Tree of Life

This post has been incubating in my brain for a few busy, happy days, and it turns out that tonight is the perfect time to post it, so . . . . perfect.


The image above is a depiction of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, the tree of sefirot. If I wrote down everything I understand about the kabbalistic Tree of Life, this would be an extremely short post! But tonight is the New Year of the Trees, so I feel entitled, and here it is.


In a simplistic sense, each circle on the diagram represents a kind of motivating life force or energy. I first encountered the sefirot by counting the omer, a meditative practice of counting the days between Passover and Shavuot. There are seven weeks between the holidays--seven weeks times seven days--and there is a structured way of meditating on seven of the sefirot during this time. Each week is dedicated to a particular sefirah. For example, the first week is the week of Chesed or lovingkindness. Then, each day of the week also has its sefira. The first day of the week is Chesed, the second Gevurah (strength), the third is Tiferet (beauty, balance), and so on.


Here's the cool part: Each day the weekly sefirah is played off against the daily one. So the meditation of the first day is lovingkindness within lovingkindness. The second is strength within lovingkindness. The third is beauty within lovingkindness.


It's simpler to say this than to really know what it means. I so thoroughly didn't know what it meant that I employed very concrete means to try to envision it. One year I assigned each sefirah a color, and scribbled the proper combination together each night with colored pencils.


I remember the first year I counted the omer. The first night was easy--lovingkindness within lovingkindness. Loving energy naturally creates more love. Cel mai simplu.


Then I got to the second night, gevurah sheb'chesed, strength within lovingkindness. Gevurah connotes not only strength, but boundaries, discipline, rejection. These sefirot are also imagined as parts of the body. Chesed is the right arm, drawing things closer in love. Gevurah is the left arm, and it is like a shield, strong, rigid, pushing things away. I thought about this interaction for a long time.


There are many ways in which I have experienced breast cancer as a loss of power. Mainly, it took away my illusion that I was a person who didn't have breast cancer. Breast cancer was something I had feared my entire adult life. When it happened, I kept trying to ward it off. I didn't want to hear about breast cancer organizations and support groups. I was going to get through it in a state of adaptive denial.


Here's the moment when that changed: I had had the mastectomy and I was lying in my hospital bed. I noticed the sign taped to the wall behind me: "No IV's, Blood Draws, or BP in Left Arm." For some inexplicable reason, this sign made me feel better, even good. I think I was relieved to have the surgery behind me. I was still uncertain about the future. One thing was clear, though: I had joined the warrior women. The sign was the badge of courage.


Last year, I tried to get at gevurah sheb'chesed by holding my left arm in my right arm. The thought that came up for me at that time was that even someone very strong needs to be held. Although I had thought a lot about the fact that the cancer was on my left/gevurah side, I had forgotten this detail from last year's omer count. I came across it when I was looking back in my journal a few days ago, and it startled me. This was exactly the motion I had been doing for days, cradling my left arm in my right arm because the left arm was so weak and I was not supposed to use it.


I don't know exactly what this means, but I feel very lucky. This week has really been like the crossing of the sea for me. My pathology reports came back good, which means I can focus on recovery now. Which means rebuilding my gevurah from the ground up, in my muscles and everywhere else.


So I'm headed up to the tent--I've been trying to get there all day, but the night is going to be a perfectly fine time to be there as well. There is the beautiful festival moon of Tu B'Shevat, the New Year of the Trees. Something else I only faintly understand, but in my usual concrete way, I think if I eat fruits and nuts and contemplate the Tree of Life, I've got it covered.