“He who has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder
With or without words,
to gaze within in wonder–
Training day for stars.
“Fate will have it—and this has always been the case with me—that all the ‘outer’ aspects of my life should be accidental. Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value.” — Carl Jung
He knew from an early age,
or perhaps it would be truer
to say from a timeless state,
that it was meant to be
an inside job.
The outer was simply a pageant
and circus of externals
run by ghosts
and blind assassins.
His quest,
as foretold by his soul,
was to learn to navigate
through the interior world,
the plains and ravines and hinterlands of psyche,
its deep dark forests too,
and to do so abiding faith
and trust in illuminated breadcrumbs,
scattered
here and there
to the alchemy
of paths always forming.
“All that matters now is the ‘deep inner serenity for the sake of creation.’ Though whether I shall ever ‘create’ is something I can’t really tell. But I do believe that it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.” – Etty Hillesum
Where no one can see–
You, created by you, a
deed worth marveling.
“So let this be the aim of the meditation: to turn one’s innermost being into a vast, empty plain, with none of the treacherous undergrowth to impede the view. So that something of ‘God’ can enter you, and something of ‘Love’ too. Not the kind of love-de-luxe that you revel in deliciously for half an hour, taking pride in how sublime you feel, but the love you can apply to small, everyday things.” – Etty Hillesum
In the pervasive realm
of small everyday things
light
threading between
the toes
of the woman
walking barefoot
in the grass
where two fire ants
perpetrate a tango
unseen
by the world
at large.
In the fasting age
of the world’s lengthy night,
hunger
for reclamation projects,
and restoration of citing
visions
long overdue–
all is stilled
to know the suture of light,
moving quietly across
tenderest stitches,
upon which symmetry
is duly derived
to exact
a deepest mending.
“… even in the darkest times we have a right to expect some illumination . . . This may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under most all circumstances and shed over the time that was given them on earth.” – Hannah Arendt
You say you want magic
to keep company the twin canaries
of grief and longing?
Look no further
than your own two hands,
conduits
for spidery balls
of glowing light
intrinsic to divine order
and symmetry.
In other words,
the world is not in your hands,
the Universe is.
There is nothing to grasp.
Your palms, opened,
are engraved
with the not-so-secret
secret score
to an opera in progress,
where you, as singer and audience,
asked for wonder
and received it,
to bask in and share with others,
as if many worlds
depended upon
embers in the dark.
“I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect. I could believe in the full spectrum of it and sing about it. It was so real, so more true to life than life itself. It was life magnified.” – Bob Dylan
It was,
chord
by respiring chord,
a staggered world of archetypes
and metaphysical masks,
that the troubadour, Bob Dylan,
rendered,
with explicit dignity,
the lasting lore
and gist of lives
bound to the slanting
trespass of light
upon so much fabled earth.
“In waking life, when all is well and cares fall away, when the intellect is silenced and we slip into reverie, do we not surrender blissfully to the eternal flux, float ecstatically on the still current of life? We have all experienced moments of utter forgetfulness when we knew ourselves as plant, animal, creature of the deep or denizen of the air. Some of us have even known moments when we were as the gods of old. Most everyone has known one moment in his life when he felt so good, so thoroughly attuned, that he has been on the point of exclaiming: ‘Ah, now is the time to die!’ What is it that lurks here in the very heart of euphoria? The thought that it will not, cannot last? The sense of an ultimate? Perhaps. But I think there is another, deeper aspect to it. I think that in such moments we are trying to tell ourselves what we have long known but ever refuse to accept—that living and dying are one, that all is one, and that it makes no difference whether we live a day or a thousand years.” — Henry Miller
A life in the day
of a glimmering instant–
Dreams, in thrall, take flight.
“Everything is begging to be discovered, not accidentally, but intuitively. Seeking intuitively, one’s destination is never in a beyond of time or space but always here and now. If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored.” — Henry Miller
How tenderly fascinating
it can be
to watch oneself,
with supple compassion,
moving out through the in door,
in through the out door,
an ordered transit of follies
and conveyance,
that is decidedly congruent
with the perfectly still witness
who thoroughly enjoys the cinema-going
adventures of a life lived
and projected
through dreaming in real-time.
John Biscello 