Tag Archives: Holy Hill Hermitage

Sharing Solstice with a Soul Sister

Bereavement, News, Practice, Relationships, Support, Teachings, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Jolie, May her Memory be for a Blessing, hanging orange and popcorn balls filled with birdseed as part of our Solstice honoring of the birds and of the bushes and trees around my cabin in Eire, December 21, 2015

A popping, crackling fire, it is cold, very cold, as only an Irish night can be. Five years ago now, my solstice fire on the Isle of Eire kept me warm and took me deep into the Winter Solstice time of change and birth. I had a sister come visit, we made garlands for the trees, had a festive meal, and made offerings in songs, tears and some good Irish whiskey.

This spinning planet will continue spinning and I’ll keep spinning on it, but my dear beloved Jolie left this earth on November 30, 2020, ten days after learning she had ovarian cancer. I had been getting ready, and coordinating with friends and family re: who would be traveling to her in Ashland for her surgery, who would be there before and after, and who could cook meals locally.  We never got to that point. 

I find I don’t know how to continue writing, after the sentence “we never got to that point.”

I mean who was expecting that? Jolie thought she was dying and that the cancer had moved into her lungs, but I thought she was overwhelmed and scared and in pain and afraid. I was wrong. She was all those things as well, but she was also very, very sick. She had been unwell, struggling with tummy issues (or so we thought). I think that during the Covid 19 pandemic, many folks went to  the doctor less often, and she thought her issues were dietary, not ovarian. I can’t know all the reasons her cancer was so severe and took her life so quickly. Perhaps she’d had it for years and misinterpreted the symptoms. Jolie has had a sensitive stomach and nature for as long as I’ve known her, which is over twenty years.  She’s also had a troubled history with her female organs.

She couldn’t eat gluten, dairy, caffeine or alcohol and she also avoided sugar. She was a fiercely healthy woman in so many ways. She probably spent more time outdoors than anyone else I know. She hiked, biked, slept, walked, dreamed and lived in nature all the time. She would set up her bed outdoors when the weather was nice. Her preferred environment was always a wild and outdoor one. 

Now, she is flying free and singing with the angels, or she’s an eagle or she’s lounging somewhere resting in glory, these are my most fervent wishes and dreams for her,  a real end to her profound and deep suffering. She was a fiercely joyous person at times but also someone who keenly felt the pain of the earth, the pain of others, her own pain and she just was tuned to the hurt channel a lot of the time.

She and I had a disagreement about life after death, we had many, over the course of our friendship. She remembered coming into her body as an infant, being born and feeling very unhappy about how much suffering she was going to have to endure and she insisted her first memory was this sense of pain and anguish. She further was afraid that this cycle of pain  would repeat and that she wouldn’t get off this spinning wheel of suffering. 

For a Jewish girl, she had some serious pagan beliefs. Actually, she probably considered herself more of a pagan than a Jew. She was a deep lover of the earth, of Native spiritual traditions. She studied with various tribal elders, learned rituals from them as well as worked for different Native nations around the world throughout her life. She studied Buddhism and Hinduism. She loved the Enneagram and we disagreed about that as well. One of my last promises to her, after a fight we’d had, was that I’d read the section pertinent to me (in her opinion) and go over the chapter with her to explore areas I needed to grow and change in. She would do the same with me for her chapter. I don’t remember now what number I am in the Enneagram. I’m sorry, sister, I won’t be following through with this task, now that you’re not here. The Enneagram is not for me.

I’m firmly a Jewish Curandera/Healer/Witch myself. Jolie and I danced our Judaism together and she came more into a relationship with it as our friendship grew and she saw that there was a deeply rooted earth-based nature to Judaism and that she didn’t have to hide who she was or water down her Wild Woman ways to be a Jew. In recent years she was teaching and working within several Jewish communities, not outside of them, actively a member and engaged with them. We went over her lesson plans and ideas often and she wanted me to co-teach with her for years. Something, I never had the time for, and which now I most deeply regret. 

Back to our argument. Jolie was pretty sure that she wouldn’t just be going onto some heavenly realm after she died. Let’s be clear, this discussion of ours happened over many years, not close to her death. We spoke about everything and always went deep. She’s someone who never withheld her truth with me and I with her. All subjects and secrets were shared. I told her, I’d already had a conversation with the Holy One and clearly stated my preference to NOT be coming back around. This lifetime has whacked me pretty hard and I don’t want to do anything over or again. I’ll miss love-making and cuddling with my husband, spending time with my friends and family, flower arranging and the flavors of food, but none of these are worth another round for me. I also have a deep homesickness for singing with the Heavenly chorus. 

When I pray and I can go deep, I feel as if I’m touching the tiniest fringe of being in the Divine Presence and the longing I feel is in my cells and soul deep. I honestly can’t wait to be on the other side. This doesn’t mean I’m in a hurry to get there, but Olam Ha Ba/The World to Come, for me is a place of great light, comfort, Shalom/Peace and praise. 

I told Jolie, I thought she was wrong, her memory of pain and suffering wasn’t wrong, but the idea that we have to continue suffering on the other side and repeat stuff just doesn’t resonate for me. So, I made a deal with Jolie. I told her:

“Listen if I’m wrong and you’re right, in another 300 years or so, when we’ve both been good and dead for awhile, let’s agree to meet up and you can point out the error of my ways and have a good laugh at my expense. If I’m right, then there will be no meet up, other than as we both recognize one another on the other side as two voices in a choir of Holy energies and voices soaring through the universe in great joy and wonderment. That’s what I’m looking forward to!” We laughed and she said some part of her hoped I was right and she was wrong. 

I’m not worried, I know she’s free from suffering now. I’ve seen her soaring and felt her voice directing me. I have been grieving her hard and its been complicated by the fact that she made me the executor of her estate. So, I haven’t been able to cry or just be devastated because I’ve had to remain functional to ensure the care of her cats, home, and make sure her affairs don’t fall apart. But when someone you love dies and dies suddenly, you need to fall apart. So, finally I had myself a good cry and then I got a message from her.

I got a strong call from Jolie to go do a Mikveh and then to come home and have a fire circle for her. It’s January, it’s cold at the lagoon. It’s Covid times, having folks over is not recommended. But, Jolie, on the other side isn’t too concerned about these things. I’ve posted on my YouTube channel my post Mikveh thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Be6vyEdEUQ&t=1s

So, I made a few phone calls to local folks who knew and loved Jolie to see if any of them wanted to come to the fire circle to sing songs and tell stories and cry. I’d set up the chairs six feet apart and provide hot soup and tea and some Irish whiskey too. It was a last minute decision and most folks were not able to show up, but two friends did, so it was perfect because three is a sacred number for me and for Jolie. Additionally, I let folks know we would be gathering and to light a candle or join us virtually in remembering her and so our circle was actually a bit larger.

A day after the circle I got an email from another dear friend of Jolie’s telling me that my message to hold a fire circle for her and do Mikveh came on the 49th day since her death. This is the day in the Buddhist tradition when the soul can leave the Bardo and is released for their next adventure, whatever that might be. So, even though I sensed she was free, she may also have been hovering around all of us who loved her and missed her and she chose to communicate with me in a sort of snub your nose kind of silly way by leaving her message with me on the 49th day since her death.

The spiritual technology that Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Native peoples and Jews have around death is profound. Different ideas and teachings and yet very similar practices in terms of honoring the dead and praying for them and making offerings and taking good, good care of the folks left behind.

This is true of any good religious community. We are not all the same in how we live, but we are all going to die, regardless of which tradition we grow up in or come into. How we cross that river is not up to us and what happens on the other side is truly a mystery. My certainty is not really a certainty, it’s a strong feeling, a kind of tuning of my soul with the other side. I’ve danced with angels and heard from folks who have crossed over. I’m very aware that the veil between here and there is a shimmery thin wisp of a thing. So, my visions and ideas feel right to me and sharing them with Jolie, helped her feel a little better about what might be the case for her.

Our last conversation was right before her mother arrived on Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving. I told her I’d seen Jolie sitting at the base of a giant Mama Oak Tree with squirrels running and playing at her feet and gathering acorns and an eagle flying around in circles and keening a powerful song. She loved hearing this. We talked about whether she and her mother had to wear masks and I told her I thought they both needed to, since her mom was flying in from San Diego to Ashland and had been exposed to lots of germs. I was worried for Jolie’s health and for her mother’s. Jolie died two days later early Monday morning, with her mother present, most likely from a pulmonary embolism caused by the swelling and fluid in her body. It was terrible for Jolie’s mother to have to watch her daughter collapse suddenly and not be able to be resuscitated. Jolie did leave this world in a terrible way, terrible for those of us left behind who loved her.

I have so much more to say, but I want to tell the Winter Solstice in Ireland story, so now I’ll head back there. I was on my silent solo retreat, which was supposed to be a full year. I was writing to folks and got several letters from Jolie in tremendous pain. I decided to call her and when I did she asked if she could come visit for two weeks during Solstice and for the Christmas and New Years’ holidays, Hanukkah was early that year and had already come and gone. She couldn’t bear being alone for the holidays and wanted to be with someone she loved and who loved her and who she felt safe with. I prayed on this and got a strong sense that I should say yes. I’d been alone and on retreat at Holy Hill Hermitage in Skreen, Ireland for six months by that time. She got permission to come stay in one of the cabins on the land and she agreed to give me lots of spaciousness and to honor whatever my needs were for silence and quiet within the context of our visit. She just needed a friend and someone to connect to. 

So, my sweet wild sister showed up at the Hermitage. I didn’t know it, until she got there, but my very loud, wild, Jewish self was desperately lonely for someone of her ilk. The monks, nuns and other hermits were all very fond of me, but regularly reminding me to keep my voice to a whisper or to slow down. There wasn’t a lot of interaction, but there were weekly optional Sunday lunches, cooked by the monks and nuns and work days when you could help out with the grounds or cleaning and some talking was required to navigate the tasks at hand. 

When Jolie arrived, everyone sort of got it, this is Jewish, this is not just Nicole. Additionally, Jolie was with me during Christmas, which is always a less than fun time for me, for lots of reasons. Part of my healing journey in Ireland, involved coming into a deeper relationship with Christian practice from a truly Holy place, where the folks practicing were profoundly engaged and real practitioners. I’d already decided to cook Christmas dinner for all the folks who were at the Hermitage, so they could worship and no one would have to come down and do the cooking. Jolie helped me make the feast for our fellow hermits and that was both fun, ironic and silly. I told the community, I wouldn’t cook a ham, but I’d do a Turkey and all the fixins.’

Jolie also brought so much into my life that seems obvious now, but at the time just didn’t make sense or happen without her. So, for our Solstice gathering, she helped me make these orange and birdseed balls. I’d developed a very active conversation with my cabin’s bird visitors and loved feeding them and seeing them on the other side of my window while meditating. Jolie also had me drape and decorate the bushes and trees around my cabin, a very pagan thing to do! Luckily, my cabin was down a small hill and the flora around it was not too visible. Jolie liked being a rebel, so the Jewish witches, decorated the bushes around their silent cabins on Solstice for the faeries, angels and the birds. We also made a fire pit since there was no way she was going to go through the night of Winter Solstice without a fire.

My window seat where I prayed and meditated and where I left a bird feeding ball outside so, the birds and I could commune.

So, behind my cabin we made a small circle of rocks and when it got dark we made our fire, wrapped up in lots of layers, and since it wasn’t raining, we sang and chanted and did powerful ritual. We shared and cried and danced around our fire at the Catholic monastery. Two Wild Jewish Witches being Wild Women together in the dark. This moment paired with cooking Christmas dinner for our Catholic brothers and sisters felt truly like a Tikkun/Healing for all the women, witches and Jews who had been thwarted, burned or killed at the hands of the Christian communities over millennia. Our solstice fire was a glorious reclaiming space kind of liminal moment of mirth, healing and wildness in the middle of a very sacred, kind and beautiful Catholic place.

Now, not only do I miss Jolie, like an ache in my gut, but I am also left missing the quiet and the dark I had there and what I call my bone time too. I miss the sounds of birds and water flowing in the stream outside my window and the wind, the whirling, whirling wind. Those were the only sounds I heard for months.

Here, where the noise is constant, and birdsong is a background to pumps, heaters, cars, humans in communication with each other and the cacophony that is a town, I think back to my time of Solstice quiet and shared solitude with the Holy Hill monastics and Jolie, my soul-sister who came to visit.

I make a wish and set my intention/Kavannah to one day be there again, in the quiet and the deep, deep nourishing dark, where I can dance again with the stars and sing to them and hear their refrain. Jolie won’t be with me in person anymore. Our rendezvous will now be in a few hundred years, or I’ll find her in all the spaces of my dreams and visions and when she calls out to me in the voice of the hawk, eagle, squirrel or flower that catches my eye and says, “notice me, I’m here with a message for you.”

I miss you Jolie, thank you for being my sister, my brave, wild sister.

If you want to know more about Jolie and her continuing legacy, which you should want to know about, please visit her website: https://www.gowildinstitute.org/

Jolie, having a blissful moment with flowers

Shabbat Structure: Simply Sublime Spiritual Technology

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Solo Shabbat in Eire, Holy Hill Hermitage, Ireland, in my cabin named Clare in the Fall of 2016

Simple Shabbat, the basic structure is a phenomenal series of steps and prayers and practices to elevate the soul and align us with the essence of creation. I am writing this piece because a young woman, who was also on retreat, three years ago at the same hermitage as myself in Ireland, asked me about the order of the prayers. I led a few Shabbat ceremonies, both in my cabin and at the main house, for the other people on retreat. I was mostly alone, but there were moments of connection with the other hermits, clerics, and other folks taking sacred space in solitude.

I remember once being told by a dear friend of mine, Stephen Jenkins, professor Emeritus at Humboldt State University, who was getting ready to teach a three-day session on Judaism in his World Religions class, “Wish me luck, Nicole.” I responded with: “I don’t want to wish you luck, I need to come in and teach this part of your class.” I’m not sure those were my exact words, but this was the beginning of my lecturing in his World Religions Class. I have guest-lectured, during the Judaism portion of his classes, for over fifteen years now.

Some things cannot be put simply and survive the stripping down, especially when we are talking about Shabbat or Judaism in a three-day period of time. The mere idea of three days in a class on campus, to cover the topic, made me a little sick to my stomach. It felt kind of like asking me to describe the magnificence of the sunrise or my love for my children or any other sublime and mysterious, historical and elemental quality of the universe. It’s just not a three day or a one minute text or email kind of thing.

So, thank you Chelsea Smith, for asking me this question about the order of the prayers and why we cover the challah. I’m going to try to be brief, completely contradicting myself from the previous sentences. Of course, me being brief, is an oxymoron in and of itself.

When I lead a service I have a basic structure that I follow, which is not my invention and which has changed over the thousands of years that Jewish folks have been observing the Sabbath. I choose from various prayer books I like or I incorporate elements into my practice from those prayers when I am being a little looser in my observance.

You really begin by preparing for the time and setting the space. I clean my home, cook special foods, make challah (a braided Jewish egg bread).  I’ll get my recipe up here one of these days. You then create an altar. When the Beit Ha Midkash/Holy Temples were destroyed, Judaism did not die for many reasons. One of the main reasons is that we took the elements of our sacred service and rites that were observed in the Holy Temple and brought them into our homes and into our dining rooms.

As long as you have light (candles or oil lamps), wine, salt, bread, water, and prayers offered from your heart, you have the elements of the basic service. This means every Jewish home becomes a sacred temple in time and space. No one can say it better than Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote a simple short book called The Sabbath. I won’t begin to go where he has, but he describes Shabbat/the Sabbath as  both a Sanctuary and as a Palace in Time.

So, we begin by clearing and cleaning as if to welcome a sacred guest. That guest is the Sabbath Queen or the Shechinah or the Seventh Day. She is likened to a bride, she is always referred to in the feminine. We make special foods. For folks with little time or money, even during the Shoah and times of tremendous ugliness and torture, Jewish folks would hide a crust of bread or save one olive so they’d have two on Shabbat instead of one. Folks keep their best cheeses, oils, foods of any kind, for the three meals that occur beginning 18 minutes before the sun sets every Friday evening and ending when there are three stars in the sky the following night, Saturday. It’s roughly twenty-five hours or so, a little longer than one rotation of our spinning planet.

In Ireland, I couldn’t go buy a challah or get bread from Josh Fox, my favorite local baker, here in Arcata. I needed to make it. My little kitchen in my cabin, didn’t have an oven, so I had to make sure I could use the communal kitchen and arrange a time to be taking it over for many hours. I didn’t always do this, for many reasons, but here’s a picture of two small challahs I made for one of my blissful solo Shabbats.

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Small challahs, one in a traditional three braid form and one shaped like a Jewish Star of David, there’s also that key element SALT!

These Challahs are uncovered here, but they are traditionally covered with a cloth when we recite all the blessings before eating our Friday evening meal. This was the original question from Chelsea, “Why do you cover the bread again?”

We cover the bread because it is the final blessing we say before beginning our festive meal and we don’t want to hurt its feelings. This tiny piece of spiritual technology teaches us that if we are concerned about the feelings of our bread, so much so that we cover it, so it doesn’t know its the last in a long line of blessings, we better be that concerned about the feelings of all those we encounter. The bread thinks it’s the only blessing or the best blessing or the special blessing, because it somehow hasn’t heard or experienced all the previous ones. This seems a little comical, but it’s essential to Judaism. We physicalise our practices in small and large ways to make it not a mental exercise, but to embody the essence of what we are reaching for.

So, once the bread is made, I prepare the other foods and make my home and body ready to receive my guest. I take a bath or a shower, or I do a Mikveh (ritual immersion in living water, see Mikveh Movement and Me). Then I lay the table. I put the candles or oil wicks I am going to light out, I get the wine ready, open it and let it breathe so it is at its best. I make sure I have my prayer books or other readings I want to use, I pick fresh flowers and set the table more beautifully than I do for the rest of the week. It’s truly a special time.

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My Shabbat altar from my window seat in Clare.

Once all is ready, and usually this is minutes before you are required to kindle the lights of Shabbat, if I have time I meditate or center myself and let the week’s events play through my mind and release them. My beloved teacher, May his memory always be a Blessing, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi sometimes used a small cardboard box that he passed around and asked folks to deposit their weeks’ cares, worries, and experiences into. He would then take it and put it outside the room or the house. I sometimes do this with children. It’s a great way to physically demonstrate the practice of letting go.

Then I cover my head with a shawl (creating a sacred space in my body) and light the candles and move my hands over them to bring the light of Shabbat into my whole being, I move my hands over them in a circular motion and bring their essence over my head, eyes and body three times. I then recite the first of many blessings. This blessing is thanking the Divine for instructing us to kindle the lights of the day and to observe the practice of it by resting deeply.

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Photo by Temple Beth El’s President Joseph Hale, from one of my Lay-led Shabbat Services

It’s very hard to talk about even one of these blessings in a short way, but that’s my assignment right now. Arrrggghhhh! Each one of these practices have books and teachings about them that deserve attention. Simple structure, okay, after the blessing for the Sabbath light (remember how light was the first thing created in the Universe?), we welcome the Angels of the Most High (the special Shabbat-only angels). These angels only come down to this earthly realm if they are invited and your space is ready for them. Did you set a space for the sacred guest, did you create a place of beauty for Holiness to hover? We welcome them and ask them to bless us with peace and then we let them depart. They have to go everywhere they are invited, so, they can’t linger. Their blessing though is so magnificent that it imbues the rest of the evening. As angels they can and do move through space and time differently than we do.

This is my favorite blessing, and even if I’m not doing more than just the basic layout, I almost never skip this one. I close my eyes and feel their presence and I am uplifted to the realm of the Holy One, for just a second or a moment, but that’s simply sublime!

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Detail with Angel, sculpture in glass, given to me by a lovely woman who was at Holy Hill for a few days and who was part of a discussion about angels that miraculously occurred and which connected me with the incredible Irish mystic Lorna Byrne who sees and speaks with the angels.

Next we bless the children. This blessing is not just for folks with children, in my way of doing things, but a moment to name all the children in our lives or that we are thinking about. In a traditional setting the parents place their hands over the heads of their children and recite three blessings. One for boys, one for girls, and one for all of the above. I just generally do the all of the above since there are many folks who aren’t identified as one or the other. The prayer said over everyone is the priestly blessing originally offered by the Kohanim, (of which I am one). I like the male and female blessings as well, so sometimes I do all of them and just ask folks to align on the gender spectrum, however they wish, male, female, somewhere in between, or inclusive of it all.

Next is the blessing over wine. This is the VERY modified order of blessings at the table. There are many, many more, but if you do these blessings you are basically covered. The blessing over the wine isn’t just about giving thanks for the wine or grape juice. It’s the blessing that recounts the order of the Holy One’s creating of the universe and ending with the day of rest. It’s a blessing you do while holding a glass of wine, but it’s about acknowledging, thanking and sanctifying the DAY of rest. It’s longer than the other blessings and it’s beautiful!

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Shabbat Table, chez moi in Bayside, wine open and breathing, Challahs covered, salt on the table and right before candle-lighting. Artwork by Thao Le Khac, Joy Dellas, my grandmother Perla Barchilon and some Italian tile maker from a hundred years ago.

After the wine blessing, we do a ritual hand washing with a special two-handled cup. We aren’t cleaning our hands, we are purifying them. It’s a mikveh for our hands. We recite the blessing with our hands raised above our heads after having poured water three times over our right hand and then three times over our left hand and drying them with a clean cloth. The blessing basically says, Blessed are You, Holy One, who has instructed us concerning the raising/lifting/immersing of our hands.

This is crucial. Before we actually eat our meal, we’re almost there (I promise), we raise our hands towards the heavens. I think of this as dipping my hands in holiness and sanctifying them so that they only do good. I want to bring down the honey and love and goodness of the Divine realms and only have my hands be the vessels of that. I never want my hands to be hitting or hurting or tearing or harming others or the earth. No small task, which is why, we need reminding, hence the blessing!

Then we uncover that poor challah, who now is the most rich indeed. We’re hungry and excited, the challah is golden and the light of the sun is gone. We have the glow of the candles and the light reflected off the windows and each other’s eyes and now we give thanks for the miracle of bread. Bread is a miracle. The play of water, salt, yeast, grain and magic that makes it rise is how we too are made. Like the bread, we need to rise. We need time, rest, the right ingredients and balance of earthly elements, sugars and salts and magic to create pockets of air, or lightness so that we are magnificent.

Then we break the bread and dip it in the salt, which represents the promise of the Divine. Salt is a preservative, the original one, way back in the day. It reminds us of the value of commitment, of time moving across millenia, it’s the taste of the moon and stars and the ocean and our sweat and it connects us to our ancestors and life.

Then we eat and share stories and talk for hours. There’s another whole bunch of blessings after the meal….. but I’ll leave those for another day!

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My Papa Jacques Barchilon, enjoying his Shabbat dinner, over a year ago. He’s in Heaven now, where the food and the company far exceed anything I can create here. I miss him so!

Gevurah, Grounding and Getting To It

Jewish Holy Days, Jubilee, News, Practice, Relationships, Support, Teachings, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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The Tree Bark, Beautiful and Boundaried

This is the week of Gevurah/Din, which I cannot easily translate. Here are some ways to think about Gevurah: Judgement, Severity, Boundaries, Strength, Discipline, and the Angel Gavriel/Gabriel, whose name shares the same root. Gavriel is the angel on the left side of our bodies, who girds us with strength and protects us.

When I say this is the week of Gevurah, that needs explaining as well. Starting on the second day of Pesach/Passover, observant Jewish folks count the Omer. We count seven cycles of seven, which = 49 and then in the evening of that last day, it’s another day, the 50th day and this is the holiday of Shavuot. Shavuot is about the first grain (Wheat) offering, it’s a pilgrimage festival, like Pesach and Sukkot. It’s also considered to be the anniversary of when the Torah was given on Mt. Sinai and so we stay up all night studying Torah, specifically the Book of Ruth, but all of this is weeks away.

Right now, we are in the second week of the seven and each week is linked to the lower seven Sephirot/Energies/Attributes of the Divine, on the Tree of Life. Last week was Hesed/Loving-Kindness, this week is Gevurah. Gevurah and I have been connecting only in the last few years of my life. Prior to a conscious choice on my part to get into balance and make serious changes in my life and the way I engage with the world, most folks who knew me in the past would laugh and say: “Boundaries and Nicole, in the same sentence or space, that’s an Oxymoron”

Tree of Life

The Panoply of Symbols for the Sefirot

The Kabbalah assigns every symbol to one or more of the Sefirot. Here is a list of some of the many symbols and correspondences one can find. It comes from Dr. Eliezer Siegel in Calgary. Each of the following lists for each Sefirah is found on Jewish Virtual Library under the name of the Sefirah. Nava Shoham (1-800-ketubah.com) collated all of these entries onto one page, which I’ve reproduced here (using some of her font colors) with some corrections. This image of the Sefirot here is found all over the web. I’ve added directions and some alternate names in yellow to the image. If anyone knows the source or artist please let me know….Rabbi David Seidenberg

 

Please visit Neohasid.org for a fuller description of all of these teachings. I cannot do the Sefirot justice here. I do want to talk about the work of Gevurah and my engagement with it. Fundamentally, we have all these energies in us, available to us and truly we can find and move into balance. It is not beyond us. This task, this work of counting the Omer is always complex, but it allows me daily engagement with specific energies. By paying attention and counting, literally and also figuratively, I attune myself to the Divine, to the world and to my deeper and truest self.

So, onto the Gevurah, Grounding and Getting to it! As an Empath (see Isn’t It Always Love) I feel it all and I have struggled to have any kind of boundary. I’m extremely grateful for this Omer practice and for the teachings of the Tree of Life, because they have enabled me to seek out and gain some semblance of relationship to the boundaries I needed to cultivate. For me, implicit, in the idea of a boundary, is that I am not creating a hard wall to keep anyone or anything out. I am engaged in creating a porous, but still strong web or fluid that surrounds me, or whatever needs surrounding. It is not a hard boundary.

I have very few hard boundaries, I’m not a hard person.

Nicole Clare Red dress pre.final mikveh
Me, in Ireland, surrounded by my companions, the trees and the river and the fire. This is right before my last Irish Mikveh/Immersion in Living Waters in the very cold water just behind me.

My Gevurah practice is about getting grounded in the earth, recognizing that all of creation has structure of some sort and that this structure is necessary and good. The tree is surrounded by bark, the stem of the flower is a tube carrying nutrients from ground to flower, the seed has a hard shell around it until conditions are right for it to break open. All of these are examples of Gevurah in the world. A boundary that allows life and bounty to unfold.

My own boundaries are like these, I have had to create a boundary circle around certain areas of my life in order to live my life. For my Jubilee year, I took a nine month retreat, this was a boundary circle around interaction with other people, with caring for others and with feeling and doing for others. (You can read all about this is the Jubilee section of this blog)

The majority of people in my life, my children, my family, my friends, my colleagues were outside of my circle, I was inside of it with the Holy One and Creation. I was isolated, in a cabin in Western Ireland, at a Carmelite Hermitage called Holy Hill. I was not alone. The birds, the Angels, the Divine and I were in communion. The ivy on the trees, the flowing river outside my window, the stars and the wind, these were my companions. They were great companions.

I was also blessed with fellow hermits and retreatants who were on similar journeys of contemplation, stillness and engagement with what emerges when you aren’t on the treadmill of the world. We prayed in silence together and shared a common meal once a week, when and if we wanted to be with others. Sometimes, I felt called to being with others, sometimes not. My boundaries are always flexible, this is how I do Gevurah.

My friend Arieh David Scharnberg asked this question on FB:

Looking for advice:

This is the week of Gevurah in the Omer Counting, usually associated with ‘discipline.’

How do you practice self-discipline in ways you can commit to and in ways that don’t induce stress?

What I mean is, every time I think about ‘ok, I need to get more organized’ or ‘I need to be more focused at work’ or ‘I need to do x or y once a day,’ even if it is taking things one step at a time and breaking things into smaller increments, any time I think of a change in my behavior that requires a commitment to that change, I either feel incredible anxiety in trying to commence (a fear of failure) or at best resigned if not despair when I find I have an inability to maintain that change.

Thank you in advance for your wisdom and insights!

This post is my answer to him. Gevurah requires grounding, earth-based practice that is rooted and  attended to, in order for it to be lasting. This doesn’t mean all my boundaries now stay in a permanent fixed place or that my discipline is perfect. It means that I get better all the time at walking this walk and engaging with this energy. It’s a practice, not a goal that I will reach and cross the finish line where a throng of folks will be cheering. It’s subtle and continuous and small sometimes, even just one small action will create a shift in my direction that allows the boundary to get stronger.

And, here’s the thing about all of this, right now we have to pair each of these energies/sefirot with others. We take the week we are in, this week it is Gevurah and align it with each of the other seven, so today, as I write this, I am in the week of Gevurah paired with the Sefira of Tiferet (glory, beauty, harmony). So, how do I relate to these two qualities? Here, in Jamestown at the home of my sister by Love, I am secluded, boundaried. I have taken myself away from the hustle and bustle of my family’s current crisis. I am not needed in this moment, my brother and others are doing the work that needs doing. I am preparing for Shabbat, which is a boundary I observe EVERY week, a time of stillness and honoring of Tiferet in my life, when I actively court the Divine and rest in many, many ways. But, I couldn’t do this if I didn’t create the boundary. Many folks now understand this about me. People no longer expect anything from me on Saturdays or Friday night. I don’t get phone calls or even many emails and I don’t respond to them either as I mostly turn off my technologies that are external and focus on my spiritual relationships.

My Shabbat practice is a Gevurah practice linked with Tiferet and all the other elements on the tree, but it starts with creating the boundary circle around this day, every week and I get better and better at it. I can go outside the boundary, when I need to, or choose to, again, the boundaries are never going to be hard and brittle for me, that’s not who I am. This Gevurah gate in my life has allowed me to create others because there has been and continues to be so much value generated and present for me as a result.

So, whether you practice this very intense and complicated counting or you are just looking at ways to feel protected, boundaried, held in by a structure that is healthy and supportive, I encourage you to go outside, meditate on the bark of a tree or the stem of a flower. Take the time you need to create spaciousness for yourself in any area that you need to by creating a boundary that is real and healing and healthy between yourself and the forces that love to pull you and all of us off our center.

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Heart at the bottom of a tree. Photo taken by my husband while we were on a walk together in Humboldt County, where we live, love, find and hopefully create harmony and balance, for ourselves and for all those we encounter.