Last night we had our final meeting for the Tree of Life group. Only five of us there (turned out to be a pretty good number and we played with the idea of pentagrams) - we worked with the whole Tree and after the Lightning Flash, returned to our initial positions. This meant that I left Netzach (which I did least justice to, of all the sephira - having only intermittant glimpses of veils of green light, filtered through summer leaves of an English forest) and arrived once again in Hod. Which felt like a familiar but out-grown mode - I understand everything there (well, I think I do) but it does not fully express me. But I like it! Things seem easy, do-able and comprehensible.
One of the exercises we did was choose the Sephira we had the strongest relationship to, and that which we had the weakest relationship to (from our experience of spending a month in each Sephira). Then we studied the path/s that lay between the two, to plot a way to draw on some of our strengths in understanding/developing our weak areas. My strongest was Kether (where I spent 5 weeks soaring with the white cockatoos and the all-everything) and my weakest Yesod (where I spent 4 weeks wondering what was going on and why, though I had some intellectual grasp of it, I couldn’t actually relate to it or feel it properly). Of course the Path between the two lies right down the Middle Pillar - passing through Da’ath and Tiferet on the way. So it looked like: I have to choose (free will) to step out of Kether, into Tiferet (which is a kind of alarming place for me, all that light and movement awash in there with no guarentees) to pass into any understanding of Yesod.
We also each laid out a Tree of Life spread with Tarot cards - I had the beautiful Ace of Cups from the Haindl deck in Kether, which pleased me greatly. Death landed in Da’ath (very aptly), and the sneaky Son of Swords reversed in Yesod (not surprising - and in this deck it is depicted as Osiris, who I have a bit of a history with).