The road is long unless the way is lightened. I turned a corner from a busy road and heard a shower of birdsong. Immediately my way was brightened. A mile or two and I might reach the house of love.

Love has its own home and is there all the time. It exists at the highest point above. I look down into a deep well and see the reflected light of stars. The stars have moved on but they have left their light where it fell.

I am a traveler. Love is encased within me. On earth I am alone: a part of love which heaven once let fall.

All my roads are hard without the song. I recreate it in my heart constantly. My journey’s end is not too far. The house of love – I’ll reach it soon and touch the climbing buds around its gate.

Well

So if all hearts were one we’d share a love

and never grow apart or live estranged;

but only at the highest point above

are spirits in their unity arranged.

Yet on the earth I’d dip into that well

where heaven keeps its certainties intact;

there stars have left their light just as it fell

and love remains with love as proven fact.

Traveler (for H.)

And love, encased within me, seeks its own -

a universe where love is shared by all;

but life on earth decrees I am alone,

a part of love which heaven once let fall.

The rocks and woods, the cloudless, dreaming skies

conceal my heart, an absent passer-by;

and everywhere it travels it still tries

to paint a part of heaven for the eye.

Gate

Then turning from the busy road I hear

a shower of birdsong, lightening the way;

a mile or two and I might come quite near

to love’s own home, and choose perhaps to stay.

But all my roads are hard without the song

which in my heart I always recreate;

I’ll come to love although the way is long

and touch the climbing buds around its gate.

© 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.

The search for the intangible is a delicate process. It takes you to the very edge of what you’re capable of perceiving – to the twilight hours, to the crepuscular borders of sleep. It leaves you frustrated with the ordinary light, the daylight hours which seem to only exist to lead you towards those hidden pathways. Included in this is the path to love – to the ideal of love and to the perfect picture of the loved one which is all that love exists for. No twilight is long enough to let those images come close to the soul.

And here I confess I lose my way because I find only the intangible purity of the soul itself, which bears the image of the loved one. In that region the only form of converse is prayer – prayer to the being of purity who occupies that space just on the other side of twilight. In a sense that being is the finest part of the soul as well as being the pure image of the loved one. And in my world that being – she – steps forth from the shadows into the most delicate process of searching. The intangible becomes alive -alive with the pure white lily flower as it contemplates the night; with the birds who know what song means to the evening.

I can find the golden smile I seek; together we can soothe away the thousand tears of day. And though I lose my way I know there is always someone who stands close by.

Wept (to H.W.)

And searching for the sun inside my sleep

I find you there, and golden is your smile;

so can I travel to that silent deep

and cross the tyrant earth another mile?

And whose peace shall we find within the dark

when all the icons of the earth have slept?

We’ll find each other’s brightness, like a spark

and soothe away the thousand tears we wept.

Island

There on an island in my dream you stand,

above the sea of sleep which I have swum;

the island’s name is Love – it is the land

which poets wait for, dutifully dumb.

You make the ground the wonder that it is

and spin the breezes softly into sighs;

and there among the perfumed fleurs-de-lys

I’ll write at last the poem of your eyes.

Prayers

I search for you on hallowed ground and stop

to pray among the birds and souls and flowers,

till prayer and searching tire themselves and drop

to leave me with the sacred night-time hours.

And then my soul at last becomes awake

to journey on the pathways of the heart,

while birds are still and flowers softly take

their perfumed prayers to sleep’s own deepest part.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

All the work in Light on the Page is protected by copyright. You are welcome to quote from the poems and articles on the condition that you cite the author and the source:

Author: Landar

Source: www.lightonthepage.com

For other permissions please contact the author: landar651@gmail.com

It’s a strange thing to be finding – or even looking for – stillness in the time of whirling winds, spinning leaves and earth-drenching rain; when the conflict in the heavens is between the burgeoning fullness of life on earth and sun’s own need to refine his activity down to a small, silent point.

At this time you are like a spider which builds its web facing into the summer meadows and expects to catch the full harvest of insects enjoying the light and warmth of the day. Instead, the blasts of autumn wind come racing over the hills, driving showers of rain before them – and you realize that you are the one who is caught, on the web of your own expectation of plenty.

It’s hard to see the sun delighting in the turning leaves and realize that you also have to let go of your easy words and concepts. But this is the lesson of life – that the living must always give way to the refining, paring-down activity of fall. And it’s the essential message of your inner being just as it is of the sun.

To be left with nothing? The spider is left with nothing – every creature which dwells in the expectation of fullness is left with nothing. Autumn is the time, par excellence, of resources. To let go, as a poet, of your well-chosen epithets, your sun-warmed store of words, and go into a place where the earth is still, where your body is silent – even while the wind is lashing the trees into gorgeous shapes and colors – this is the message of the sun. And the reason for this is that all your sentiments and fine feelings must die into the earth to allow for new life to come forth. All your resources are buried within the stillness and silence. You owe nothing to the leaves and wind and falling rain. The only hope for the future is to go into the center of being. The spider cannot do this – except that the Creator provides for it through instinct. But you as a poet, as a creative human spirit, must make the journey inwards – to fly from thoughts and words so that you may win ‘the soul which is forever drenched in Love’.

Pledge

The cold of autumn is my robe and gown -

I wrap it round me, seek no other dress;

abandon warmth of summer with a frown,

and learn to care for nothing, live on less.

The fallen wood I burn is all my own -

those high ideals and flowering thoughts I grew;

now in the cloth which fall alone has sewn

I pledge to see the might of winter through.

Drenched

And so I’m spun on rainbows, climbing sun,

and cloud-drenched rain, as if my spider-soul

had thought to catch what summer had begun

but found instead that fall had caught it whole.

So all my thoughts and words are left to spin

where once they flew with certainty above,

and I must fly from them that I may win

the soul which is forever drenched in Love.

Lives

To leave the earth – my body – far behind

and journey on in stillness to the source,

I have to know in truth that what I’ll find

is birth and death to earth’s own vital force.

And at the gate I’ll leave my words like robes

which I have worn to show my worldly state

and enter into knowledge of the globes

which spun me into lives both small and great.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

All the written work in Light on the Page is protected by copyright. You are welcome to quote from the poems or articles on the condition that you cite the author and the source:

Author: Landar

Source: www.lightonthepage.com

For other permissions please contact the author: landar651@gmail.com

We find love in family, in our arrangements and choices for life. Then we are surprised when Love doesn’t find preferment in us. It takes away a family member inexplicably; it casts asunder all our arrangements and plans and throws us out into a cold world unprepared. How is this possible? Life isn’t meant to be like that – it’s meant to be secure, protected, healthy. Part of the answer to this is that the security we think is secure is actually an empty idol. We bury the gold of Love in family, occupation, lifestyle, country and then worship it as a thing in itself. Politicians particularly trade on this. Love itself stands apart and chooses – or inflicts – what creates and sustains life, not what preserves and hardens it. Thus the inexplicable comes in and takes a loved one away or, apparently, takes love itself away.

Nothing will ever explain why this happens except the process of life itself. Suffice it to say that life wants you to turn towards Love itself and see it as something quite independent of all the things and institutions in which you have enshrined love. You can choose to see Love as the ultimate Being in this way. If you choose to love family, country, way of life more than the Being of Love then you will never see that the inexplicable events of life are actually tinged with the miraculous. There is always new life, there is always new creation – that is the principle lying behind the twists and turns of life which we can’t explain. The process of life itself will eventually reveal where the miracles lie hidden.

This realm of the miraculous is the real gold, the real treasure of existence – not the outward forms in which we try too hard to crystallize love. The mere preservation of forms, families, and institutions will always result in social fracture and warfare. The inner current of the miraculous will allow for new life and creation. This is the reason for loving the Being of Love before anything else.

Dove

What saves life and what gives life away? – Love

is the only power with the strength for that;

the gift of the miraculous is in

every life and death barring none.

Love stands free of life and will not be bound

by choice, by arrangement, by preferment,

but will descend as the dove onto earth,

touching lives with the true skill of its wings.

Stranger

We’re born of Love, we beg our days from Love,

we bury its gold in the family heart.

But Love stands apart and says I am the one

not the many: the single, not the kind.

Can Love then divide mother and daughter,

father and son? If you walk with bare feet

through villages where you are a stranger

you’ll see whose love is for Love, whose is for kind.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

Picture: Miracle of The Roses by Valerio Castello

Life plays itself out on two levels. The one is breath and blood and heart, the other is thought and feeling and understanding. A fatal damage may occur to either. If to the first then life is over; if to the second then what remains of life – all your days – may seem like an open coffin. However, Love might not give up on you. It might choose to place a flower on that satin bed. Then, though hope and trust appear to be gone, the miracle of new life or of life sustained takes place. I believe this is true. Even if someone dies with all hope and trust lost, that flower may still be placed there. It may happen at the moment of death – many stories attest to that – or, I believe, it may happen after. The miracle of new life or of life sustained will take place at some point.

This fact indicates the vital relationship between the two levels. On the one hand we don’t know why death, illness, accident take place; on the other we feel it is essentially connected with the inner impulse of thought, feeling and understanding. Love gives meaning or restores the balance – by that I mean the force which creates or sustains both levels. By its intrinsic nature this force is miraculous – we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. At its most outward level it may make the dumb man speak or the blind man see. Only – we’ve grown so far away from understanding it. Faith is what binds us to it. But faith has grown like a very long arm stretching further and further away from the miraculous.

What separates us from the animals? Truth. The ability to apprehend truth. This ability gives us the means to overcome all divisions. Unfortunately, the faculty to divine the truth has been largely replaced by the process of rationalizing phenomena. In other words a faculty has been supplanted by a process, ‘divining’ by rationalizing, and the truth by phenomena. The verb ‘to divine’ is very little used nowadays. It accurately expresses our relationship to the truth at a human, non-animal, level. It contains the notion that truth is a treasure which is not so easily discovered. Ultimately, I believe, it embodies our relationship to the divine itself. As such it is the means by which we arrive at the flower laid on the white satin bed. It is the force which rekindles faith.

Truth can be as great or small as you like. It can be the smallest wave of a great ocean. That might be the wave which makes you take off your shoes and bathe your feet. It is the wholeness which brings your feet back to life again.

Walk

The hour long walk from truth to reality

may take many lifetimes: the perception

of truth must sprout into its living tree.

Many a beanstalk has been coined for this

and felled again in the evening of its growth.

I long for the sinews of that sap-filled wood,

for its pleasure in the sun, its thinking

in the rain, its maturing into sky.

What does a short walk in autumn achieve?

Leaves falling, lives left behind, truth turned real.

Wave
 

And truth is like the very smallest wave

of a great ocean – enough to make you

take off your shoes and bathe your feet until

the wholeness brings them back to life again.

And it is a poem, just unnoticed

while the world is busy with monuments,

but remembered when the soul longs for meaning.

And it is the evening after a day

of half-paid bills, of lights at red, of snatched

meals and thoughts trapped between layers of road metal.

Miracle

So if life slams shut its other lid -

and in there lie its jewels of hope and trust -

what can you see but the coffin of your days

lying open through the many years ahead?

Love places a flower in that satin bed -

the miracle of new life, of life sustained.

And even if you die and are laid to rest,

the call to breath and beating heart will wake you.

Best wishes, today,
Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

Is it just that I grow old and want to die? (Every human being must ask this question at some point.) No, the heart continues to sing its song. The song is of love and by this token it knows that it will be there when the new world rises. The new world is coming, as surely as that day in the old when the serpent first bit my heel, when I first learned to know defeat and hope in the earth. I’ve loved and known the old world, together with its beasts and birds, its seas and tireless mountains. I have to go back to the beginning and see the ancient Hyperborean isle that gave me birth; to the north, to feel again the cold, clear air of Polaris, when the stars first came down to receive their names. My hidden, secret history. But the new world will be born, through the tears of the old.

I feel the new world as a cocoon inside me. I see it, and hear it, in the heart’s song. Will you let go of the old, as a snake sloughs its skin? The new world is not there in knowledge, which the serpent bestows. It’s there in the way in which knowledge is received and given – in other words, in the human form: the being who stands with her foot above the serpent. In the transmission of love we can rise above the serpent’s bite. The new world is already in and around us. It holds an end to suffering and death. But only if we become what the song sings to us. Is it possible to become the music of a song? In truth, there’s nothing else you can become.

Hyperborean

And at the southern shore of life

each wave brings fresh alignment

with the hyperborean isle.

And at the north polaris

informs our day with cold, clear news.

I have not finished thinking yet

or feeling what the earth has made me

since its first deep draughts of hope.

Nor will I ever know

what can console my fears

without those green, sea-rushed shores

or the sharp intake of breath

when stars first came down for their names.

Serpent

The ancient world grows tired of living -

refreshing itself each day

in its own founts of wisdom

to give my eye the price of a new view.

It sees with imperceptible joy

the new world forming like a cocoon in me

and waits with breath held

through Platonic years

for its terrible, impressive weight

to be lifted from it. And with it

will go the four-legged creatures,

spines parallel to the earth, the birds

who’ve sung creation into life each day,

the seas whipped up by storm,

cold, enduring mountains left alone.

The new world will remember how

the old upheld its vow even as

that first, curling serpent bit my heel.

Song

The heart sings for its own survival

in a world which has neither passed away

nor been born. And I flit like a shadow

between those two worlds. Ah! will you let

the old peel off its skin and start again?

Will you let your pains and fears, your infancy

and age merge with the earth’s forgiven dust?

The song is the wise history of love -

defeat and hope in the ashes of sound.

And by this token I know that I will be there

when the new world appears behind our doubting eyes.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

You can also find Landar on EVOLVER:

http://www.evolver.net/user/landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

Is the dark shadow of the ‘Antichrist’ looming? Is the spectre here already? Is the earth preparing for the second coming of the Christ? Both of these theories have been voiced by psychics, sages, religious groups and ordinary people going through near death experiences. The apocalyptic sense of upheaval commonly experienced today, through successive waves of panic, trauma and menace – combined with the instantaneity of communications – has left human consciousness in a pre-tensile state of anticipation.

So what is the reality? In order to understand the question of the ‘second coming’ – or of the arrival of the Antichrist – we have to look at things in a Christian context. The most global or cosmic context is given by the gospel of St John. There are two very significant indicators here concerning recognition. Firstly, there is oft-depicted scene where Jesus informs the disciples that one of them will betray him. ‘Who is it?’ they clamor to know. The question of identification is uppermost in their minds. Even though Jesus indicates by his actions who it is, the disciples are unable to understand. At that moment ‘Satan’ enters into Judas who then leaves the room.

The second question of recognition concerns the divinity of Christ. The disciple Philip says to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father and it is enough for us’. Jesus replies with a question: ‘Have I been with you all for such a long time and you have not recognized me?’ He rebukes them gently for not seeing that the Father is in him. Thus in the context of one sequence in this essential Christian document there are two questions of recognition. The one about recognizing the divine is of course far greater. The other, concerning the betrayer, ends with Judas sloping off into the night, possessed by a demonic intent. In both instances the disciples are not awake enough to make the identification.

I believe that in the discussion of Christ/Antichrist the same question of identification comes down to us today. (You can use your own terms, according to your particular background or beliefs.) In the gospel Christ makes it clear that the principle of recognition is a matter of consciousness, of being awake. The recognition of the divine represents a new or heightened consciousness. The decision to oppose or betray requires a diminution of consciousness, an opening up to the demonic. The demonic demands physical entrance. The divine requires a non-physical acceptance of its own element.

From this it seems clear to me that we would be very dull in our senses or apprehension if we expected a second coming on the physical plane. On the other hand it is also apparent that the counterforce, the demonic, is constantly trying to infiltrate itself into physical thought and action. The two forces are diametrically opposed. The second one is like the force of gravity. The first is its opposite – the force which attracts life upwards. It doesn’t cajole, or attack or persuade – it just asks you to see, to recognize. It precisely doesn’t need a physical form.

When the light is strongest the shadow is darkest. The second coming is an overwhelming inner sense of the way forward, of the validity of existence and the permanence of the inner being. Those things are the answer to the trauma and panic of our times. The light of the world is present in us and around us now. Its menacing counterpart, the dark shadow, is also stalking the earth, urging itself into physical manifestation. The brighter the light shines, the harder the shadow becomes until it is there – walking among us. Again it’s a question of recognition: Satan went out the door with Judas but he comes back in again in his own form.

We may expect to see him as an ‘Antichrist’. But isn’t this looking too far from home? Isn’t he present in a more immediate way? He is. He is present in the forces which are anti-christ in us. Thus he is present particularly in hatred and vengeance. When we give way to hatred and vengeance we are anti-christ. These are not merely feelings – they are forms of possession. And the possession grows rapidly more present in our ‘apocalyptic’ times. Love and forgiveness are the opposites of course.

An actual incarnation of the Antichrist? Perhaps. Who and when? Well, to know the sun is to know the shadow. Learn the form, the being, the deeds of the Light – recognize them truly, come to them in yourself – and you will be in no doubt about the identity of evil: in yourself and in the world, in human shape.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved