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

The Other Side of Nature's Door

And on the other side of nature's door lies Mind. When I see the beauty of the sun in the clouds, sheltered in moisture which is held and then dropped; when I see its grandeur in rainbow and river, sparkling in air one minute then weaving through land the next; then I know that in me lives a being whom God ordained to take his purposes further - to recreate the world He never finished. For God left nature open as a door into His divinity and it is my task - in order to complete my own creation and that of the world - to go through that door as artist and as thinker.

On the other side lies Mind. I can slip into that Mind when I will. We don't ordinarily realize we can do that. But when nature, beauty, goodness or truth strikes the Divinity in me into life - as a flint struck on stone creates fire - then the door opens. The human spirit is the creative fire destined to complete the world.

But the things we don't ordinarily realize or accomplish are, in a sense, as thin as air, or as the moisture in air. We need sun to irradiate them, to flood them with the familiarity of the gleaming rainbow, or the shining river. The colors in the rainbow are second cousin to the iris in the eye; the winding river is the course of life as it flows back to the sea. Our kinship with life is fully illustrated by them: God is an artist. The divinity in us understands His work. It enables us to push the door open and enter into Mind while at the same time allowing us to feel we have the right to do so - it belongs to our kind. We are kith and kin of God. Of course, the minute you think these thoughts, the minute you slip through, you are instantly ashamed - ashamed of your temerity and cunning: the temerity to speak of the Divine at all in terms of what lives in you; the cunning to be able to weave a path of thoughts that might take you to such a destination. After all, you are just a human child; it is your duty to be obedient and live on earth as was intended.

I feel all of these things; I feel them very keenly. I feel them as the central contradiction of my life. But rainbows will shine and rivers will flow. I can't help myself but create and create. I can't do other than believe it was meant to be so. If I think at all I must believe. We are divine children - it is our inheritance. It is your duty to strike up that fire - even if in doing so you feel disobedient; you feel the shame of going beyond what was intended. God has given us His own nature:

For beauty sails like moisture in my mind

and brightens when I let my thoughts fly free;

and all the nature in me and my kind

flows back to Him as streams will to the sea.

Jay

 

© landar 2011. All rights reserved