#you're not impure you just need to purify it's like washing your hands before you cook

[thepomegranatewitch]

I'm taking the mikveh guide course via Mayyim Hayyim and Rising Tide Open Waters and finished my first week. I made this to try to explain what it means to me. Anyone, anytime, can choose to mark something new, can choose to cleanse of anything that no longer serves them, and for all Jews, no matter your observance, this is open to you. I'm so excited to help you access this the way you need it.

Artists statement and image description.

A collage: a banner of stars with Hebrew text “shelter us beneath your peace” floats over a pomegranate tree bearing only ripe fruits. It grows in front of a beach at sunset with subtle trans pride colours from a stone wall that reads madrich/a in Hebrew. This wall, collaged from an image of the kotel, is balanced on seven pillars of text capped with an image in front of a red desert sand, connecting the natural and human made desert mikvot with the biggest natural mikveh, the ocean.

Between these pillars grow flowers. From left to right, a red poppy for rest and healing, California poppies for the artist’s home and their medicinal restful qualities, yellow roses for friendship, a lily of the valley for the author’s birth, its duality as poison and perfume, and mention in Shir haShirim, a blue gentian for medicinal properties especially as an emmenagogue to tie it to mikveh use, lavender for healing, a white rose for love and death, and a pink rose of Sharon as mentioned in Shir haShirim for love and marriage. They are in this colour order as a nod to queer use and usage of mikveh as a spiritual technology.

The columns each have one of the seven principles for mikveh written in Hebrew, and are capped with a stone collaged with a related item. From right to left, these are a Torah scroll, a folding screen, a magen david with the downward pointing triangle replaced with a heart, a seven branched menorah with almond blossoms instead of candles, an open book, a brush painting a rainbow, and an open set of french doors that, if you look closely, are opening to a mikveh at Mayyim Hayyim.

Over all this are three blessings connected to mikveh, in English, with a name for the divine in Hebrew beneath. The first two are the artist’s own poetic translations of the mikveh immersion and shehecheyanu brachot, and the last is a tekhine praising Gd for gifting us the mikveh as self empowerment connecting us to natural cycles.

Blessed are You, She Who Contracts our god, Sovereign of Space Time, who has blessed us with your teachings and invites us to immerse.

Blessed are You, Being our God, Sovereign of Space Time, who has blessed me with my life, sustained me, and accompanied me to this moment.

Bless the One who gives me this.Bless the one who shows me how to cleanse myself take in the power of the water and the moon as the sun sets orange and feel that coursing through my veins to know I am powerful as this.