VISION by James H Cousins

When I from life's unrest had earned the grace
Of utter ease beside a quiet stream;
When all that was had mingled in a dream
To eyes awakened out of time and place;
Then in the cup of one great moment's space
Was crushed the living wine from things that seem;
I drank the joy of very Beauty's gleam,
And saw God's glory face to shining face.

Almost my brow was chastened to the ground,
But for an inner Voice that said: "Arise!
Wisdom is wisdom only to the wise:
Thou art thyself the Royal thou has crowned:
In Beauty thine own beauty thou hast found,
And thou hast looked on God with God's own eyes."

As a meditation, I have coupled this beautiful poem with a stunningly lovely song, written and performed by Patrick Leonard, Live To Tell. The [popularized] song's lyrics were written by Madonna and include the following phrase, which is convergent with the selected poem:

I know where beauty lives

I've seen it once, I know the warm she gives

The light that you could never see

It shines inside...

May the window of your third eye be opened to the divine beauty within you, that it may shine forth in glory, a reflection of the "joy of Beauty's gleam" in every face. Namaste, Peggy

James Cousins was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1873 (died 1956). He was largely self-educated. He later moved to Dublin where he became part of a literary circle which included William Butler Yeats, George William Russell and James Joyce. Cousins was significantly influenced by Russell's ability to reconcile mysticism with a pragmatic approach to social reforms. He had a life-long interest in the paranormal. Cousins produced several books of poetry and wrote widely on the subject of Theosophy. In 1915 travelled to India where he spent most of the rest of his life, eventaully converting to Hinduism. At the core of Cousins's engagement with Indian culture was a firm belief in the "shared sensibilities between Celtic and Oriental peoples". In India he became friendly with many key Indian personalities including poet Rabindranath Tagore, Indian classical dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale, painter Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Mahatma Gandhi. Wikipedia

Live To Tell was originally written by Patrick Leonard, who plays in this video, for the soundtrack of the film Fire With Fire. The song was shown to Madonna, who decided to use it for the film At Close Range. It was produced by Leonard (score) and Madonna (lyric) for her third studio album True Blue.

Cosmic Mother

Resplendent jewel and unclouded brightness
of the sunlight streaming through you,
know that the sun is a fountain leaping
from the father's heart,
his all-fashioning word.
He spoke and the primal matrix
teemed with things unnumbered -
but Eve unsettled them all.

To you the father spoke again
but this time
the word he uttered was a man
in your body.
Matrix of light! through you he breathed forth
all that is good,
as in the primal matrix he formed
all that has life. Scivias, Hildegard of Bingen

Nature takes shapes that repeat themselves at all levels of life. The orb, the wave, the elipse, and the spiral are found in plants and animals, in geographic and cosmic configuration, in quantum particles and animal cells.

Forms such as the seed, the leaf, the egg, are potent metaphors for life, as they relate to shapes we find in the human body. The womb itself, can take the shape of a branching tree; seed-bearing ovaries hanging ovoid from bilateral filopian branches. Or imagine the womb a germinating seed, as in the image of Mary above, a seed giving rise not simply to one life, but many, as she becomes the fruit-bearing tree.

The Sanskrit figure for the sound Ohm, can represent the shape of a bird in flight. Perhaps a dove. Spirit. Nature's patterns and forms give rise to a symbolic language that speaks to us of the unity of Life. We are held in a matrix of relationship, each level dependent upon the others to potentiate and sustain the sacred web.

From Hildegard, Prophet of the Cosmic Christ by Renate Craine: "According to Hildegard, the Mystery of God reveals one great pattern. All of creation, including the matter of the universe, emerged from God's Love (Caritas) and has Christ, the Wisdom of God, as it manifestation, goal and explanation. The entire universe is meant to reveal the interrelational, Trinitarian energy pattern of Love. Humans are meant to participate in this pattern of fecundity (viriditas), which is the work of the Son ['the work of the Word is fecundity']" Causae et Curae, 22, 15.

Hildegard's vision is fully articulated in the lovely words of this excerpt from Scivias, as she sings of the receptivity that makes Incarnation possible; praises for Mary, the matrix of the Good Man...and Eden, the matrix of "all that has life." And God saw that it was Good.

Artwork and original description: Joyti Art Ashram  http://jyotiartashram.blogspot.com/2011/06/elemental-symbol-of-life.html

The Inner History of a Day - John O'Donohue

No one knew the name of this day;

Born quietly from deepest night,

It hid its face in light,

Demanded nothing for itself,

Opened out to offer each of us

A field of brightness that traveled ahead,

Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps

And the light of thought to show the way.

The mind of the day draws no attention;

It dwells within the silence with elegance

To create a space for all our words,

Drawing us to listen inward and outward.

We seldom notice how each day is a holy place

Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,

Transforming our broken fragments

Into an eternal continuity that keeps us.

Somewhere in us a dignity presides

That is more gracious than the smallness

That fuels us with fear and force,

A dignity that trusts the form a day takes.

So at the end of this day, we give thanks

For being betrothed to the unknown

And the secret work

Through which the mind of the day

And wisdom of the soul become one.

Jeremiah 29:11 (God assures the exiles.)

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.  You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.  I will be found by you...”

May each day bring to you a revelation of divine light and love, hope and trust, wonder and reverence,

Peggy

Blessed Longing by Goethe

Tell no one else, only the wise
For the crowd will sneer at one
I wish to praise what is fully alive,
What longs to flame toward death.

When the calm enfolds the love-nights
That created you, where you have created
A feeling from the Unknown steals over you
While the tranquil candle burns.

You remain no longer caught
In the peneumbral gloom
You are stirred and new, you desire
To soar to higher creativity.

No distance makes you ambivalent.
You come on wings, enchanted
In such hunger for light, you
Become the butterfly burnt to nothing.

So long as you have not lived this:
To die is to become new,
You remain a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.

John O'Donohue, in his book, Anam Cara, offers this poem as an example of the "helplessness that sometimes accompanies love." He offers it as an example of the way passion causes us to surrender our "common sense, rationality and normal serious reserve;" to awaken to the creative energies, the desires and longing emmanating from the heart.

This awakening is the threshold of "salvation." To make the realization that you are part of something so vast and lovely, it transcends form and time is like falling in love. It IS falling in love...it is seeing "sameness," recognizing yourself in the other - realizing that you are One with the Other, falling into the universal mystery that is the Love of God! Love is the nature of this cosmic Spirit-relationship. Love is all there is. Love is who you are, where you came from, how you are to live, and that to which you will return.

Love is the truth and the life and the way.

You are "saved" because you realize the eternal nature of this One Love. You are fully awakened and fully attuned to the music of the universe - the creative flux and flow of the divine and its movement through you and around you and before and after you. And you have no choice but to surrender to it, because it is who you are. As a caterpillar dies to become a butterfly and a butterfly is drawn to the light, so do we transcend ourselves for, by, and in Love.

In love we reach outside of our selves, extend ourselves, open, vulnerable and real we willingly fly into the fires of (com)passion and truth. Our need for love draws us to our Lovingness. There may be pain, but it is sacred pain. And the real tragedy would be "to have cautiously avoided these depths and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal." (John O'Donohue)

May you live passionately in love - awaken, surrender, be vulnerable and open, true and free in the eternal embrace of sacred Love that is who you are in unity with all creation. Peggy

Dance by Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Tell me a story of who you are, and see who I am in the stories I am living.

And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.

Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be . . . some day.
Show me you can risk being completely at peace,
truly OK with the way things are right now in this moment,
and again in the next and the next and the next. . .

I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring.
Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall,
the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will.
What carries you to the other side of that wall,
to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?

Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart.
And I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.

Show me how you offer to your people and the world the stories and the songs you want our children’s children to remember, and I will show you how I struggle not to change the world, but to love it.

Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude, knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging. Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.

And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest intentions has died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breathing us all into being, not filling the emptiness from the outside or from within.

Don’t say, “Yes!” Just take my hand and dance with me.

~

This is a letter from me to you. It is a letter from God to you, imploring you to share, to encourage, to reach out, to recognize the weak and the strong face of Christ in others, and within yourself. This is a letter about loving the light within each person and honoring that light in all persons. It is about letting Love IN and holding it to the light, dancing in life with Love. This is the message of Gabriel to Mary on the night of the Annunciation. "Come dance with me."

The word, perichoresis, is used theologically to describe  the "mutual inter-penetration and indwelling within the threefold nature of the Trinity." Literally perichoresis means "around - contain,' and choresis is related to chorea, from the from the Greek word χορεία (=dance). Perichoresis is commonly used in reference to the Spirit, who is eternally in dynamic, reciprocal relationship with Word and Source. Perichoresis refers to the relationships of our hearts to God and to each other. Our awareness of this indwelling divinity, this Spirit by whom we are all connected, all unified as holy harbingers of Godliness is entirely dependent on our consent, our receptivity, our "Yes."

Molly Marshall, in her book, Joining the Dance: The Spirit, Gabriel "calls life forth from from the emptiness of Mary's womb...The birth of the Son is a collaboration of human and divine. The conception requires the Spirit's fecundity and Mary's fruitful yes. God's creative movement accords with the receptive participation of the human partner." Christ is born through the Spirit of consenting hearts of "Yes" in shared relationships.

May your heart be open to the dance of the Spirit. May you realize the birth of the divine Christ within you and honor God's light within all who share this glorious dance of humanity and creation. Life is a sacred gift from God. Share. Trust. Love. Dance!

Namaste my friends, on this beautiful Christmas celebration of divine renewal! Thanks be to God.
Peggy
Artwork: Annunciation Henry Ossawa Tanner

Advent by Thomas Merton

Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Skies, and be perfect!
Fly vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your full!

The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent,
holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our
solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets' stately setting,
Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!

Read this poem slowly. Read it, perhaps two or three times so you can feel into the words and rest deeply into the place from which Merton describes the scene of Advent unfolding. Read and rest with the words until you step out of time and feel yourself  "more humble than the rocks, more wakeful than the patient hills." Smell the sweetness of hay and hear the lowing of the beasts in the barn and in the vast open mountainside the sheep graze in a silent starry night. Let the words of the poem, like the coming of the New, pour over you slowly, slowly and gently lift you into the flow of the journey to Bethlehem.

May the serenity of the season surround you~Peggy

O Come!

I have always sensed great beauty in austerity: the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, the Belgian fog, the stark vast flint hills of Kansas, medieval chants. These stunning landscapes of solitude have called my heart into mystery all my life. In austerity, the clutter and noise of business fades away, leaving only what is essential; as if all of time is poised in quietude's vast open arms, waiting for my soul to enter.
“O Come!” the silence whispers. “Be. Here. Now. Stop. Listen.”

There is a universe in this one silent, open instant. “O Come!”

Ransom my mind from captivity in the business and distraction of time! Hear my bounded heart, crying for the True! You, O Silence, are a balm for my bloodied shackled body. I am exiled in the turbulence of Chronos, choking on each breath, missing moment after moment in which austerity peeks from behind “ the shroud that is over all the peoples, the woven covering that is over all the nations” (Is 25:7) and invites me to that sacred slice of Kairos.

"Be still! Be. Still. In the simple,  the timeless hospitality of austerity I am gathered into the unbounded arms of God with Us, Emmanuel, transcendent Christ, and held  transfigured into timelessness itself.

“O Come!” The Beloved waits.

“Keep watch!” The owner of the house stands waiting at the door. Do not let him find you sleeping!

Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel,

And ransom captive Israel,

That mourns in lonely exile here

Until the Son of God appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

Shall come to you, O Israel!

May the open arms of austerity, the calm peace of solitude, beckon to your soul - Be Still! May you realize your abundance in simplicity. May the voice of the Beloved whisper softly to your heart, "O Come. Come into my love, my peace, my joy. Listen! I am waiting, always waiting just for you."

Advent Blessings, Peggy

austere -plain, simple, stark, sparse