Leather Journal With Button Closure - Tree of Life

Genuine leather with the Tree of Life worked into the cover, a wrapped cord and button closure, and unlined pages at seven by five inches. It is the size that fits in a bag without a plan, which is most of why people end up using this one instead of the handsome one they are saving for something.

Unlined matters more than it sounds. A ruled page tells you to write sentences. A blank one lets you draw the sigil, tape in the leaf, draft the spread and write the sentences too, which is what a working book actually gets used for.

The Tree of Life is the most widely shared image we stock, though shared is doing some work in that sentence. Yggdrasil is a cosmic ash with three roots running to three different places, and one of them goes up to a well among the gods rather than down; the Norse sources never lay the nine worlds out in a diagram, and scholars have pointed out that they cannot be made to sit in one. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is not a picture of a tree at all. It is ten sephirot on twenty two paths in three pillars, Keter at the top and Malkuth, the material world, at the bottom. The Assyrian sacred tree is carved through the palace reliefs and Assyriologists are still arguing about what it meant. What these have in common is not one meaning. It is the same instinct, to draw a living thing that reaches in two directions at once, which is a reasonable image for the cover of the book you write your practice into.

The leather is not finished to a uniform color. It arrives with grain, tone shifts and the occasional mark, and it darkens where your hands go. A year in, it will not look like the photograph, and that is the argument for leather over board.

Good to Know

7 by 5 inches, unlined, genuine leather, cord and button closure. Handmade, so the cover tooling and the leather color vary. Fountain pen users should test a page first; unlined craft stock takes wet ink differently than a machine-made notebook.

Try It With

the Flower of Life journal with a strap is the same build in a different symbol, and the Tree of Life with Wolves book of shadows is the same symbol in a heavier binding. Sealing wax if you want to close a page and mean it. More in journals.