I am very pleased to be able to showcase a guest blog from the very lovely Jane Meredith. This is taken from her Falling through the tree of Life book.
Having always had a fascination with the Kabbalah I have tried on several occasions to delve into it, but each time I have been left confused. Until I read Jane's book, this was a complete revelation for me, it takes you on a journey of discovery through the Kabbalah in a way that makes total sense.
Extract from Jane Meredith’s Falling through the tree of Life: Embodied Kabbalah.
Published Llewellyn 2022
There’s a thread of fierce glory in it, that I can live this way, and I feel myself burning through old patterns as I learn to meet each being with wonder, reverence, and expecting nothing… I am starlight glittering as I burn through my fuel, my days of life. There’s a man I meet in a Parisian bakery and shyly exchange a few words with, that barista I’ve always liked, this dear friend and I hope, oh I hope in some way they know the delight which it gives me, that each of those moments I spend with them is a whole world, to me, and I would go anywhere with them, give myself entirely, I feel in the core of my existence and it’s shimmering there, alive, yearning, and yet complete. This process is so engrossing, this dying-wide-open, it’s like a star consuming itself and surely I blaze with it.
In Paris I visit an exhibition of immersive art within a repurposed power station, l’Atelier des Lumières. It’s the work of various artists, transcribed to the screens of the walls and floor; the viewers wander though a shifting world of color, form and time. The enormity, the explosion of it, how it’s held within the building but is all the wonder of life unfolding, living-dying – this is the interior. Of the heart of a star, how it feels to be all-alone but yearning for the other, of the dare and risk of each breath, shimmering at the edge of self and then falling. I can almost feel the colors as they run over my fingertips, how it flows out of me, the dance of life and that I am all alone is incidental, the stars form through me. That I am all alone is crucial, it’s the beginning. That I am alone is meaningless, all of existence is here with me, forming me and receiving me and if I choose to meet it with love then how much better, for me. If it tears me in two with impossibility then I surrender, like the stars do, like the butterflies, at inevitability, paying the price for these living breaths of consciousness.
This is it – the stars forming – can you see each brush stroke, movement, moment and they cascade into being around the walls in all directions and I am immersed, seeing their light on water, dancing, shimmering. I am in the water of it, it ripples and drips around me undulating through me like the blood beating I am one with it, pulsing the in and out, the breath and pause of it I am the ripples on the floor, the star exploding in the flower built petal by brushstroke by petal and the sun itself – a flower, a star, the birth of a universe in orange yellow citron, vermillion and white – white – white – the silver effervescence collapsing to purple and blue and gold every fleck and shimmer of it –
The juice of this, the liquid gold the light and pattern into and out of infinity, take me again, wash me through with your gold and silver that pierces, moonlight and stardust on water, drink me, rock me on waves unending, death this is, and life – all of it together the moment drawn out forever and ending, endlessly. I am in stripes now, sedimentary layers of becoming I am rippled, opened, divided through line and dance and leaf and flower, I am in this bud and branch and orchestra of it all – the sap, the bud, the cliffs and fields, oceanic, the fall of seasons, of stars and rivers the ever becoming and the light – the blue of it, gold, red, carmine, cobalt, orange the patterns, senses, the grain of wheat the sunburst, the feathers on the wings of birds and I am that and that and that all through into the becoming I am thread and weave and disarray out into the night, the nothing all – heart –
I am here at the birth – the beginning it’s all wave and breath and pulse – no form, a thread maybe an edge of light, becoming, bubbling then… effervescence violet, purple, cobalt spark explosion becoming – I dark I flood, explode into light, fragment and form, rivers of stars that are fountains, waterfalls. Cascading light light it is all light, blossoms, billowing rippling unending folded space/time the nothing is here, backdrop to becoming, giving birth that is all I want forever I am fragmented by it, become all this is who I am why I am, how I became to have these eyes, this blood-beating-heart consciousness to be here on the edge at the birth of the universe – brilliance upon brilliance in time in ecstasy waterfalling out from every centre like kisses, like wine, waves of blessings –
cascading collapsing – desire – the becoming of the thread of desire and sheer explosion of it the strokes of sunlight
I am so singular I become not just one but a reflection of All, so clear, so unmuddied with intimacies and overlaps with other humans I can ring a true note, my own. If that justifies these years of aloneness, all this despair then I’m pleased; I see why abstinence can be considered holy; the bell of me is clear to ring out my own note, into the furthest reaches of the universe. This vast loneliness – each star is everything, in itself. But also I am filled – torn – by the most ferocious yearning for the other, so extreme I would rip myself in half to achieve it. I could collapse back on myself, close myself off and become secret, a dark universe and perhaps that will happen but not while I have a choice. I choose to burn stellar, to feel the atoms of me collide and collide and collide, making love and complexity and alchemically blazing with life, light, in love with the moment, each moment, each dying second and I’ll give everything, burn each piece of me in this determination to live, yearning even if unmet, dancing light into the cosmos, one tiny fleck, a spark, a ferocious blossoming pulsing life giving everything, dying and not knowing –
I am an exploding star of a woman, born to burn up every atom and give everything in each moment, not knowing but flinging myself out to the edges of the universe in the pure intensity of desire with each breath.
To find out more about Jane, her website is https://www.janemeredith.com/
