Light on the Page» truth

The Smallest Wave of a Great Ocean

Landar — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:21:39 +0000

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

The Noise of Many Places

Landar — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:10:05 +0000

Truth will always find its friends. I understand that because truth knows me and calls me by name. Who is truth? Pontius Pilate asked the question, ‘What is truth?’, because he did not know the being who stood before him. Would you or I have acted differently? Pilate was in a position of authority – he was required to act. He did not have the benefit of hindsight; the book had not been written yet. Would we have acted differently? And yet truth remains. It doesn’t matter that militant atheists will not give it a shape, a name, an identity. Truth will always find its friends. Sometimes they will emerge shyly, unexpectedly, at the point of defeat. Truth is the quiet shoulder in the turbulent man. It wears its chequered coat in company. Who would not want it to be a harlequin, a thing of many varied colors? And yet it stands by the person who bears its single color alone – the person who has no friends. It will stand with him or her until the end of the earth.

The stillness of truth rebuffs all agitation; it needs no convincing or persuasion of its right. It doesn’t waste its time in condemning what is wrong. It lets its silence reach into the noise of many places.

Silence

The stillness of truth rebuffs all agitation;

it is a citadel and will not yield its walls.

It houses life and love and stands above the earth

but chooses its messengers to speak aloud its name.

It needs no convincing or persuasion of its right;

it wastes no time in condemning what is wrong.

The stillness of truth has a certain home in me

and will never be shaken from its ever-spreading roots.

I will not force you to listen to my words

but will let their silence reach into the noise of many places.

Truth

Will truth stay in itself and shield its light?

It will not shun the market-square or hide

from people who’ve never learned debate.

It wears it chequered coat in company

but knows its friends by name and calls them out.

Yet it will stand by one who is alone,

who bears its colour with no one else around.

Even until the end of earth it will stand

when every false attack has gone to ground.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

Image: The Seated Harlequin, Pablo Picasso

Life Is a Dream

Landar — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:39:46 +0000

Which is greater, the love of life or the fear of death? If you level them out you have the sphere of earth: a roundness purporting to be flat. Earth is the sphere of our activity – we walk in it in life and lie in it in death. Therefore in a sense the joys and fears are equal. We forget ourselves by night and remember by day. We expend our life by day, recoup by night. As an individual I am an eternal thing: a myth born in a moment. I am like an ornament hanging on a tree which is already dying. The world is the vehicle for my existence but that existence must always pass away. As regards life things might as well be equal – the love of life and the fear of death. As regards my individuality, my heart is like a square object in a round space. It must go on trying because the earth is walking in me too.

Life is a dream; the waking point is pain. I hardly have the right to speak of pain – to quote chapter and verse – unless I am prepared to bear the burden of my own and help others carry theirs. Therefore I have to make myself a beast of burden. But as a human spirit I also want to soar up to the sun. How can I reconcile these things? Become a donkey with wings? An ox who ascends? I am what I am: I’m born to do and to try and to be what I can. Nothing will stop me even though I plod the silent road. Here it is that pain reveals itself as the light-bearer. It is the gilt on my hoofs, the silver on my tongue – it lifts me, one foot at a time, where I might otherwise not go. It ascends with me, raises me to the sun by diverse ways – the weight in the legs becomes lightness to rise up. And what is more it gives me the precious coin of expression: sympathy for all life. How else could Don Quixote – a dreamer – outride the jeers and remain a Don to the very tips of his toes? Because he knew the impossible can happen – he understood the roundness of life.

All this belongs to the question of fatalism or commitment. Fatalism is where things happen to you; you have no control over them and no choice but to accept them. It’s the condition you live in before taking the decision to level out the love of life and the fear of death. After taking that decision the flat roundness of earth is yours to live on. Pain is no longer an expression of fate but a commitment. Ultimately the gilt and the silver appear through it. No one wants or invites pain – but you have to dream like Don or fly like the donkey to ascend to true life.

Don

Do I have the chapter and verse to speak of pain

if I don’t make of myself the beast of burden?

And yet I also would fly close to the sun -

a donkey with wings? an ox ascending?

I’m born to do and try and be what I can -

nothing will stop me though I plod the silent road.

Pain is the gilt on my hoofs, the silver on my tongue -

it lifts me, one foot at a time, where I might not go.

It gives me the coin of expression, sympathy for life.

How else could Don Quixote outride the jeers

and remain a Don to the very tips of his toes?

Roundness

And which is greater, love of life or fear of death?

Both must level out to the sphere of earth,

a roundness purporting to be flat.

There I will walk, where days and nights are equal,

where honeysuckle tangles round the moon

and memory sips with forgetfulness.

I am a myth born in a moment,

an ornament on the tree already dying.

By dawn I will remember my name but not my being,

by nightfall I will have lived too long by half.

I will not cease from complaining that my heart is square

in a round space. And the world goes on walking in me.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

You can also find Landar on EVOLVER:
http://www.evolver.net/user/landar

Follow Your Own Path

Landar — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:14:39 +0000

There will always be guides along the way but the path you follow has to be your own. Your own star shines above it with absolute radiance. A true guide will never tell you to follow a different path – they will give you the understanding you need to follow your own. So many followers and believers cram into ships and railway carriages to follow the way their master has gone – then find that he is not there when they arrive. This is their own failing. The master will always be at a different point.

The followers and believers will lose sight of you if you take your own path. There is something magical or mercurial about going where your feet have to go. As if the feet themselves sprout wings. Hermes himself was a guide. He leads you to the underworld but you pay your own coin to cross the river. Each journey across is a separate one – no one is crammed together.

Others along the way will catch sight of you: those who are also following their own paths. What gives inspiration? The sight of someone religiously following a prescribed way – however exalted – or a glimpse of a person who has gone off into the thickets and briars of the unknown because their feet told them to do so? This person wears the flash of color, the red coat of the journeyman who makes his mistakes because his passion for the path is greater.

At the end of the day those who follow their own path arrive at the same destination: the far shore of the great river to Erebus. But they carry their own lamp now – they see in the dark. For others the upside-down torch of Hermes is the last light they will see.

Star

Do I alter my path as the wind blows?

If I’m wise I change my way.

But do I alter my path? Ah! -

the goal is already in me or how

can I make a path towards it?

But if the goal is the highest – say Love

on earth and I have never comprehended

such divinity, is the divine still

in me, as a star is above the path?

As I know love in your hands, in your eyes,

I know it in the highest I can reach.

Path

Let me not describe a path as mine

which has been laid out by another,

sanctified by their feet walking it

and followed by believers ever since.

Even though I see myself as small

beside them, unqualified to question,

foolish not to speak as they have spoken,

to learn as they have taught and teach again.

But let the path be mine which my own feet

cry out to follow, though they take me past

those same believers losing sight of me.

And let me honor those who say this path

was true – we know because you follow it

as we will follow ours and won’t lose sight.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

You can also find Landar here:

http://pagelight.blogspot.com/

(Image: Hermes as psychopomp)

The Holiest Secret

Landar — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:15:34 +0000

As a child, my hands held each day like a ball; my holiest secret the dark halls of night. Is this so any more? The child’s eyes are still there but they see different things now. The kingdoms of fantasy have not disappeared – but they take a different form. This fact is very difficult to isolate and understand, because childhood itself disappears and becomes a foreign land. But the eyes of the child are still the truest – within the whole human being. The earnestness with which a child plays, the complete acceptance of the world he or she creates – its inner consistency – contain everything we need to make ourselves into proper citizens of the universe. And here I’m trying to reach out to something an adult can hardly understand – to confess that I’m a child of the world who needs to ‘play’ with truth and with the elements of life in order to reintegrate myself into existence.

But everything I want to say is evaporating before me, as ideas will do. It’s dying into adulthood, losing the power of true conception. I want to reach out to that child, but he says, ‘I have played truly – what will you do?’ And I search frantically for my inner relationship to truth, to trust, to real reality – the one which hides behind our make-believe false reality and which is like a ball in the hands. And all the while I know I must be an adult who is a child – who can answer the question, ‘What will you do?’ The Christmas story is like this of course – to be able to look into that child’s eyes. Do we expect that he will only look into ours?

But before I dissolve into sentimentality I must make another assertion: I believe with every fibre of my being that that child can be reborn in us. I believe he will bring with him the proper relationship to truth and reality. But he needs the older friend to say, ‘Yes, I can help you, I can teach you – I will sacrifice everything I want for myself in order to do that. That is what I will do.’ Then you will see a smile on the face of that child broad enough to light up the whole world.

Play

And in those hours when I dream while I wake,

a world I’ve imagined appears in me;

and like any child who plays for play’s sake,

the fantasy in me is all I can see.

But when I am sifting my words for the page

these images float through the air shaped like clouds

which change by the minute – an hour being an age -

and capture the meanings which spread in their crowds.

Pen

When I was a child I rode like a king,

I carried in secret the sceptre and sword;

I was crowned ex cathedra, imagining

the world would unearth my fantasy’s hoard.

Now I know that mere wordplay has little to say

of politics, statecraft, the worries of men;

but I’ve learned of the kingdoms where truth and light play

and will always invent them again with the pen.

Understand

And childhood is kingship, fantasy all,

the world just a plaything, a toy to delight;

my hands are the holders, each day a ball,

my holiest secret the halls of night.

Is everything lost of the child in his hour,

does nothing remain of the sceptred hand?

He lives in my visions, his eyes the power

too loosen my images, understand.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

You can also find Landar here:

http://pagelight.blogspot.com/

The Steep Ascent

Landar — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 16:42:17 +0000

We’ve left words in their prison to languish and die. We’ve separated them from their origins and their gods. How is this? On the one hand we treat them as objects, devoid of living content. We deny them any connection to the things they describe, instead of seeing that they are the very life and soul of those things. The objects are real, the words are merely tools or appendages. And, in truth, words are tortured by this loss of heart. Then, on the other hand, we ourselves have lost contact with the world where words have their divine archetypes. In other words, we have no idea any more of the holy fire in which words and their ‘things’ were first created.

As a poet I feel this strongly – the soulless coinage of language. As a philosopher I lament the loss of the pure, divine world of origins, which unified our concepts and the words we used to fulfil them. And as a human spirit I swear to find those gods again, even if they dwell on the highest mountain peak.

In poetry I see the gods lit through, with excellence in sound and truth and tone. Should our words be slaves of earthly thrones, or tuck their wings in tightly out of fear? At a time when human beings are rising up for freedom, should we cheat our minds of that region where truth and words have their origin, where they can never be subject to manipulation and control? Freedom is more than the shifting off of shackles. The next set of debased concepts will merely come along to put them on again. To aspire to the world where words and thoughts have their archetypes is to unfetter the human spirit. ‘Everything under the sun is for love, and words exist to wake us to this fact – life gives us the hand and words the glove, a match that only nature can enact.’

Everything

Everything under the sun is for love,

and words exist to wake us to this fact -

life gives us the hand and words the glove,

a match that only nature can enact.

But what is fairer than the earth’s own kinds?

The mind that sees them, dresses them in light,

the heart that lends us speech, and finds

the birth of life in what comes to its sight.

Excellence

What can this language do that lives in things?

Repair the loveless, worship the unseen,

bury golden thoughts in the mind of kings,

send shepherds to the bourne of nature’s queen.

So must we let our words hide from the true

and curl our lip with phrases bleak as stone?

In poetry I see the gods lit through

with excellence in sound and truth and tone.

Fly

And words shall not be slaves to earthly thrones

or tuck their wings in tightly out of fear,

nor shall they be imprisoned in their bones

to take the shape of life where none may rear.

They have their gods where minds aspire to fly,

their truths eternal in the atmosphere,

and those who’ve dreamed them long and live to try

the steep ascent forever bright and clear.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

The All-Repairing Rhyme

Landar — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:26:04 +0000

Truth and Love are gods in their own right. We like to think that they are the products of our brain and heart, but this is illusion. They exist as pure Being above us. The idea that they are merely expressions of our own physical or mental life – properties of our time on earth – is the source of all deception. The brain may think, the heart may feel, but they will not yield the gold of truth and love unless the being within you, the self, opens its doors to the higher powers. In part, this is a question of belief – at what point does truth come off the page and into the light? When you lift it there – when you see that matter is not capable of generating reality by itself. In that moment you belong to the divine within you. It’s not just a question of faith – it’s an act, an affirmation of what you are. And in thinking this, in feeling this, you grow closer to the Beings of Truth and Love.

Their reality is greater than we can possibly imagine. The drama of life – its tragedy and comedy, its romance – lies in the mixture of experience which brings us closer to or takes us farther away from this reality. And I would like to add a further element to the duo of Truth and Love – and that is Strength. For me, strength – or endurance – is the earthly representation of another higher power, the one which ultimately lets me see through the trials of existence. Sometimes I think humor is a modification of strength – it’s certainly one of the pillars of life.

And so I find that the divine world has given us everything we need to be truly human. The brain and the heart – and all our physical elements – are just paths we walk on. Wisdom, Love and Strength are the Beings we have to unite with. Most of all Love.

Golden

And love makes perfect what it finds sincere,

while every falseness drowns in its own brine,

so truth exalted knows a life of cheer

and cold pretention rots upon the vine.

But what a path of stones I have to cross

to earn the right to speak of truth in love -

how many times deceived and steeped in loss

before the golden face shines from above.

Rhyme

So my poor brain and long-enduring heart

must suffer, labor, think themselves to death,

with this in compensation: that they start

the lives of thought, of love, and give them breath.

But Truth and Love are gods in their own right

and oil all the creaking gates of time,

so while my body sleeps away the night

they fill it with their all-repairing rhyme.

Best wishes, today,

Landar