Rock-Crystals

The virtue of the sun going lower - being driven lower - is that its level rays strike deeper into narrow openings hidden in the earth. And in these openings lie caves which, at other times of the year, conceal their unspoken ornaments in perfect darkness. Even the names of rock-crystals tumble from the lips like precious imaginations: chrysoprase, heliotrope, rose-quartz, amethyst. But now, under the spell of the lowering sun, their angles and eminences, their curious colors and striking transparencies, flash into life and extend far beyond their normal, lowly domain.

My best counterpart for their metaphor is the human brain, or perhaps - better - the human skull. Ah! the number of thoughts which have been passed over or concealed because their true value was never allowed to shine! The number of thoughts which only need the glancing, angled light of the sun for a short space of time to reveal their radiance, their glorious-sounding names! And these are the thoughts which have been growing in us, in the manner of crystals, over long periods of time. How odd that they only need the corner of the year to flash up into brilliance!

Why? Because these are the thoughts which line the wall of the cave, which grow in us without our probing or stimulation. At their deepest level these are the thoughts which answer the call of the sun with their eternal light, stored for this moment - their precious names speaking only when our senses are lowest to the ground. Precious or semi-precious, these thoughts belong to the universe and grow in us.

The constellations of the zodiac, too, are like twelve sleeping figures around the inside of a cave - and are often described as such in fairy-tales. If you, as hero, bring the magic crystal - the sun-illumined light of thought - into the cave, the sleeping figures will rise and guide you - and rescue the kingdom in its time of need.

The time is now, the kingdom is in need, and the crystals must shine again at the lowest elevation of Helios, the sun.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

The Coming Age

The day is coming when soul and sound, when self and sight will be one. It will be the time when cosmos and consciousness will live inside each other. And at the heart of both there will be a birth, a newborn child. This is the meaning of Advent in the Christian year - a long, slow growth through all of time to the point at which the meaning of life, the perfect human being is born. And it's a laborsome process too, through all the realms of earth in which the very foundations of our life were laid down. Thus the shining minerals, the sleeping plants dreaming of sun, the rapt, attentive animals pursuing life and finally - finally - the human being conscious of rising through all these things. And all this in four weeks!

                                                  

It is the time when inner and outer experience each other in mutual interchange; when my consciousness seems to rhyme in the moisture coating the day; when the sun keeps every precious moment wrapped in faith; when the cosmic poetry of creation wakes with me in the morning.

The expansion of consciousness is a gift of nature but we only win back the cosmos through our own efforts. It is waiting to be won - not by storm or acquisition but by gentle birth. I believe this is true whether or not you are a Christian. But the Christian imagery leads up to this point. A process of labor culminating in the birth of what was always present, what was always waiting for us. A process which wins back the different kingdoms of life. It is the story of the world and of evolution, irrespective of faiths.

I see this in the blue of the sky, hiding behind a screen of righteous cloud. Within my skin the cosmos; within its shell the newborn self appears.

Wind

Listen! In the rattling of the wind

an angel comes with promise of new birth;

within the closed might of clouds

a sorrow which is joy declares itself.

Can I bring myself over the hill of pain

to see the tired world breathe in life?

Can I hear the touch of wings

where the seasoned wind grows most strong? Listen!

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

(All the written work in PageLight is original to the author. You are welcome to quote from the material, citing its origin:

Author: Jay Landar
Source:  www.pagelight.blogspot.com )

Ever Higher Into the Blue

I see that patch of blue through the mist in November and its quality is unattainable. Everything else dances attendance on it. The crooked, coiling branches of the oaks contain their dark dreaming - some leaves might fall if a gust of wind should summon itself from the centre of the earth. There are walls here confining nothing. Their shifting surfaces release thoughts into the air. Pathways, trees, superbly crafted branches - a tumbledown greenhouse, poets in circles going round and round. And crows, rising like black shades where the leaves have fallen. Their cacophony beclouds the sky.

Everything depends on that patch of blue. Its continuing light fills every thought - each hope, each confinement, each fallen shape - right down into the next gust of wind concealing itself in the centre of the earth.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

The New Romanticism

In the age of the Romantics poets, artists and musicians gazed out at the world and what they saw struck awe and wonder into their souls. With their hands, their brushes and their pens they conducted the orchestra of skies and restless seas. Inspired by their own restless natures they strode across the landscapes of Europe and made themselves a part of the imagery of the era. Today the world has changed. Artistic and thoughtful souls feel that the gaze has been reversed: nature is peering back into the human being and searching for a moral landscape it can write about, extol and travel. The axis of the world has changed.

The human being in turn creates either a shadow or a transparency. Only a solid form will generate a shadow and, in so far as the human soul has not received its share of wonder and awe, of light and color, it will remain solid. Those who lived their lives in the past with eyes firmly shut form only an opaque surface for nature today. For those who took in the truly luminous nature of the surrounding world a new field of vision opens up. They have the opportunity to learn transparency.

But there are at least three aspects of transparency. There is the luminosity on the side of nature; then there is the numinous world of the divine on the other side; and in the middle there is the self which, in its non-solid state, has to learn to see itself again. By shading its eyes it can find itself as after-thought or after-image. In a sense its own presence is no longer of such importance. The luminous world and the numinosity of the Divine are what matters. At one and the same time nature can look back through the human being and the heavenly can look down into the world. This, I believe, is the new Romanticism. Not that we are a reflecting sheet of glass - a mirror - but that we are a transparency that allows the divine and the natural to work through us equally.

These are the thoughts of one who is amazed that these things can happen and that they truly reflect the path of spiritual evolution. We can talk about saving the planet but our activism must also become so soft that we ourselves almost disappear. In what way we are painted into the picture as individuals, or as representatives of our time, is something the future can decide.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved 

Picture: Woman Before the Setting Sun by Caspar David Friedrich

A Home to The Unknown

We are all such small, unmodelled things - but at the same time we are equal to the millenia. We feel so minute and powerless in the face of world changes and yet the great cycles of time bow to us in the course of their turning. This is what it means to be human. How does this happen? It comes about because the spirit is homeless. It blows as the wind blows. No one can say precisely where the wind springs from or where it goes to. However, for the length of time that a cloud stands in the sky, that body of vapor gives a shape and face to the wind. It gives a home to the unknown. The human being is like that body of vapor. And yet the cloud has its own properties, its inner consistencies. It has the imagination and intelligence to create great shapes from its mass.

Of course the cloud is not a conscious thing. I am not talking here merely about conscious intelligence. I am talking about the part of the human being which becomes shaper and former - not just as manipulator of the world but as shaper and former of its own spiritual being. Traditionally we play the passive part in religion: we are the created and God is the Creator; we are the supplicants through prayer and right-living, and God bestows his Grace. It's right to think this way. But at the same time we are spiritual beings and the spirit wants to form itself just as the cloud - if it were conscious - would want to take possession of its imaginative shapes, its cathedrals in the sky.

In this sense we are equal to the millenia; the cycles of time bow to us. The spirit is a being which captures its past and exalts its future - while at the same time, in the quietness of its heart, dwelling with the Being which comes and goes as it pleases. I am shaper and shaped and give, for a time, a home to the unknown.

As a poet and author I give shape to these thoughts. They allude to the high and to the eternal; but they are also small and mortal, as a man is before his Maker.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

The time of year, November, is a paradox: the sun rises through mist and peers directly into your eyes. Each day it stands lower in the sky. Each day, while it gives up its abundance, it stares more searchingly into your being, for signs of the poverty, the chastity, the obedience, which govern its descent. You must let go of your treasures, let go of everything, if you will follow me, it seems to say.

The words are not popular. But the season points to them. The Spirit of the Time, the Zeitgeist, points to them: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience. Abundance crumbles like dust in our hands and leaves indebtedness. Our limbs stray from the purity of what we need and leave cheapness, a lack of value. We depart from the kinship of our own true nature and find a chimera, a hollow image of freedom. The debt of nations, negative equity, hallucination. The times are calling out for that level searching of your own being.

Raise your arms above your head; bring them down on either side to describe a circle around you. There is your eye of the needle. A caravan of camels, laden with treasures, stops before you. Oh my world! I leave behind your wonders, which were arms and legs and torso to me. Only I will go through. I am poor, chaste with cold, and obedient. Master, will you take me for what I am?

Jay


© landar 2011. All rights reserved


Image: Giotto, Allegory of Poverty