has deep seated earth grounded material aspects to it or that I don’t feel like I truly know something until I’ve put my hands to it, but I kept feeling the need to build the Tree of Life.
Now there are two common ways for people to do so, one is to draw it on paper or canvas, the other is to draw it, or build it, on painter’s canvas to huge scale. Somewhat like transportable Labyrinths which can be assembled in or outdoors or unrolled if they are all one piece, a Tree of Life can be painted so each sephiroth is big enough to stand on and the paths between them can be walked. I liked the idea of having something that can be walked on or interacted with in this way and that was transportable, but I have no interest in storing or maintaining a huge Tree of Life canvass that would most of the time sit in my garage gathering dirt. 😛
So instead I began the process of creative meditation. What would be something I could make with my resources and skill set that would allow me to work with the Tree of Life in the way I wanted to through the creation process and ongoing once the creating was complete? What came to me was making a quilt. Applique of each sephiroth and path while using my fine cross stitching skills to put the Hebrew for each sephiroth on them. From the moment I realized this was what I would do the meditation process has begun to unfold. I have begun designing the patterns for the Hebrew letters and putting them together for the names. I have also gone to the fabric store and found some of the fabrics I’ll be using. It isn’t all of them. I have one fabric on order and I still need to figure out the middle 3 sephiroth. Daath, Tifereth, and Yesod are the one’s I’m still sitting with.
In each choice, each action is part of the meditation bringing me a better knowing of the Tree of Life and of myself. And in the end I should have a Queen size bedspread that can be used for meditation in a multitude of ways. At least that’s the plan. 🙂 We’ll see how it goes. Like all meditation, the path is rarely straight and the end is rarely where you thought it would be. 🙂