Lamplight

We might expect the new consciousness - if we expect it at all - to be infinitely muscular and equal to all the crises of our age. (And isn't it strange how people have stopped mythologizing 2012 now it's here?) There is always this reality gap between the fantasy of salvation and the demands it might make. It's precisely into this gap that the strong, muscular saviours will step. We are faced with choices between ideas, religions, regimes and somehow fail to trust the energy of our own longing - the longing for peace and truth and justice. These are not simply abstractions - they are powers to be found somewhere if we can keep our mind on them for long enough.

The bewildering truth (and it is bewildering) is that it's not power at all that establishes world harmony - it's not the rush of a 'new consciousness' or a 'great shift' and it's certainly not the control of a muscular ideology or dictator. (In this respect we're only substituting traditional authorities with more insidious belief systems.) Neither is it the rule of those who come like the lamb but have the heart of the wolf. Peace - if we can find it - is like the lamp at the end of a secluded passage. We have to be quite still to reach it. We have to go together, if possible, or at least come back for those who are left behind. The lamp holds no expectations - it doesn't promise to answer the darkness of the world. It's like a spring of clear water in a moss-lined cave. You can reach it and drink or not. Yet strangely this small lamp also stands above the whole world and fills every crevice with light. So much depends on not taking your eye off it - on not being trapped or lured or deceived by external powers.

Peace is not glamorous but it is glowing. And lastly this lamp knows every step of darkness you have ever taken. It has kept its eye on you unfailingly since time began. It's only demand is that you do the same.

Jay


© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
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The Other Side of the River

I am forever trading places with my lost self on the other side of the river - only to realize that the sense of loss is itself misplaced. The river flows and in its currents a skein of colors, purple, blue and gold. Quite soon I see these colors rising on my page - the river brims here as well. The self I thought I left on the other shore is committing words to paper.

It's so hard to grasp the sense of this - that we are not alone. We may have faced loss, separation, failure in love but the spirit who abides on the other side of the river - seemingly - is simply looking for a way to smile from our eyes. I could say that this is the Christ who has come down from his cross; I could say that it is the higher self - at any event, once known never forgotten. It's no use to minutely examine life to find this presence. It's in the colors on the river.

So many people I would have called friends once have grown scales of mistrust. This is another reaction to water. Darkness foams against the world of light. But I know that you - the spirit on the other shore - will understand: our days apart are a fading dream. I find you again where none may speak: under the bank's green edge - purple, blue and grey in the watery seams and margins of life. I find you where people gather and speak, where something smiles from their eyes which is not ancient loss but which forgives the world its wrongness.

Jay


© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
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A Faraway Flower

As I seek to cross the bridge of no making I know that I cannot go alone. For on the other side I will be One, and that is impossible unless there is unity. The arch is steep and sheer, the columns deep and the ascent as narrow as life's way. The apex-stone is a diamond, holding both sides. But what lets me cross is the fact that our hands are linked - two with two, crossing in the middle, to form an unbreakable figure of eternity.

Do I know who I will cross with? Whoever it is has gone along life's way with me. He or she is my making, my completion. The road shines behind us, the cool water's breath rises up. Who do I seek union with? My self, my eternal partner, my lover? On the other bank of the river the ground will welcome our feet, its green light deep and untroubled.

Take my hand and we will cross, our human stories twined in fairytale. There has been loss and distress, parting and sorrow. There has been the magical light of a faraway flower which holds our image. Who will I cross with? Who am I alone for? The crossing of the bridge is one part of the union. The far shore is another. What is un-separateness? Do we have a right to seek the unified? Must we not place hands on that diamond, cross and link arms together, understand that the bridge only comes from our own being?

Jay


© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
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The Poetry of The Soul

You will never grow tired of the birds. My soul is also in the nest, conquering heights by instinct before the wings are even formed. How is this possible? Because instinct in the human being is constantly evolving out of one thing and into another. It is accompanied on the one hand by memory and on the other by aspiration. One contains depths, the other heights. This is the poetry of the soul - the spirit sings in a deep past and a high future. Instinct swells, joyously, rebelliously, in the nest of the present.

I ask myself, how do I know this? Well, it's visible when I stop looking. The energy and expenditure of life bring to the surface things which are apparent only when you are still. Thus youth and age both have their virtues. The one climbs mountains of aspiration before they are there, the other draws on deep reservoirs of memory. Instinct nourishes them both. But how can instinct elaborate these two things - as a bird elaborates its flight in the air - unless they are really there, unless they allude to realities? The deep glow of the past dawns on us in age because its truth grows closer - tipping us at last into the deepest reserve of memory, the spiritual light we emerged from at birth. Youth climbs in aspiration because it knows that the goal of flight is a real one - its very muscles tell it so.

Therefore, when I am still, the light of things past and things to be confirms itself in me. There is reassurance in this: in days of dullness and cloud the bird does not completely forget to sing. My friend the blackbird flies to the gable-end of the building opposite and pours out his heart - and mine - into the air. I know his meaning.

Jay


© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
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The Physics of the Heart

I have another Form in mind which I can elaborate in the air - in thought - much like the World Tree. It is the form the bird makes in song - the song which maps out a world of instincts, visible to the mind's eye: the delicate, finely-wrought pattern its singing makes. The important thing here is what's visible to the mind's eye, because really it is the heart that grasps it, rather than the mind. And insofar as the heart grasps these invisible forms it re-creates what the Divine accomplished in establishing a world of instincts in the first place.

I think this is clearly related to the spiritual concept of Ascension which lies close to us at this time of year - the month of May. The work of the birds is largely accomplished - the nests are built, the young are incubating or hatching - and to a large degree the trees have succeeded in raising sap to their topmost branches. The song that spills out now has fulfillment in it and the leisure to reach up to the creator spirit.

The human heart does this consciously. The physics of the heart understands that each thought is a creative form which rises in a very finely-wrought, delicate pattern - just as the bird's song rises - to the hand that made it. We don't own thoughts and neither do we have the right to abandon them to the forces of the world. The physics of the heart is the one which can hold the bird in its hand without crushing it, which knows that ascension proceeds in songs and prayers.

And finally I see - in the mind's eye - a gleam of light at the highest point. From this point the entire earth is suspended - and all created things.

Jay


Picture: Ascension by Rembrandt

© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
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The World Tree

Something you create from the pale, invisible template of imagination but which holds the entire earth in its frame: such is the World Tree. It's important to conceive it, even as the Norsemen did - the realm of human beings in the middle, the shining palaces of the gods above, and far down below, at the very end of its roots, the shadowy kingdom of mystery you must dare to enter in your search for wisdom.

But follow your chosen root to its tip and you still won't find life itself. Only dull earth. You have to search deeper still to reach the well of wisdom, with its rich nutrients of truth, pity and faith. Then what you bring up must remain, in a sense, invisible. Great Odin was enjoined to pluck out his own eye in order to receive wisdom. What he gained remained within him but his eye stayed sightless. The truth and power of wisdom is recreated in the spread of imagination and understanding across the world - like boughs and sprays of foliage re-imagined from the deepest source.

Yet human beings today are far removed from the vigor and power of imagining of the Norsemen. Our intellects are coated in shade. Instead of discerning the bright green foliage above we see only the shadows the leaves create. Each thought that reaches through to light makes visible again a leaf on the great Tree - and the middle branches are where human life exists. The squirrel and the harts of legend jump and play here. Does the Tree slowly become more visible again?

At last the whole World Tree stands clear, coaxed from thought, conjured from aspiration, as if from the mind of a half-blind seeker. It is no lost myth or figment from humanity's childhood. But it is the residence of humanity, our conception of the gods, our guardianship of life and knowledge. It is not there except that we imagine it into wholeness and completion.

Jay

© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
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The Court of Life

Can you hear that blackbird singing in the pouring rain? There - he's risen to a rooftop and is romancing the sun from its hiding-place. The bird is scaling the grey walls between resurrection and ascension. Its song curves beneath the rain. Now I see it - this song is my consciousness.

Wherever we find customs, conventions, codes we should hear the music of human life. And within that music we should discern the graceful, rooftop serenade of individual consciousness. But never for its own sake - rather because it knows what has been raised to life and what will, one day, ascend to its heavenly home. This song curves through all society and argues its case before the very court of life.

Jay

© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from PageLight on the condition that you cite the author and the source:
Author: Jay Landar
Source: www.pagelight.blogspot.com
For other permissions please contact the author.