At Last Yesod Again!!

My life has been filled with a lot of growth lately. My plate is filled and there is so much hope for the future. In my studying I have been reviewing my Qabalah studies again and my mentor has been assigning me tasks so I do not get lazy. In fact, this is the second time I have posted about Yesod..  It’s all too easy to fall asleep to Fortune, et al, so this paper is a result of one of the tasks that my mentor assigned me. I have found my greatest strength is that I have such a wealth of Life to augment my perspective of the magick. My mentor is bound and determined to make me into a scholarly qabalist and I have humbly accepted the challenge. I think I nailed it:

When I was a kid I used to hang out at the airport. Our airport was a small back then and only the smaller passenger planes would fly in, but I still adored it. The airplanes would take off and land so effortlessly and intrigued my young mind. I would pay 35 cents and ride 45 minutes on a stinky diesel-fueled bus to get to the airport. In the days, pre-TSA, I could spend hours at the terminal and watch the planes land or watch the travelers with their overstuffed luggage bags board the planes to distant places, mostly LAX. I learned I liked people-watching back then and I would wonder about their lifestyles and their wealth, that they could afford the luxury of flying on a plane. I wondered what it would be like to be all grown up with the independence and the freedom to explore. I would linger at the airport with a bologna sandwich, an AM/FM cassette player, a book and a journal, recording my thoughts, observations and dreams. It was then when I began to think about becoming an engineer.

In my contemplations of Yesod and my beginnings of the spiritual experience of the “Vision of the Machinery of the Universe”, I remember my times at the airport and the journey that lead me to my profession.

The ninth sephira has an image of a beautiful and very strong man. Yesod also has associations of great strength, yet fluidity. These ideas, like the four Nines of the Tarot, remind me of those little planes that would soar into our small airport with their graceful strength, carry twenty men, the cargo of overstuffed luggage bags and their own weight to travel to distant happy places.

When I went to college, I had to learn the foundation of aerodynamics: mathematics, science and then physics. Learning a foundation is very cyclical, like another association of Yesod, the Moon. Once I learned one aspect of the foundation and got very bright at it, like the light of the full moon, another subject, for example physics, would be thrown into my path casting me into darkness and unfamiliarity, like a dark moon. My knowledge and experience of the foundation would wax and wane, like the moon phases. When you go through the process of learning any foundation, you can be quite the expert or the jack of all trades and yet, know very little. Your knowledge is but a reflection of the vastness of the universe. There were times when I felt like I was riding the tail feathers of great scientists and mathematicians. Their brilliant minds would emanate upon and enlighten my mind. Their knowledge would change and begin to perfect my experience and perspective of the world around me because they gave me a better language to describe my experience. Like Fortune said, “Nothing can ever be explained in terms of itself, but only by being resumed in a greater whole”.

Yesod is like the reveries of a young girl, like the graceful flight and design of an airplane, like the journey to distant and foreign exotic places, like the knowledge influenced by the great scientists and mathematicians, and like the process of learning the foundation of aerodynamics itself.

Yesod is like the dream, the process and the manifestation of flight itself. Yesod is touching the sky, in hopes of reaching the stars.