Middat Makom: The Mussar Work of Understanding Our Place on Earth

...Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

(from the poem Carmel Point, by Robinson Jeffers)

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"Each species has its unique ecological niche, a distinctive role it plays in sustaining and enhancing life on our planet. By fulfilling its role, each species does all it can to sustain, increase, and evolve its own kind.... The curious thing is that we seldom apply these insights to our own species - as if humanity might be an exception to the rule, as if we are purposeless visitors in a meaningless world or as if we can take any ecological role we want. But as a species, we, too, have a distinctive niche in the community of life, a particular potential, a role that evolution has shaped us to occupy. Most of us are just not at all sure what that might be. Or perhaps we don't even consider the question. " [Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation, 2021, New World Library, Novato CA. p. 6-7]

From: Ira Stone, Beulah Trey, In search of the Holy Life: Rediscovering the Kabbalistic roots of Mussar. iUniverse, 2019.

... To members of a non- writing culture, places are never just passive settings... Particular mountains, canyons, streams, boulder - strewn fields, or groves of trees have not yet lost the expressive potency and dynamism with which they spontaneously present themselves to the senses. A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there.

It is precisely for this reason that stories are not told without identifying the earthly sites where the events in those stories occur.

(from: David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage Books, NY, 2017 [1997]. p. 162 . italics in original)

Earth Altar - Noticing an ants nest next to the River Valley (Edmonton, AB. 2023)

Aryeh Kaplan taught about this section from Yetzirah: If the "heart runs", the Sefer Yetzirah warns that one should "return to the place." He must focus on something physical, so as to restore spiritual equilibrium.

And, in a footnote on the idea of something physical, he writes: At the end of a meditation, Abulafia thus advises the initiate to "eat something, drink something, smell a pleasant fragrance, and let your spirit once again return to its sheath".

[From, Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah -The Book of Creation: In Theory and Practice. (revised edition). Red Wheel/Weiser, Newburyport, 1997. p. 67]