Today I am getting ready to go out to the Palm Springs Fine art Fair. I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. While I’m there, I’m not only going to go to the museum to see the Diebenkorn show, but I am hoping to shoot some footage for my upcoming Kickstarter campaign. I realized that if I don’t land some kind of residency out in Joshua Tree, I am going to have to fund my solo show project in some other capacity. Getting some minimal footage while I’m out that way will be enough to at least make the video teaser for the campaign.

I don’t want to give away the title of my show yet, but I’ll let the cat out of the bag as far as my plans.

I talked before about learning Hebrew and my interest in Kabbalah. I’m going to get more into that, if you don’t mind. Just some basics. It’s interesting, I swear. Okay, maybe only to me.

First off, Kabbalah is often misunderstood, and I first talked about that in my post right before this one. I mentioned the cult of the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, but it was misunderstood even before that. A lot of people have considered it a kind of “black magic” or even an “occult” side of Judaism, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Not that there isn’t a kind of magic to it, there is. There can be, and there was at one time, but that’s not the kind of Kabbalah I’m interested in. That is called “Practical Kabbalah,” and I will skip that.

To oversimplify it, there is a fundamental, kabbalistic concept of G-d, as the Ein Sof, the Ten Sefirot, and the kabbalistic tree of life.

Now this part is right up my alley, and that is, that the true essence of G-d is so transcendent that it cannot be described, except with reference to what it is not. I love that! This true essence of G-d is known as Ein Sof, which literally means “without end,” which encompasses the idea of G-d’s lack of boundaries in both time and space.

The Ten Sefirot (Sefirot) are emanations, or qualities, and in this case interactions – how G-d interacts with the universe. G-d has both masculine and feminine qualities, and the Kabbalah pays particular attention to the feminine.

Okay, there’s that much in a very small nutshell.

This is mostly where my meditation interest came from. And as far as the Torah, I’ve been reading that too. It’s taken me a long, long, long time to read Genesis. You’d think that would be fairly easy, but I have been torn between several translations of it and several ways I wanted to understand it, in different perspectives I guess you can say: metaphorically, historically, religiously, and from the viewpoints of many sects of Judaism and Christianity.

And now I am beginning Exodus with a much different perspective than I had when I started Genesis, and so much has happened in my life since then too. So much death, so much growth. And my art, wow! How can I describe how far that has come?

This project means more to me than just putting together a solo show. It is a perfect plan without a plan. I’ve assembled the framework where all I have to do is place my feet along the stones in the path (there I will be grounded) and my head and hands will be free to do whatever comes naturally.

I guess I’ll have to wait until next time before I start describing the stones on that path. Sorry Charlie.

I do know that all I need is 10 days out in Joshua Tree. I can get my preliminary work done in 10 days.