Solstice

This past weekend I spent time in a place of enormous beauty. The room was created for a group to enter into prayer and healing together for several days. I realize its beauty is more than appearance–the beauty is true–it reflects truth. Human beings came together, in the goodness of their hearts, and prepared a space. It was created with a depth of vision born out of and in relationship to the imaginal. Through that effortless patience, beauty and truth were revealed as one. Something unseen became known within me, the moment I walked into it. Interconnections were illuminated, pulsing and alive in the blood; between worlds, yes. And in the cells between us–the room, myself, and the other people gathered there.

Several days before, I had the first dream I remembered in many months:

I walk in to the room, openmouthed. There is a sparkling silence in the air, things have yet to begin, but the space is prepared, waiting. There are places for the musicians, where the music will come through. Children are there, others are coming. The beauty comes into me and fills my being unencumbered. The channel through my mouth completely open to what is there. It is like drinking liquid gold, drinking in the beauty, nothing is in the way of it pouring in. The beauty is true.

The dream spoke directly to the experience, even though it happened in my psyche before I walked into the space in my waking life. This is not so surprising, because when a connection is true it is continuous across the boundaries of space and time. There was a conversation taking place, one that is ongoing still, between and across those boundaries of life, both seen and unseen. The lived experience in the dream informed me while I was in the room, and my experience in the room informed my dream, and that was just one tiny thread of connection among a multitude of connections that have been and are taking place around this one thing: this particular moment in time where magnificent truth was reflected in beauty, visible by way of a human creation.

With precision and care, the people who created the space train their ears to hear, their eyes to see, their mouths to speak from the heart. It is a practice they have given their lives to. An alignment with truth, beauty and goodness. When we are able to attune, reality becomes ‘visible’ in its relationships, patterns, rhythms. In the continuous unfolding of itself like the petals of a rose opening or Saint Teresa’s many rooms. The manifold levels of a thing are revealed. Like jumping into the river, we are carried on its currents deeper into its being, its particularity. It is the language of the heart, and we recognize it. With great care and humility, we are capable of listening, speaking, manifesting out of that dynamic reciprocity.

This time of year the artic colors are often present in the sky where I live. The changing of the light, from night to day and day to night is particularly luminous. There is an online service that offers times of first light, last light, nautical light, the many shades of light and dark coming and going, wherever you are. In the north, where we have already had snow cover for weeks (early this year) and darkness comes so soon, these gradations of air are significant. They breathe me through a daily relationship with the turning that is piercingly present. If I stop for a moment this time of year, it is the air, the quality of the light-dark, that I notice. I search the subtlety in land and sky, even in skin, and watch for what glows from within. Is the light hard or soft, what is revealed? Now my being accepts the shapes of the bones of the trees without surprise; leaves and brush gone, I look further in easily. Funny how the crystalline nature of winter is wrapped in a particular softness that is like no other season.

It is as if the inner life of things becomes more alive, palpable. Even the empty sound of a room sparkles. Let alone the sound of the quiet of life silenced by deep snow.

This time of year, let us create beauty. Join forces with what shines from within. Notice how truth becomes visible. In the little things. Land in the goodness, plant our feet there. My granddaughter is two and more fun that I can say. She is living beauty, beauty in motion, unbound goodness, pure truth. Her beingness as a human person spills out, so much bigger than the space she occupies. She experiences the world in such close connection to it; so visible, is the innocence of her existence. She is in relationship with all that is around her.

I think about the waiting I sensed in the dream and felt in the room last weekend. The waiting I felt in the beauty, the way the beauty connected me to truth. It is reminiscent of the pondering, the mysterious capacity of the human being Mary to hold all that is, the joy, the sorrow, the pain, the love. The expansive heart that she passes on to us. The belly that manifests. Deep beauty is true. The connection is made, and we participate. I talk with a friend and she reminds me of the good. Our work as partners in creation. The good, the true and the beautiful. A circle of life in motion, a trinity. The trinity.

Reverence. A candle generates reverence, a new arising. It is a simple act, to light a candle with purpose. We engage, in all centers, with our whole being. Remember? How it feels to pause for a moment; then feel what happens within when we strike the match, when the wick is lit. Third force.

For years we celebrated Advent with our children by marking each week, as many familiar with Waldorf schools do, with the arrival of the stuff of life. First the mineral kingdom, then the plants, then the animals, and then the child, the human. What flows from there is awe, gratitude, love. How could it not? Slowing down to witness what we blip over daily, our connection and interdependence with the mineral, plant and animal in ourselves and one another, the miracle of life, communicating and relating at every turn. One tiny way to enter in. No words necessary.

It is a movement of the heart. Call and response.

I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known.

The above from the below, and the below from the above -the work of the miracle of the One.

The ancient Ones, the newly born, wait for us.

 

Note: Oft-quoted, the first line above comes from the Hadith, the sayings of the prophet Muhammad; and the second is a line from an Arabic version of The Emerald Tablet, translated by ‘Anonymous.’

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