Your Own Peculiar Light - Fred LaMotte

 Perhaps you didn't notice how, when you awoke
this morning, you took your first breath
from the other world, the world inside this one,
where atoms are not shadows but fragrances of color,

and flesh is the music that vibrates the Law
that can never be written in books.

It doesn't matter anymore if you are on the Left or Right,
Christian or Muslim, a do-er or non-doer.
You need not wear a veil here in this softer daylight.
The glow of your essential oil anoints the meadow,
greening branches, thickening fur.  The hungry ones

who need your touch are no longer driven away
by the deafening thrum of your thoughts, but gather
toward your musky pollen like bees.  It matters not
what master you follow, what party you join,
but how deeply you rest in your body,
aligning your heart with a certain star,
dissolving that distance with each exhalation.

The formless flower of the void opening her golden cup,
pouring nectar down your darkest furrows, bittersweet,
the taste of death and joy.  Arise, come, begin your task.

Earth is thirsting for the flavor of your own peculiar light.
It rainbows through your face as through the prism
of no other tears.  Hear a new song, don't ask whether
the voice arises within you, or in the dust-atoms
on your path, transforming wounds into destinations:

Shivoham, Shivoham, Chit Ananda Rupam:

Pure truth I am, pure truth I am,
the very form of awakened beauty...

Neither ask what you must do.  From now on
your work is to keep listening, keep listening
for this music in the heart of every stranger.

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

A Liturgy of Light - & Suffering - John O'Donohue

 When suffering comes, we feel panic and fear.
Frightened, we want to hide. You want to climb up some high
ledge to escape dismemberment of this acidic tide.

Yet the strange thing is: the more you resist, the longer it stays.
The more intensely you endeavor to depart the ground of pain,
the more firmly you remain fixed there.

It is difficult to be gentle with yourself when you are suffering.
Gentleness helps you to stop resisting the pain that is visiting you.

When you stop resisting suffering, something else begins to happen.
You begin slowly to allow your suffering to follow its own logic.
The assumption here is that suffering does not visit you gratuitously.
There is in suffering some hidden shadowed light.

Destiny has a perspective on us and our pathway that we can never
fully glimpse; it alone knows why suffering comes.  Suffering has
its own reasoning.

It wants to teach us something.  When you stop resisting its dark
work, you are open to learning what it wants to show you. 

Often, we learn most deeply and receive profoundly from the black,
lonely tide of pain.  We often see in Nature how pruning strengthens.
Fruit trees look so wounded after being pruned, yet the limitation
of this cutting forces the tree to fill and flourish.  Similarly with
drills of potatoes when they are raised, earth is banked up around
them and seems to smother them. Yet as the days go by the stalks
grow stronger.

Suffering can often become a time of pruning. Though it is sore
and cuts into us, later we may become aware that this dark 
suffering was secretly a liturgy of light...

John O'Donohue
from: Eternal Echoes

With thanks to - The Beauty We Love

P.S.  I also substitute the world struggle for suffering -
same thing, only on a different level

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

The World in Different Light - Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller
1924-2020

Original title - "Monet Refuses Operation"

"Her poems are 'a testament to the miraculous power
of language to interpret and transform our world'
and 'a testament that invites readers to share her vision
of experiences we all have in common: sorrow,
tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and
mortality - 'the hard dry smack of death against the glass'"
(Washington Post)

Lisel Mueller was a German born American Poet.
Her family fled the Nazi regime in 1939 when she was 15.
She worked as a translator and academic teacher.  She
began writing poetry in the 1950's, publishing her first
collection in 1965.

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
street light through ice on window...