The golden stairway is a clear and vivid image in my mind. It's there for me. Through the practise of innumerable meditations, rather fewer good intentions carried out; hopes allowed to grow, faith un-deferred, acts of love appearing above ground like the proverbial groundhogs testing the air for spring; through all these things the golden stairway appears. Does it happen in a moment? No - a lifetime.
But at the foot of every stairway lies.. a well. A stairwell. What depths are in the well! Its inky darkness conceals so much! But first you see the image of the stairway descending in reflection; descending to places your inner being knows just as well as those at the top of the stair. We've been there before, in a time of innocence, before we ever gathered up the hopes, the opportunities of faith and acts of love. What lives in the inky darkness? A thousand hurts, a life of things unfair. And every one of them as real as meditations, as good intentions.
The apparent quandary in spiritual growth is how to transcend realities, how to make the higher appear out of the lower. In fact it doesn't happen this way. I gaze into the well; I muse and fret. Then slowly I see a golden shape appear. I realize that only a being formed of gold can ascend a golden stairway. The stairway is continuous, as it reaches downwards and upwards. The golden shape is myself - the being I create out of everything I try, and dare, and do. This being can live among the hurts as well as the heights. The well is filled with tears but the golden stairway leads both ways.
Jay
© Landar 2012. All rights reserved
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Author: Jay Landar
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