light reaching completely

Poetics for the winter solstice

Light hazily drifts today, fragile like lace, a winter solstice shawl in soft winds. I give it a story. I note this. Could light reach me completely as is? Uninterpreted? Unveiled?

One might fear blindness. For light, unfiltered, is infinitely more than all the light the eyes can see. For light, uncensored, is unbearable. The physical body revolts. The psyche with its secrets flees into shadows.

One might fear that one might shatter in a thousand constellations. Identity might scatter like star dust, the pieces of all you believed yourself to be roaming space without direction, without continuity, without purpose.

One might even fear the impossibility of knowing when light completely reaches us as it is. One might fear the uselessness of the question. Mere conjecture, really, a waste of energy and time. For it’s true that our knowledge is absurdly finite, a shivering sliver in what is. Confined by the instrument of the human body-mind. How can we ever know the truth of reality, as it is?

Let the fears reach you completely as they are. Offer them up to the light, why not? Other things may happen now. You see?

The distraction of sound, singing cardinals, for example, and the lovely laughter of Japanese thrushes. The wind in the grasses. The grasses soft like the wind. And the enormous ocean swells crashing into the shore, sweeping mantles of foam reaching for the light’s shawl. So that on an island nearby, after many years, a famous big wave surfing contest will take place, a last minute announcement: Thousands will drop all their other plans and find their way to a beach. They will mostly miss the light.

Other things may happen. Thoughts may become more visible, not different from other perceptions, although seemingly more intrusive. Thoughts are like glittering fishes carried on waves of photons. But we don’t know what photons are. We would have to know ourselves first, wouldn’t we? Before we could speak of the nature of photons?

Something happens when light reaches us, regardless, when you and I for just this one moment open to what is, put all judgment to the side, all story. Available.  We tremble.

And here are beautiful patterns, without us knowing what they are. And here is the absence of blindness, the absence of its absence, not even its possibility Here, in your company,  light makes love to light and from it a universe blossoms.

Oh, you laugh, ‘the patterns, I see now, were the play of fence posts and prancing shadows,, temple pillars curving toward us like a score of ballerinas.’ It’s winter solstice. Light makes love to water and from it the pastels of dreamy piano sonatas unfold and also the paintings of Vermeer. When light reaches us completely as is, there is plenty of space for story too. Light makes love to poetry. We stand in awe. Our secrets a bit less dark, touched by beauty, the sweetness of this time of year. Are photons made of love and calling us?  We will not know until we dare to know without knowing.

Today we come so close, you and I. We bake an apple pie. To celebrate with friends made of this same inexplicable light, made of the same dance.

credit: geoffroy-hauwen | unsplash