Last summer, I took a walk with Shekinah
Chapter One of the Book of Splendor
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Listen to me reading this chapter here, editing as I go, thinking things through, making corrections, noticing things and laughing (quite a lot).
Last summer, I took a walk with Shekinah1.
I crossed into the farm, past the sheep, grazing in front of the farmhouse and the cows, munching hay in their muddy pen. As I walked, I was thinking about the Zohar: The Book of Splendor, one of the foundational texts of mystical Judaism, which I had just started reading. Or maybe, I was re-reading it. I don’t know. So much of this book feels familiar to me but you know, ancient wisdom is like that - it’s in the groundwater.
Anyway, I walked out of my house and walked the curving and gravelly dirt path through the fields until I came to the top of the hill where, to my right, there used to be an apple orchard and where, to my left, there is a beehive now.
I never knew there were beehives there - not until quarantine forced us all to stay home and I, no longer able to escape our crowded, cluttered house and our complicated marriage, started walking the land.
And it was there at the top of the hill -- with a beehive to the left and an orchard to the right — that I suddenly remembered the one student who had asked for a refund after taking my Soul Caller Training.
Her email was generous and gentle. She had no complaint with the material yet her email was a quiet and aching Please. She didn’t write the word ‘please’ but I sensed it in her letter, which she summarized with a simple statement: I was hoping for a more essential teaching.
So was I, I thought, remembering her. In fact, that hope - and my own longing for essential teaching was the very foundation of the training she’d just completed: a training that was literally made of my own longing for the singular ordering principle that would (finally) set the pieces of my life (and the world) into place so I might (finally) get on with living.
If only I could silence the humming inside. The persistent and anxious buzz that kept whispering: Something is missing. In me. In the world. Something should be here that is not here. I knew, somehow, that if I could find it, I would be complete. I also knew, somehow, that what I was looking for was looking for me. In fact, the tagline on the sales page of my program was: What you seek seeks you, a line that I borrowed from Rumi, the Sufi poet who was also, a thousand years ago, longing.
As I taught the Soul Caller Training, I often sensed the one I was searching for reaching back. I could feel it in my fingertips. A kind of contact, a sense that it was humming along beside me, inside me.
I remember how I felt after I refunded that student’s money: sad, guilty, incomplete. Wishing I had some wisdom to offer to guide her on her way. Was there something I should have told her? I didn’t know - and that felt bad. After all, I was the teacher. I should know everything, shouldn’t I?
Today, if I received such a letter, I’d still return the money but I’d return it with this question: What essential teaching are you looking for? I’d ask in the hope that this question might help to focalize something for her.
One of the things I teach now, in my soul caller work, is that every question constellates with its answer. Every longing constellates with its fulfillment. In this mirror universe, what you seek seeks you. That’s the principle. What essential teaching are you looking for? I would ask her.
I started walking again, in the orchard, and listening for her answer - which, of course, is my answer, too. I listen and, in my imagination, she tells me:
I signed up for your program because I sensed, from your writing, that you’d found it: the sweet syrup of the One Wisdom, distilled to its essence after centuries of tradition, and your own years of study and painful experience. I was hoping I might purchase it from you, that Oil of Truth. I was hoping I might dab it on my wrists as I run between home and work, dinner and after-party cocktails. I was hoping its fragrance might fill me, might swirl into the aching emptiness that I carry in this place, right … here. And in my imagination, she places her palm over her heart. In my imagination, she lifts her eyes to mine. Right here, she says. where a part of me seems to be missing.
In my imagination, I invite her INTO that challenge. “Come, I say. Sit down. Close your eyes. Sink into the support of the earth beneath your chair.” I invite her into the ache - the empty place. “I’ll come with you,” I promise. “You are not journeying alone.”
In my imagination, if she’s willing, I explain that the part that she is missing is not missing at all. It’s been erased, I tell her, but don’t worry, it’s still there, hidden in the ache. “Can you feel that? Can you trust that? “I ask her. “Can you trust me? Can you trust Love?”
She looks at me then. I’m scared, she says (in my imagination).
“Scared of what, love?” I ask. And then, she tells me,
I’m scared that I’d have to change. I’d have to quit - the partner, the job, the school board. What if an angel or a goddess or a spirit animal guides me to give up the addiction, the keeping up, the pretending? What if the gods can see me? I mean, really see me. What in the world would I do then?
Yesterday, standing beside a devastated orchard, I realized why the memory of this student had returned to me. Because she was my teacher. By her longing, she had invited me to go deeper, to distill my work, to make it more clear and more accessible. She needed this so that she could finally stop searching. And so did I.
We need this so we might instead start living inside the book of splendor that is all around us.
She was asking me to bring her back into the garden.
And that’s a new line that wasn’t in the original writing and I want to explore it a little bit with you. Because of course, I can’t invoke that word “the garden’ when I’m talking about guidance and the book of Splendor without your mind and my mind going to Eden. And I can’t talk about Eden without talking about what I think really happened there.
And boy is this post gonna be long if I do that . . . These are unpublished chapters and this is a writer trying to figure out where, what word order to put things in. So, this garden, this Eden . . . and I’m looking out the window at this slushy gray day and this sky that I know behind those clouds is blue. This Eden outside my window where it’s snowing now and where a family van just drove by. Real life is what I mean. This Eden whee we all live all the time and always have.
I think simply, just keeping it simple - I think that the snake is the fire of our own wisdom. It think it’s our own spinal column. I think that the snake that shows up in mythology and in the Bible is mystical teaching, which we might know today as Kundalini Rising - but it’s teaching that even Jesus and Mary Magdalene and their followers knew about and talked about and it was erased from the books, when they were whitewashed, or I should say, woman-washed. When women were washed out of the stories except as accessories to heroic men.
What I think happened in the garden was that Eve and Adam ate the apple of enlightenment, swallowed the seed of the fruit of the wisdom tree. Now that they had accessed higher consciousness they were banished from the illusion that they needed a father god to take care of them. This wasn’t a punishment - it was a liberation - but maybe they didn’t realize that at first. It’s hard to take care of yourself when you’ve lived without responsibility, without awareness of your own privilege. It’s hard to leave home and have to deal with other people. It’s hard to have to pay your own bills. It’s hard to be exiled from the protection of the patriarch.
What we miss in all the books and in that story is that, as we are exiled from the house of that father, we enter the benevolent generosity of the mother. The ever present support and nourishment of the mother. What we miss, because we were schooled to look beyond her, is that she was always there. We never left her. In fact, the house of the patriarchy is inside of her. She is the whole world. The patriarchy is inside of the Great Mother.
So, exiled for becoming so wise, we left our father’s house. We went to college or we apprenticed to a master and now we are out in the world having to make our own way. This is not exile or banishment, this is adulthood. and it’s not easy. I’m watching my 30 year olds go through it.
Especially now in this world that we’re living in — though I think that parents of any age in human history might have said those words. It’s hard to be in bodies. It’s hard to be creatures who have to eat and earn a living and make our way in the world.
Back to the garden. To me, that story isn’t about expulsion from Grace. It’s about entry into Grace with our eyes open. We could say that whoever it was that made that story, whoever decided to leave out the feminine aspect - the holding and protection, the wildness into which Adam and Eve entered that biblical day, was the banished one. The banishment is in the storyteller, not in the story. The one who left out the second half of the story because they could not see it (or, perhaps, did not want you to see it.)
So, this student who came back to mind at the top of the hill in the devastated orchard was my teacher. She was inviting me to SEE. To notice that the harder work I have to do is to stop searching for the right words that might both give you some secret key - or the essential oil that you could dab onto yourself and find truth - and instead, step out of that role as the patriarchal, hierarchal “wise one” and come stand beside you in the garden.
You could say that when Adam and Eve ate the apple and the Kundalini serpents went up and opened the third eye, the father god in the sky released them so they could see the mother god all around them in everything.
I believe that Eden is the world we live in now. Once we have eyes to see her. Once we realize that this world is her — and so is the planet, and so is nature, and so is this body. Mine. Yours. Every cell of your body is her.
So that’s the distilled down essential recording. For this kind of podcast. I’ll move on.
In the apocrapha of Mystical Judaism, there’s an oft-repeated story of ten vessels.
In the beginning of the world, it is said, the Divine created ten glowing vessels. And into these vessels, the Divine poured and poured Divine Light until, unable to contain so much magnificence, the ten sacred vessels shattered into an infinity of shards, tiny fragments, each infused with Divine Light, and strewn across all creation.
At the top of the hill, laughing, I asked myself: What distilled Truth am I looking for? What did I imagine I might find when I opened The Book of Splendor on my Kindle this morning?
If I had found that Truth, would I have recognized it? Would I have trusted it?
And then, I laughed - and laughed and laughed. This has been happening lately. In places where I used to cry, I burst out giggling. This other thing has also been happening also. I’m experiencing beauty.
For a long time, I couldn’t experience the beauty of a sunrise, a symphony, a particular shade of blue - there was this numbness, this blank place where beauty should have been.
I knew it should have been there because I heard other people talking about it and I would go to the concert, I would go to the film, I would go to the mountain and look out at this range of gorgeous, colorful and awesome range of mountains and I didn’t feel anything. And I knew something was wrong. and that’s that sense of something missing again.
But I can now — i can experience beauty now. And so, lately, like someone who was blind and can suddenly see color, beauty has been overwhelming me by being in everything everyone everywhere.
So, the laughing was about that - but also, mostly it was about the realization that the Truth with a capital T that I was searching for all of my life is here. Right here. I am already full of beauty and wisdom and aliveness, overflowing with it.
This morning, I’d reached for the Book of Radiance, perhaps in some quiet recognition of that awareness in me. What I reached for reached for me. See that? That’s sort of the ongoing message of this piece, I think, now that I’m reading it out loud.
I’d reached for that book of radiance this morning in recognition of that. I am already radiant. In fact, I am literally writing a book entitled, The Way of Radiance.
As I say that I realize I am literally the book of radiance. I am the way of radiance and so are you - and that’s what that book is all about. And I stood on the hill and I laughed and laughed.
I want you to see me laughing as I realize: I am a book of radiant splendor, walking down a hill, dictating into a cell phone, as I laugh to myself.
New Chapter: Reclaiming beauty, our own and the world’s, from a culture that has forgotten Her
And here we want to spell Beauty with a capital B - because that’s always been Her name. That’s how she gets our attention and our hearts - unless something’s missing and we can’t access that. And if you feel that way, I invite you to consider — if you can’t experience Beauty — what may be missing is that second part of the story. The story where She speaks, where She contains and holds and supports Adam and Eve into the world out of the Garden of Eden. You could say the Garden of Eden is the world of illusion, of innocence into the world of knowledge, of open-eyed awareness.
Reclaiming Beauty
Light is so beautiful. It lifts us from bed in the morning. It calls us out of doors. It brightens our days, our moods, our energy. We close our eyes and we call it to fill us from crown to root. And yet, filling with light can be shattering if taken to extreme. Especially when we are doing it where others can see us. That kind of illumination doesn’t line up with the image of what a woman should be, should do, should claim.
Or what man should do, come to think of it. We’re all reduced by the culture we live in right now and She is calling all of us to break out of those reductionist prisons - that reductionist story that we live inside of, literally as prisoners, when the real story is also here, in a concentric ring around that one.
If we could just cross into it we could expand and be whole and be free.
That kind of illumination doesn’t line up with the image of what a person, a human being, should be, should do, should claim. There are rules about what we are allowed, what we deserve, what we can have, who we can be.
When we feel that we are small, claiming this kind of power IS shattering. When we are taught that we’re unworthy or unwelcome, it’s dangerous. And so, we shove it down. We cover it with veils of self-doubt. After all, what if it’s all in our heads? What if the truth that we sense blooming within, right there under that hand we have placed on our hear, is not real? What if they say we’re hallucinating? What if they say that we’re full of ourselves?
So we shrink back down. We stick with the assignment. To be a Good Girl. Hard Worker. Fits in. Doesn’t make waves. It’s so much easier this way. Until, one day, it isn’t. The day when we wake up and realize: I am so much more than this. I can’t pretend anymore. Our idea of who and what we are has shifted - another self is calling for expression through us. This other self is not the opposite of the one we were programmed to be. She’s not a bad girl. She’s a girl infused with light - with power. She’s the Shekinah.
The crucifixion of everyone and everything
Take a walk with me now.
Watch as a small, insignificant woman walks through a devastated orchard holding the light of Shekinah inside her own body. Watch as she tries - she has tried for years, to keep the light from leaking out - through her skin, through her hands, through her voice. Afraid that someone will notice and turn toward her. Afraid that someone will see the light and force her to see it herself. To own it, to claim it, to maintain it. And then what could happen?
A woman is standing at the top of a hill, holding two images in her mind. In the first image, she sees a woman filled with light. In the second, she sees a small, insignificant woman, fragile, likely to shatter if given too much power.
This is the crucifixion. This is the crossroads. This is the moment of truth.
Which truth? That depends on which image she chooses.
Two days before my walk to the top of the hill in the orchard, I had a profound Kundalini experience. I was on a Zoom call, taught by another teacher. I raised my hand. People turned toward me. Light streamed from my throat and out of my mouth. I finished. I turned off my mic - and I was struck by lightning.
Heat and pain shot up my spine. As if I had sprouted a second heart at the base of my spine, and instead of blood, it was pumping pain and fire. Electrifying my nervous system, climbing my bones, the fire burned upward to the back of my throat where it stopped, pulsing like a puma, pulsing like a race car, stopped at a red light.
It burned - and it hurt. When it was over - one minute, two minutes, an hour? - I was completely spent. I was wrung clean. I fell asleep on the sofa and I didn’t wake up for two hours.
Why do I tell you this? Because speaking truth, moving light, is real. Real energy moving through real flesh and bone and sometimes, our fears of being shattered aren’t wrong. Kundalini experience has been moving through me for more than six years. As things move in seven year cycles, I’m hopeful we’re near the end.
That said, if I have learned anything from this Soul Caller work that I do it’s this: Image comes before form - and images can change.
So, back to the woman who is standing on the top of the hill, between the beehives and the devastated orchard. Holding two images of herself, one in each hand. She is talking with God, asking: what right do I have to claim something this miraculous, this beautiful, this sacred?
And God is telling her, You have the right of first blessing. You have the right of the shard of My Own Light, which I gave to you, and which glows in you. The shard of the shattered vessels with which each and every one of you is born.
And more laughing.
The woman on top of the hill understands this now. She is erupting with, she is exploding with, she is effulgent with light.
(And just so you know, efflugent means bubbling up and out. Effulgent blessing, effulgent light means fountains of light, fountains of blessing, fountains of laughter. It’s said that in the beginning this is how creation began. That there is such a fountain and that it is always and ever will be, eternally, flowing, always bubbling upward and outward to fill the world.)
Now imagine her standing on that hill, dictating those words into her cell phone
As I dictated those last words into my phone, I spotted a single pink blossom on the ground. (It was summer.) I stooped to retrieve it, and I stood up with this delicate prize in my hand just as, fifty feet ahead, my friend Bella suddenly appeared, walking toward me from the opposite direction.
Delighted to see her, I walked toward her, tucking the blossom and my cell phone into my pocket. Suddenly, “Look behind you!” Bella shouted and I turned just as a family of deer leapt onto and across the path right behind me.
Awestruck, I froze, as the father, the mother, the baby and the second baby brushed by - I could feel the solid weight of them, the air moving to make way for them as they landed and leapt, landed and leapt across the path I had just walked.
Bella came up beside me. We stood together watching the deer continue their journey behind the beehives, into the forest and out of sight.
“That was amazing,” I gasped. My heart was racing. In my mind, I was already translating this into dream language. My mind was saying: Wow! I was given a pink blossom. I stood up and saw Bella (which WOW! her name means Beauty in French). And then the deer.
Bella smiled. “You know,” she said. “The last time that we met - on this road - I’d forgotten who you were. Please forgive me.”
I dream translated it as she was speaking to me: Beauty forgot me.
“That’s OK,” I said. “We were both under masks - and rushing.”
“No,” she insisted. “You were very special to me once. I don’t know how I didn’t see you - didn’t know you.”
Dream translating, I thought. Beauty didn’t see me. Didn’t know me. Now she does.
“Are you working on the farm today?” I asked.
”No. I just felt like taking a walk.”
“So did I, I said and then, I risked. “Shekhinah called me outside.”
And then Bella laughed. And she pronounced the word properly with her Israeli accent.
“Do you know Shekinah is the same as Mary?” she asked.
Fire zippered up my spine but gently this time, and I laughed. “And Shakti. And Isis...” I said.
“And Gaia,” she said. “Mother Earth.” She smiles then, and cocked her head to the side. “This feels almost magical,” she said. “You know, the deer is a sign of healing?”
I nodded, and she went on. “In Germany, over every pharmacy, there is a head of a deer with the big … the big.” She made a gesture at the sides of her head. “What's the word in English?”
“Antlers?” I asked.
“Yes!” she says. “Over the door of every pharmacy. Or printed on the packaging of a remedy, you see a deer’s head, with antlers.”
And now I remembered how very fond of her I once was. And we stood in that miracle moment when you remember how much you loved someone and that connection reopens between you. And then, we said goodbye.
But then, she turned. “Just this week, the new pastor at my church tasked me to start a conversation with the Jewish community inside of our Christian community. Would you come?”
I laughed again.
A woman stands at the top of a hill, invited by beauty to explore her own ancestry. (I dream translated that. I didn’t say it out loud.)
“Yes,” I told Bella.
And then, she headed to church and I turned toward home. I dictated all of that into my phone and then, as I reach the place in the path where the deer had crossed my path, I remembered the pink blossom in my pocket and I pulled it out.
Holding it in my palm, I realized: It’s not an apple blossom. It’s dogwood. And there was not one dogwood tree in sight.
I am almost at the end of the path when I spot a small family just entering the farm: a mom and a dad, two little girls and a wee cocker spaniel, who looks like Toto from the Wizard of Oz. I’m not surprised.
We greet one another. Glad for the gentle wind and the bright day, the spacious land that makes it possible to keep the masks that we all carry now, in our pockets. As we pass, I glance at the younger child, taking in her beauty, the black bangs framing extraordinary eyes. I am about to look away when I notice the image on her sweatshirt: a rainbow. Shekinah’s own signature sign. The rainbow.
There are no small miracles.
And as I’m recording this I wish I could remember the story of why the rainbow is Shekinah’s own signature. I’ll find out. And please put it in the comments if you know.
In every encounter I have ever had with Grace, with Shekinah, there is always this kind of sweet punctuation mark, a link of symmetry or symbol, to tell me: this is real. These ‘punctuation marks’ come as one singular end point or they arrive in cascades, coming and coming in waves of signs and symbols that don’t stop coming until I just give up, overwhelmed and decide to stop noticing them.
Today is a cascade day.
As I approach my driveway I see scattered on the ground thousands of shards of glass. A shattered vessel. Slivers of light, blinking in the sun. Everywhere.
I laugh, of course. When we meet, you’ll see that I laugh all the time.
Slivers of light. Shattered vessels. Shards of light everywhere.
I passed my new garden…
Oh, and isn’t that interesting? See, I wrote this essay almost a year ago and I’m just noticing as I read it out loud - here’s a garden. When I wrote it originally, there was no garden imagery in it but I’ve been putting it in as I read. And yet, here it always was, at the end.
I pass the new garden that my daughter and I built last summer, and there, winking up from new soil, more shards: bits of a shattered Christmas ornament …
and it’s blue That very blue that I have trouble naming. Something between celestite blue or celadon blue or aquamarine. I can’t think if the name for this color but I will because it’s beautiful and when you’ve been starved of beauty all of your life, and suddenly encounter that blue . . . there’s something human about needing and wanting to know its name. See, there’s that longing for knowledge that leads us out of the garden into the world of knowledge. And isn’t that remarkable?
winking up from the soil, shards of a shattered Christmas ornament that my husband hung from a branch last December. The tiny blue mirror pieces are everywhere. I will never be able to pick them all up. They will blend with the soil, infusing this light, this blue, into the garden.
Perhaps this is good. And a good place to end this story and cascade of signs that will never end. This walk with Shekhinah. This Grace that I find when I open my eyes to see. Everywhere, every day, in everyone.
I’d love to know how this work lands with you - I’d love to hear your own reflections on Shekinah, on longing, on the things that I share in these chapters.
Offered with great love.
xxoo
Explore Shekinah on Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shekhinah