invitation to the reader
self of me on the page. This is one of my experiences of the Tree of Life, falling in love with the world. It’s been suggested that it’s unusual to equate sex and the Kabbalah so closely, though I think it’s obvious. We’re talking about the Tree of Life—and how does life arise? By sex, of one sort and another. Sex is the raw emanation of the life force. Maybe it’s the sex of sunlight into sea water, maybe it’s pollen on the breeze, and maybe it’s two human animals scenting, tasting, touching, and merging. The whole of the Tree of Life is about sex. The bursting complexity of atom-building, the vast throbbing expanse of space, the irresistible seduction of a black hole, the layered delights of the world. And the Tree and trees themselves: roots into soil, branches to the sky. Birds nesting, insects burrowing, small animals living in, on, and within its trunk, branches, and roots. Caterpillars eating leaves, forming chrysalises, transforming themselves, bound to the twigs and emerging as butterflies, ephemeral symbols of the beauty of life. Each student of Kabbalah has their own Kabbalah. Mine is the Kabbalah of Broken Butterflies, the briefest and brightest. Humans—all living creatures of this earth—are bright and beautiful. And compared to the Tree, to the divine, to the universe, we are impossibly brief, almost impossible—but then, miraculously, possible. Existing anyway in spite of our brevity. What could we understand in these few moments of universal time granted to us? Hardly anything. And yet—something. Caterpillars eat the leaves of the Tree on their way to becoming butterflies. They bind themselves to a tree in their process of transformation, trusting it to hold them as they dissolve their bodies and allow the wondrously named imaginal cells to re-create them in the butterfly form that will be birthed, open its wings—and fly—through the Tree. How much can a butterfly know of a tree? It is fed, sheltered, birthed by the tree. Like the butterfly we stretch our metaphoric wings and flutter through its leaves and branches. The Tree formed us and so we belong to it, but we only know a tiny part, and that imperfectly from our butterfly or human experience. Rather than understand it, it would be more true to say we are it—the butterfly is the tree in butterfly form. I am the Tree of Life in human form. And in living, I’m breaking—breaking open from the chrysalis, breaking my heart with this life, breaking free from old selves, breaking down my form as I fall through life’s journey from birth to death.
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