Holy Rhythm - Stephen Jenkinson

People in our culture play the polyrhythms of their life,
but don't play or tell the Rhythm inside those rhythms.
They know it - but they don't play it, and they don't
tell it; that is the work of "the Gods", they say, to play
that simpler, steadier Rhythm...  That Holy Rhythm that
 is the signature of life itself.

As you get into the sway of that Rhythm, you realize
you've been playing everything around the Rhythm,
everything but the Rhythm itself, trying all the
possibilities you found until all that's left is to be
told and played by the simple, ragged syncopation of
your days.

That's when the Rhythm finally is able to have its way
with you.  It's like answering at last somebody who's
been calling your name for years.  You play the rhythms
and you learn the Rhythm, and you move accordingly...

Stephen Jenkinson
from: Die Wise

~

Vortex Art - Mystic Meandering
2012

Wonder and Awe - Stephen Jenkinson

photo from unsplash.com

It's dark.  You are standing in a field...  This the midnight sky
of your younger, wilder days.  It is ablaze, aching with stars.
It is the vault of heaven, indigo sea of time pierced by light
from the other side.  The horizons are gone, and the Bridge of
Sighs, the one they say the dead walk to leave this world,
dazzles you.  Dew settles on your shoulders and you're
atremble, no longer full with comprehension and certainties.
Every idea you have seems too small for the world.  You
lived long enough to see a night such as this, you're stilled by
it.  There are unlikely companions in the field with you,
everyone quiet.  Someone looks up into the night sky and says:
"You see that star right there?  Could be it isn't there anymore."
Some things in life are too hard to see by yourself because they
happen every day, unwinding above your busyness, or because
you thought you knew them already.

Wonder takes a willingness to be uncertain, to be thrown.  We
have a lot of information these days, and few are enamored of
imprecision or subtlety.  But starlight traveling a bewildering
distance for so long that there is every chance that it doesn't
even exist anymore, and all of that having already happened,
and you standing there, your face blazed in the dark by a
starlight gone, seeing it all, what is and what isn't there: that
is a marvel, and surely that is how awe is born...

Stephen Jenkinson
From - Die Wise