You will never grow tired of the birds. My soul is also in the nest, conquering heights by instinct before the wings are even formed. How is this possible? Because instinct in the human being is constantly evolving out of one thing and into another. It is accompanied on the one hand by memory and on the other by aspiration. One contains depths, the other heights. This is the poetry of the soul – the spirit sings in a deep past and a high future. Instinct swells, joyously, rebelliously, in the nest of the present.

I ask myself, how do I know this? Well, it’s visible when I stop looking. The energy and expenditure of life bring to the surface things which are apparent only when you are still. Thus youth and age both have their virtues. The one climbs mountains of aspiration before they are there, the other draws on deep reservoirs of memory. Instinct nourishes them both. But how can instinct elaborate these two things – as a bird elaborates its flight in the air – unless they are really there, unless they allude to realities? The deep glow of the past dawns on us in age because its truth grows closer – tipping us at last into the deepest reserve of memory, the spiritual light we emerged from at birth. Youth climbs in aspiration because it knows that the goal of flight is a real one – its very muscles tell it so.

Therefore, when I am still, the light of things past and things to be confirms itself in me. There is reassurance in this: in days of dullness and cloud the bird does not completely forget to sing. My friend the blackbird flies to the gable-end of the building opposite and pours out his heart – and mine – into the air. I know his meaning.

My heart itself is in the nest and waits to fly,

when I have mastered every instinct given me.

Cloud and rainfall bury me in thought. Impatient

for the sky, my life will not release the power to rise.

Yet everything is there that’s needed, save the light

to draw me up – I have it in conception, in

the memory of flight, which is instinct’s other name:

never to be forgotten, the heart’s ascent.

And though I neither fly nor fall I understand

the golden heights: they are born in me and I climb

back to them with each passing minute of my life.

Thus age brings only remembrance, and active age

remembers what was never known in time’s embrace.

I move without moving, come down without climbing

and fly by faith alone before the wings are fledged.

Do I envy the bird in the nest? – his soul is mine.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© Landar 2012. 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.

I wrote this small piece for my friends at Evolver (drop in to Evolver.net if you have a chance) and was surprised by how passionately people feel about these birds. Here’s the interesting thing: the crow seems to have a different significance for each individual, perhaps more than any other creature. They are emblems, myths, symbols, omens, delights and just plain birds, along with many other things. Should we let them be? Not until the day comes when we can let our own humanity be..

CROW

~The crows are bearers of light and hope and promise. Each and every one lifts straw or twigs to the nest. When is a crow silent? When it is building. Sunlight flashes on the underside of their wings. They slalom miraculously through the branches. They career round corners of the wind. The treetops are eager for them, bursting into the upper light. There is genius in their working – magical, canvas-filling skill. In what sphere did they learn their gifts? The god of crows is living here and now. I stand in its presence, a pupil of origins, groping for words to express its being. There is no other prayer worth raising on this day. Crow.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© Landar 2012. 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.

Too often this world can seem like a prison with no way out. Then it feels as if the days are filled with labor and night is like a lid or cover pressing down. The activities of the day pass like colors before our eyes but in night everything that is black and white in us starts to walk, preventing proper rest or release. This has a lot to do with the stress and materialistic values of our times. But there is another factor which is often over looked. The effects of stress and the struggle for worldly survival commonly include: loss of self-esteem, lack of confidence, insecurity and inferiority complex. The world contrives to inflict these things on us mainly because it does not respect basic human needs and values – its systems honor those who go out and get, those who climb on others’ shoulders and push their way higher. We often think that the answer to low self-esteem and under-achievement is to gain a footing on this worldly ladder – to match or equal the go-getters in some small way. And small achievements in this way can be valuable. But what lives with the world dies with the world; what belongs to the world’s systems perishes when those systems crash. Can self-esteem really be based on this?

The problem is not just one of self-belief but belief in total. The world offers very little to stimulate true belief. Do we really believe that the answer to feeling small and crushed is to enlarge yourself? This amounts to nothing more than a kind of body-building. No – if you feel belittled or disparaged in some way the answer – ultimately – is to have something to believe in. Something which is larger than yourself, which understands you intimately and which is truly worth believing in. In the end it’s the moral-divine universe which fits the bill – the one which is related to every single part of our existence, which understands our feelings of smallness, of disaffectedness, of disempowerment. There is something in the colossal, divine universe which is so tender and intimate it can take you by the hand and lead you on to worthiness and value. The hand of an angel, if you like. Or, rather, something which shows you how to take yourself by the hand and lead you from the prison. But the essential feature is belief because only belief can draw us out into the grandeur of existence and make our own being sufficient or adequate. ‘Body-building’ is not really an alternative.

Unless you have the kindness of an environment which offers you belief – and there are many different kinds and forms of belief – then it can be hard to come by. Example is important – the example of people who deeply believe in the value of human life and its connectedness to the divine-moral world. And, in my opinion, we urgently need to rearrange the structures of our social life so that they do not crush people and rob them of their self-esteem.

Then I see a world where the gentle colors of the day continue right on into dusk; where the rainbow pavement does not disappear; where sleep and truth reveal another land to which this world is just an empty husk.

Squirrels

A squirrel has no fear of any height -

though the tree scrapes the moon and sun and stars;

it will not let the darkness cause it fright

nor lose a minute’s sleep through winter’s powers.

But fear and darkness living in the mind

will shake your branch and show to you the drop;

they’ll let your seeing nightmares make you blind

and leave you without sleep – while squirrels hop.

Wraith

Two thirds are color, one third black and white,

and what I’m made of perjures my belief;

the colors rise like memories of light,

the black and white steals it like any thief.

My days are mostly colored in with faith

and light escorts me till the hours of sleep;

but darkness comes and whitens like a wraith,

disturbing dreams and waking up the deep.

Husk

And colored is the light of all my days,

while black occludes the stillness of the night;

now soft belief can guide me on the ways

which need a gentle footfall to be right.

Then I can lead my own self by the hand

and walk the rainbow pavement into dusk;

there sleep and truth reveal another land

to which this world is just an empty husk.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© Landar 2012. 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.

Under a thickness of clouds, alone;

the night-bell rings out three -

who comes?

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

Poverty, chastity, obedience – we know these words as evangelical counsels or as religious vows: the vow of poverty, the vow of chastity, the vow of obedience.But apart from their significance as monastic vows, their place in the theology of the cross, they have a modern spiritual significance which even nature and the changing season can point to. I believe that the demands of our age make these concepts particularly relevant. The following short commentary – Poverty, Chastity, Obedience – and poems approach the spiritual relevance of these ideas…

The time of year, November, is a paradox: the sun rises through mist and peers directly into your eyes. Each day it stands lower in the sky. Each day, while it gives up its abundance, it stares more searchingly into your being, for signs of the poverty, the chastity, the obedience, which govern its descent. You must let go of your treasures, let go of everything, if you will follow me, it seems to say.

The words are not popular. But the season points to them. The Spirit of the Time, the Zeitgeist, points to them: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience. Abundance crumbles like dust in our hands and leaves indebtedness. Our limbs stray from the purity of what we need and leave cheapness, a lack of value. We depart from the kinship of our own true nature and find a chimera, a hollow image of freedom. The debt of nations, negative equity, hallucination. The times are calling out for that level searching of your own being.

Raise your arms above your head; bring them down on either side to describe a circle around you. There is your eye of the needle. A caravan of camels, laden with treasures, stops before you. Oh my world! I leave behind your wonders, which were arms and legs and torso to me. Only I will go through. I am poor, chaste with cold, and obedient. Master, will you take me for what I am?

Ears

Shall I preach to the air

that I find myself so lost for ears?

At the point of creation

there is only the birth

of self into the sky.

And the creator – Father, keep me

in your Grace – who rises in me

like a sun through mist.

Am I self or more than self

that the angels give ear to my silence,

give strength to my sound?

Circle

My arms describe a circle around me -

it is the eye of a needle.

A caravan of camels has stopped before it,

laden with treasures. Only I

will go through. Oh my world!

I leave behind your wonders,

which were arms and legs and torso to me.

I am poor, chaste with cold, and obedient.

Master, will you take me for what I am?

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

Image: Giotto, Allegory of Poverty

Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

This article – 9 11 facts – was written on the 10th anniversary of September 11 2001. It considers the September 11 facts from a very different point of view. The full 9 11 truth may never be known. But I believe that what happened on September 11 ten years ago can be understood in the light of changes in human consciousness. The question of a 9 11 conspiracy is intimately bound up with this. Of course there are numberless September 11 stories – wonderful, tragic and moving personal accounts – which, like a mosaic, create all the 911 information we have at our disposal. However, it is the place of this decisive event in the development of human consciousness which may still turn out to be the most important truth of all. Please read on, if you will: 9 11 facts or – September 11th and Human Consciousness…

*

The events of 9/11 – brought to life again by the recent memorial – can’t help but strike questions into the hearts of people who think deeply about things. Every detail of what happened, all the circumstances, seem to be symptomatic of underlying changes in the pattern of human life. Like arrows fired in from another world the doomed planes seemed to bring to an end a millennium of history. It might be more accurate to say they brought to an end millennia of history lived under the sign of a particular form of consciousness. The attack on the very symbol of commerce and trade signaled the close of an epoch during which human consciousness was directed firmly downwards into the earth. Imagine human beings facing into the earth with the circumference of the heavens above them, like a bowl turned downwards. Then think of that bowl inverted, turned upwards, with human consciousness facing into the heavenly worlds instead of the earth. This is the scope of the change overtaking humanity today.

After ten years it’s possible to look back on 9/11 with a certain distance. The proliferation of ‘conspiracy’ theories point to the fact that people are deeply dissatisfied with explanations which talk simplistically about an ‘attack on our way of life’. They feel instinctively that the events represent something very much deeper in the course of human affairs. They want to connect to those forces of change; in fact we might feel that our very future – our survival – depends on gaining access to the hidden stream of change in human evolution. Unfortunately this is played out politically in a desperate attempt to control and destroy. And a counterforce reveals itself through this: a force which actively strives to prevent the unfolding of a new consciousness.

I relate this to another phenomenon: the apparent lack of a spiritual consciousness natural or native to the west. Is there a spirituality lacking in the west that allows us to be left with a ‘ground zero’? Is there something metaphorically rushing in to fill the gap? What is the relationship between this and, for example, indigenous native traditions? Why is it we are setting such store by a Mayan ‘Long Count’? What, in the end, is going to snap us awake?

For me, the answer cannot and will not lie in simply another religion or tradition – a new practice of spirituality. Even to talk about a ‘new form of consciousness’ falls short. I don’t seem to have the words for what I mean, just as our prevailing culture doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to truly fill the gap. The phrase ‘the coming of the Son of Man’ seems to me to be the one that applies – if you take the ‘Son of Man’ to be a new beinghood which is both natural and native in us and yet which fulfills, for example, the Mayan Long Count and augurs in an new era.

Something which is both born in us and which fulfills the past would be an adequate memorial to those who died – and who continue to die – as a result of 9/11. In other words we need a spiritual reality to fill the hollow of our ‘ground zero’. I believe that what is meant by the phrase ‘Son of Man’ is that reality – and that it already hovers over the empty space. This represents the new beinghood which combines and fulfills the various native traditions around the world, and which also grows out of western consciousness. We all look for the sacred on our different paths and imagine we find it in formulas, wordplay, symbology and description. It’s not in these things however heavily etched into the stone the words may be. The point at which words fail is exactly the place where reality is born. Therefore I suggest we summon up the ‘minute’s silence’ to really usher in the new. No one gains entrance to the true or the sacred except by struggling for it. The ‘ground zero’ is the hollow in each of us and the ‘Son of Man’ is the beinghood which fills it. I don’t mean to be simply religious in saying this – I believe the phrase alludes to what it means to be human. Perhaps this phrase should more fairly be ‘the Child of Humanity’. Until this Child is born in us we cannot be completely human. We are still in a process of evolution.

Sooner or later we’ll need to know the full extent of the conspiring forces which lay behind 9/11 – and go beyond the childish notion of one bearded bogeyman and his cohorts who wanted to destroy ‘our way of life’. But at the same time we need to see the events and symbology of that fateful day as symptomatic of decisive changes in human consciousness – upon which evolution turns. In this way we can make sense of the trauma and terror which struck humanity ten years ago – and we can prepare for a future in which our gaze is turned upwards to the heavens instead of downwards into the earth.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

9 11 Facts

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Seeing the future or how to see the future is an ancient topic. How can I see the future? Can I really see the present? Here the poet gives a spiritual perspective, based on events taking place now. Seeing the future or – the burning arrow of our times: read on here…

If you ask me to peer into the future I can only see a cavernous darkness. No sound, no light, nothing resonating. Indeed, how far can I see into the present? I see crowds gathering at different corners of the world, I hear the sounds of now. Are they the present, are they creating the future? There are so many people now, standing in a moonless night, waiting. There is a time to gather – which is now – and people respond to it. But do I see into the future? No. The future must blaze across our skies for us to see it.

How is this possible? How is it possible for the future to blaze across our skies? Is the future not a dark, cavernous night? Ah! but there is no such thing as the future unless it is forged in the foundry of the present. And here we are talking about concepts and metaphors. The future is being, the present is being. What sort of being has the power to blaze across our skies in the future? How will eyes be able to follow it and be guided?

Only a light which has lived through the deepest night can form a path to the dawn. Is there a light like that inside you? If there is you can take it up like a burning arrow and fire it high into the cavernous darkness. Its shaft will be true, its light will burn brightly for all eyes to see. It will be a future, and people in times to come will be able to guide themselves by it. They will say, This is what we are.

That Being of the future is one which is housed in us now. It is not an idea or a metaphor. It is the only being which is strong enough to be visible in the night sky above us, where we gather below under the moonless dark.

I did not think to write this except that I see a future – and feel it and know it – which is more than the sounds and the light and the crowds gathering.

Discern

I shine like a spark in the darkness now

but can the future see that light from here,

as if I sent an arrow’s burning vow

across the gloom dispensed by doubt and fear?

Will they discern that light and guide their eyes

by its descending arc so they may say

the faith by which that shaft now soars and flies

is equal to our very darkest day?

Deep

Whatever is your best is brighter still

when its most secret light is shared with those

who standing in the moonless night can fill

their waiting eyes with what your brightness shows.

No path into the morning has been found

which does not wonder through the dens of sleep

and no illumination, sight or sound,

can lead you out unless it’s known that deep.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

Seeing the Future