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Eternal Flower

by on 24. May, 2013 in love, Pentecost

The Spirit does everything for love. It's like a turbulent wind - a Pentecostal wind - blowing outside a garden wall. Outside, around, beneath, above..

Purposes

The Spirit does everything for love. It’s like a turbulent wind – a Pentecostal wind – blowing outside a garden wall. Outside, around, beneath, above. I ask which matters more in the garden: the flower which transfixes my gaze or the fruit and seed with the flavor and future they contain? You might say – rather easily – all of them: they’re all equally important. Yes, but the flower has eternity in it – I can’t shake that idea out of my mind. It lives outside of purposes and usefulness, as some things have to do. Will the Spirit understand this, when I leave the garden, when the time comes for me to go outside?

Or do I misunderstand life as a lesson to be learned? Is it truly for progress, for evolution, for taking us further? For purposes? What if the flower that transfixes my gaze is the very thing I am meant to learn? After all, in the time it takes to stroll across the garden from one wall to the other, flowers fade and wither, fruit and seed fall into the earth and die in order to be born again and light changes a thousand times or more. And all the time the wind is blowing outside. What will I take with me if not the eternal light of the flower? To know that life is change and growth might be a lesson but it won’t encourage you to hurry back.

I’m not talking about something facile like living for beauty, or art for art’s sake. I can only understand it that the flower in the garden which transfixes my gaze represents Love and is the single thing which Spirit would save for humanity. Walls, changes, cycles of evolution will all fade and disappear but the beauty of the flower will not.

 

The Garden

Is this flower the beginning or the end
of the plant’s ambition? Fruit and flavor,
seed and progeny seem more purposeful
but the flower is the child of eternity.
And still that pentecostal wind is there
beyond my garden wall. I’d bathe in it,
debate with it, deliberate its cause
and mine. So if the garden wall should fall
will its flowers continue climbing? Will I?
Can Spirit halve the emptiness we feel
when flowers have left their image in our mind
while seed and fruit raise questions to the lips?

The wind might lift the fence from its sockets
and tease the garden wall with fresh outsides.
But where does Spirit go, where come from? Here?
Inside? I have in me a true garden
of soulful expressions: hurt, for myself,
anxiety for others – weaknesses?
So should I cultivate my plants instead
for medicines and discard useless beauty?
There’s nothing weak in pain or injury
and yet this wind which understands no sides
will wrap round ancient qualities with light
and save a flower for nothing more than love.

So is a garden with a wall my life?
And do I tend its flowers right up to death?
Or does the Spirit – a turbulent wind -
envelop what I’ve planted without loss?
I know, as you do and others will too,
that in the stroll from one wall to the next
the light will change a thousand times or more,
flowers will fade, fruit and seed die to be born,
and memories disturb their tangling roots.
Which part is useless? If any then all.
And where is Spirit going to find itself
if not in the cherished small flowers I’ve laid?

 

Best wishes, today,
Jay Landar

©Jay Landar 2013. All rights reserved
You are welcome to quote from Light on the Page on the condition that you cite the author and the source: Author: Jay Landar. Source: www.lightonthepage.com. For other permissions please contact the author.

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Woodpeckers and Angels

by on 21. May, 2013 in Angels, birds

My Burden Is Light

I would be lost - in this world of walls - without beauty, grace and humor. 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light,' is a line given to me by a friend...I have to almost weep with pain when I see words being used as blocks to create an edifice of faith or belief. Words were not meant to be block-like or cemented into place. Yes, you can use them to build an understanding but not to prevent argument or make your position unassailable. But perhaps I’m wrong. I saw a little bird this morning on just such a wall. It had yellow flashes on its wings and was dancing with a lightsome grace and beauty. The wall immediately disappeared – demolished, as if by the inherent humor of the tiny creature. I suppose the wall served a purpose. It was ugly in any event. Perhaps there were angels behind the wall. Who would know, if a wall is only built to strengthen your position?

I’m a great believer in angels – and their humor. I believe they take a delight in our motions and maneuverings, just as I delight in the pure sound of a cuckoo in the woods or woodpeckers in a sunlit glade. I need these things. I presume angels need our purest forms of expression. Yes, we have to struggle and fight for truth and support positions which need to be strengthened. The spiritual beings have been there too. Angels have had their human phase – or so I think. They can afford to smile wryly but, to be sure, they know what it takes to reach the goal.

I would be lost – in this world of walls – without beauty, grace and humor. ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light,’ is a line given to me by a friend. The best line of the week. It’s there in the gospel but you need someone to sing it or pass it over to you at the right moment. Is this not better than a thousand justifications or edifices built with cement and mortar?

 

I would be lost - in this world of walls - without beauty, grace and humor. 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light,' is a line given to me by a friend...

Woodpeckers and Angels

I’ll be God’s spy again to see and hear
how his purposes unfold on this earth:
dampness in the air has forced me indoors;
the man across the way is bellowing;
I’m longing for a cuckoo or a tree
loud with woodpeckers in a sunlit glade.
I think, I think, there are angels here too
spying on me. ‘How all too human!’ they think
with a smile, then nod – they’ve been there too.
At least if I was an angel – yes, me -
that’s what I’d do, and I’d choose those humans
for cuckoo and woodpecker and more.

A bird with yellow flashes on its wings
demolished a concrete wall. I saw it.
The bird was tiny and the wall was great.
What methods did it use? Just beauty, grace,
and, yes, perhaps some hidden humor too.
The wall was gone and I for one was pleased -
the world became a place of yellow wings
and answered prayers: a lightsome grace. Angels,
I perceived, were there behind the grey wall.
But this is me, I hate an edifice
built of blocks where petals want to flutter,
where birds and angels congregate in song.

 

Best wishes, today,
Jay Landar

Photos: authors unknown

©Jay Landar 2013. All rights reserved
You are welcome to quote from Light on the Page on the condition that you cite the author and the source: Author: Jay Landar. Source: www.lightonthepage.com. For other permissions please contact the author.

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An Aura of Listening – Whitsun

by on 17. May, 2013 in language, Whitsun

It's possible to draw closer to the original spiritual language through our quality of communication and our depth of listening. No experience is beyond words..

Spiritual Language

On my way to a recent storytelling event in Tipperary I stopped to give a lift to a young hitch-hiker. He climbed into the car gratefully and I asked where he was going. He replied by making a letter T with his fingers – he was traveling to Thurles like me. Apparently he was deaf. I thought this would limit conversation. However, as we wended our way through the peat bogs he told me with gestures that the road was very bad and that the council was due to repair it. Then he took out a train timetable and indicated that he was going to the station. He pointed out all the places he had been to and made it clear that he was a keen traveler. When I dropped him at the station he clasped my hand as if we were life-long friends and took his leave.

This encounter shone like a light through my whole day. It helped me in my task of telling stories to children as young as four and older ones of twelve. I noticed that in the classes there were one or two children with learning difficulties. There was a little boy of five or six who sat beside me and played with a wooden car. But I was aware that he was listening intently. I felt warmed by his listening. It had a special quality – it seemed to embrace the whole class. This happened in another group as well. Although these children had been designated as ‘special needs’ or ‘learning difficulties’ they were gifted with a listening ear and their warmth had a special meaning for the classes they were in.

There’s hearing and there’s listening. There’s speaking and there’s communicating. Essentially these things happen on another level. They convey warmth and experience. They carry the consciousness of whole groups as well as individuals.

Recently I’ve been struggling with statements I’ve read to the effect that ‘language is inadequate to convey spiritual experience’. I’ve heard this from two highly-esteemed sources, both spiritual teachers. As someone who lives in the beauty of language I find these statements unconvincing. Surely it would be more accurate to say, ‘ I find it difficult to convey spiritual experience in words, with language’. If I think of my deaf friend overcoming obstacles cheerfully, or the two children with learning difficulties creating an aura of listening through warmth, then I would go back to those spiritual teachers and say, ‘Think again’.

This is partly a Whitsun message. The truest language of all is available to everyone – and in this respect we all have special needs. It’s possible to draw closer to the original spiritual language – or to renew it – through our quality of communication and our depth of listening. I don’t believe there is any experience in the world which is beyond words. Perhaps at its highest level language has to be enflamed with ‘tongues of fire’ but language itself is never inadequate – only the communicator.

 

Buds in May

There is an end of pavements still to come
and a time when every shoe-tired greyness
will yield to golden pathways on the earth.
We’ll talk a language then which all must know,
a speech which holds for every living thing.
Its words, which have light in their unfolding,
will be like buds in May, pleased to appear.
Let no one say this language cannot reach
to the very edge of our creating,
where stone is trimmed with stone in ancient style.
And beyond, to where green remembers green
from times before its heart crept into bud.

 

Best wishes, today,
Jay Landar

Picture: Rock of Cashel, Co Tipperary (author unknown)

©Jay Landar 2013. All rights reserved
You are welcome to quote from Light on the Page on the condition that you cite the author and the source: Author: Jay Landar. Source: www.lightonthepage.com. For other permissions please contact the author.

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A Mystical Completion

by on 14. May, 2013 in life, light

In the deeply-active May light the water's surface changed. It appeared to take a violet hue and some new green leaves shone strongly against it...

Rainbows

Let the reader understand – the writer is only watching rainbows, which dissolve into the sky like angels in a Giotto painting. Half-rainbows – the completion is in the sun.

I love to walk beside the river in the evening, and in the deeply-active May light the water’s surface changes. It appeared to take a violet hue this time, and some new green leaves shone so strongly against it I felt they might have been singing. Now along the riverbank come lives like shadows seeking completion. They might be yours, they might be mine, trying to join. They might be past, they might be future. They are like those pictures people put up on walls of the missing. Have you seen this one, that one, a life not finished?

I can’t complete the rainbow, it only happens. I’m liable to dissolve in my failings and fallings. The reader must understand. The river knows, because it bargains life against change and movement unceasingly. The arched bridge also exerts itself to comprehend, raising its own image in the water below through meditation – a mystical completion.

But still I’m here, I’m walking, my own life is back again. It must have wanted something, known that halfway-round is no good at all. Some reader must complete and understand. The sun. Not twenty minutes later the sun joined the circle. There were rainbows – not one, not two, but a trinity, complete and casting vapors of violet and green into the May sky. Not a thing dissolved, not a single angel.

 

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Witnesses

A violet river and leaves which sing green -
a monastery evening, deep and still,
with nothing more than a swallow’s-tail breeze
to glide against the mind of the current.
Lately the bridge has given itself up
to meditation, raising its own arch
in mystical reflection down below.
It’s a place for phantoms to exchange hearts -
loves still lingering where lovers have gone,
like faint pictures of the missing posted
at a crossroads where someone might recall.
Have you seen this life or that? – not quite lost.

And in the distance – rather near, I thought -
a half-rainbow melted into the sky,
like a Giotto angel manifesting.
Can those lively witnesses come again,
the souls who walked on paths like these, and loved?
Can they raise their own reflections in strength,
or dissolve where they have failed and fallen low?
Only the river knows, which bargains life
against change and movement unceasingly.
And then more rainbows, fully-arched and fine,
single, double, surely a trinity,
violet and green and every angel hue!

 

Best wishes, today,
Jay Landar

Picture: Nasim Mansurov

©Jay Landar 2013. All rights reserved
You are welcome to quote from Light on the Page on the condition that you cite the author and the source: Author: Jay Landar. Source: www.lightonthepage.com. For other permissions please contact the author.

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A Surprise of Birds – Ascension

by on 10. May, 2013 in Ascension Day

A Surprise of Birds

Different ways to experience the meaning of Ascension Day. What is Ascension? How does it appear in the world and in the human being? Can the poet describe it.?It’s an Ascension which comes and goes in manifold ways – a poet’s ascension. Yesterday evening I watched as the bud-green fleeces of the trees were sent shimmering by wind, late sunshine, and deep, dark turrets of cloud. It might have been that the wind was a solitary commander, standing still, while the trees themselves sped past. It was Ascension Day in the Christian calendar. I was attracted by the way the birds’ wings were underlit by light as they rose up, as if in one unanimous announcement of surprise. A surprise of birds.

The clouds are also gods; the poet perhaps the one who is assigned the task of naming them. He sees them with his literary gaze, with his mind attuned to perceptions which are also religious experiences. In this way Ascension is reality – a lifting of the brow to be touched by holy forces contained within the phenomena of the world. The gods are within our compass, within our ken, just as they are reflected in the single flash of light on the underside of the birds’ wings.

So in what way is this the Ascension of a Saviour? In a manifold way – the surprise of birds, dreams, delusions, victories of the clouds, shadowbursts of light, fiery wings, deafening green, are all figments of life which rise up in a deeper imagination. The Saviour – if he is in their midst – must be concerned with everything which is deeply-loved on earth: every single flashing wing, each false beginning, all promptings of life which don’t flourish or multiply. They must be carried in his robe, in his Ascent.

This is a very inadequate understanding of Ascension. But it’s a poet’s one. It cares for the naming of things, for the observation of life as it happens. Would you say you can do better with mere concepts? We let the gods back in, with perceptions, with open eyes and ears. But above all we let them in with an open heart. In this way we’re lifted up.

 

Different ways to experience the meaning of Ascension Day. What is Ascension? How does it appear in the world and in the human being? Can the poet describe it.?

Ascension

The ancient clouds pour down wisdom in rain -
I heard it in the night and hear it now.
The silence before and silence after
are honest spaces filled with self-knowing -
chaffinches, sparrows and robins are there
releasing their creative minds and thoughts
like philosophers who’ve gleaned life’s one key.
Fruit trees, roses, and clambering ivies
anticipate the genius they’ll display
when two moons, maybe three, have glowed and gone.
And I – I am the man who heard the rain,
who hears it now and understands its weight.

Has the rain heard me – and the ancient clouds?
Do they protect in some secret pocket
my picture as I have been, am, will be?
Is it clouds in my conception or gods?
I love their dark frowns at any event
and each inception of dazzling sunlight
and the brilliance of those scattering birds,
wings flashing with underlit ascension.
Bound forever to my chair of knowing
it helps me to think I’m known too -
and I’ll scan the towering caverns of cloud
for just a glimmer of expressive light.

Now trees speed past while wind itself stands still -
their bud-green fleeces shimmer in the light
as the stationary commander bids.
A deep surprise of birds flaps heavenwards -
hear, again, the music of ascension.
Who can name the turrets of flying cloud
except the one named by them for naming?
I’ll kneel before them, supplicant-poet,
and raise my brow to their extended touch -
they are dreams, gods, delusions, victories:
a conflagration of sunburst shadows,
fiery wings, deafening green – this, my life.

 

Best wishes, today,
Jay Landar

©Jay Landar 2013. All rights reserved
You are welcome to quote from Light on the Page on the condition that you cite the author and the source: Author: Jay Landar. Source: www.lightonthepage.com. For other permissions please contact the author.

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