My ELIZABETH book is Live for Ordering on Amazon.com
And it is just in time for the celebration and honoring of my sister Liz's life on September 9th, which would have been her 75th birthday. Memories of her remain vivid and filled with emotion. Over the years I have discovered that it's a great gift to experience a sibling relationship with very little conflict. I've come to think that our amicability results from our age difference. I was nine years older than my Elizabeth. We were truthful with each other. We rarely experienced competition. We loved and rejoiced in each other's existence. I miss her with all my heart.
This book, though, isn't a memoir. It is a meditation on the Hebrew meaning of her name and the wisdom this name contains. Most simply "Elizabeth" means House of God. It means to me most simply that my sister and I were both houses for each other's life. It means, on another level, that Elizabeth is another word for the whole of creation, the multiverse, the 'house' of Divine Being that has no name. Over centuries we have assigned names to the various emanations of the One Eternal Nameless.
Again I turn to those emanations in the Hebrew Tree of Life, the meditation called Kabbalah. The word-designs of these branches of the Eternal Nameless One are not exactly poems, though they can be seen as such, except to a classical poet. They aren't exactly what is called channeling because I 'worked' them after they were written. They are trance-like, though. They have a kind of energy that moves towards the Beyond our human understandings. One poet friend calls them vedic oracular utterances. I nodded. Yes. This is how the words felt to me as their rhythm travelled from my heart to my fingers onto the keypad and appeared upon the page.
Here is a small example:
TREE OF LIFE
I am the tree
My leaves are auburn, rendered green
by time
My branches, the holy names of Being
My heart a golden rose.
O the heart's longing
O the night.
On the mountain
In the cloister walk beside the door
You had received the wounding,
The flame of Love smoldered deep
You had become the tree,
Auburn leaves unending.
I heard your song
A thousand turtle doves,
Hawk, falcon golden eagle
I felt your breath seeking
"What am I to do?"
You were not aware
I am with you.
My branches shudder in the wind
Each rings out in the hold calm
I touch you and you open
Your one tear falls
"I yearn for you."
I am vines entwining you
I am roots reaching for the holy calm
Their yearning has one end
Full Life
All the Holy Names
The Auburn Leaf
The Green.
-Christin
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