August 19, 2012

The yard is drenched, puddles standing on the driveway, yet all the water has soaked into the thirsty ground.  Everything looks dark and heavy with water; yet the smooth bark of the crepe myrtle shines with lines of reflected light, gleaming like silver glaze.  Water is dripping off leaves, sending them twitching upward at the release of weight.  The usually bright disks of the windchime are dark in the shadow, the sky gray and close, lightening finally but slowly, only the barest hint of the blue to come.  The birds, wakened by such intense lightning and thunder last night must be sleeping in, huddled in some sheltered place dreaming of sunlight.

The blessing today is that everything looks so detailed and I think I will remember this lovely feeling of discovering the world again!  How nice to come in my later years to find that there is still so much to be joyful about, so many new experiences to enjoy.  How lucky to have a new way of seeing just when you might be getting too used to the world the way it was.  I am grateful for the new sight of ten thousand things!

For the Artist at the Start of Day
May morning be astir with the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurt and its hauntings,
And fixed fortress corners,

A Morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,
And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all
The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard,
That calls space to
A different shape.

May it be its own force field
And dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye
By how deftly it fits
About its secret loss.

John O'Donohue

How deftly new vision comes from secret loss.  If I had not first loss vision, I would not now be so opened by the newness of these sights.  It's a blessing to know that the losses we experience can be part of that call of all that makes us recognize the shape of the world fitting around that loss.  You might discover hidden depths to the most ordinary things, recalling how people have touched you in the past, with tenderness and love, how they gave of themselves when they might have given up instead.   How the most basic love is always a choice and cannot exist without work, without the care, without some sense of surprise that in the face of loss the heart goes on looking for the light, and because it is looking, finds it.