Two Paths Through the Tree

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.

I think of us as shards, sparks of life flung out from the beginning of the universe, falling into this momentary form as human just as the Tree breaks apart into its many selves, its ten sephirot. They’re always still part of the one, the All, just as we are. Merged together we are unbroken, and the very atoms of our cells remember that. But as individual selves we’re always broken—broken off from the divine, though striving to remember and return with every heartbeat, every lover, every mystical quest and heart-stopping ritual. Breaking. It’s not a bad thing but an opening, a remembering of who we really are. Like a butterfly, the tiny color-drenched feathers on their wings brushing off here, there, parts of them crumpling and tearing, each one of their lives a song to the glory of life. Like us. Flying and falling, intrinsically a part of All and yet just separate enough to hold the reflection.

Flying but falling. In the Tree of Life, we fall from the very top of the diagram— Kether, the divine, where all things are one—to the very bottom, Malkuth. It’s like gravity: the only thing to do is fall. Malkuth is the living world we are part of, where we live and die and create love. Born through another human’s body, we fall into this life, and at the end we fall out of it through the gateway of death. Alive, we fall in love—with ideas, with other humans, with land, with magic, and, if we are lucky, with life itself. Falling is surrendering, letting gravity take us, toppling from the divine to the human. It mirrors the biblical descent from Paradise to Earth and the fall of the angels. Falling is about separation and union—we fall away from the other, the beloved, the All, but we fall into the embrace of the lover, the dark earth, and fleshy incarnation. It’s all about falling.

I’m writing this book to dare the dark stretch of the universe, to attempt to capture the bright sparks that whispered the gods into being, to redeem meaning. I’m a butterfly perched or falling through a tree so impossibly beautiful, the structure of the universe etched in its branches, the poetry of its leaves and buds. I ate of this tree; the cells of my body were formed by this tree as I lay bound in a cocoon to a twig of this tree in the imaginal realms, unknowing of what could emerge or how brief and bright my life would be, transformed and falling, so delicate and pigment-drenched with life force, and dying in each moment. I fell in love. In love with the breath of the Tree and each breath of mine shared with/from/through the Tree. The tree wrote me, the tree