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sees me, breathes me, holds me, forms and unforms me. My body, the tiny scraps of breaking wings, will nourish the earth-drenched roots, but in the moment I fly, flutter through the spaces cut out in space by this tree, and celebrate, dance, glory in what I am reflecting and born from and born for: this moment of Treeness called butterfly.

I’ll write as the butterfly flies, falling on its brief and terrible journey, catching a wing and tearing those delicate feathers of color, time eating it up faster than it can fly, falling. I’ll write for the butterfly and for love and impossibility.

background on the tree of life

The Kabbalah is a love poem that connects us to the pulse of all life—that same pulse that began the universe.

Kabbalah means “to receive.” In opening up to all that we receive—this life, each breath, the beautiful world we live in and are a part of—we catch glimpses of the Kabbalah’s breadth. While the Kabbalah’s philosophies and abstract intellectualism may appear detached from nature, its key image is that of a tree, the Tree of Life. Diving into the depths, we discover Kabbalah addresses this very thing: our history of separation from the living world, something we can never truly be separate from. We could call what we are receiving the breath of the divine. In the Way of Kabbalah, a course taught by Rabbi David Ingber through the Shift Network, the rabbi suggested that the name of God cannot be spoken not because it is forbidden, which is what is commonly assumed, but because it is the sound of a breath. It is breath itself; perhaps it is every breath and therefore the very essence of life.

When we use the term the Kabbalah, we are discussing a body of occult knowledge that is received—either directly from God, Source, or the infinite, or through engagement with Kabbalistic practices, teachers, study, contemplation, and magic. Teaching, argument, and discussion can help to unpack this knowledge; one does not receive passively but actively. It is our own reception of this material, these raw experiences and our understanding of them, that makes us students of Kabbalah.

The Kabbalah is Jewish. Non-Judaic mystery schools, including Christian and occult schools, have versions of the Kabbalah, often written as Qabala or Cabala (or other variants), but these are based on, and build from, Judaic sources and writings. In other times and places, access to this material has been strictly regulated as to who is and is