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
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