As an unashamed romantic I see Chance as a second world within the first. It moves or slides seamlessly under the surface of the world we think we live on. This first world is a fiction: a strange, glittering, gleaming fantasy we think is fixed in place by our deeds and decisions. In reality the mutable world of Chance slides unseen beneath our feet.

With regard to this world of chance we are static. It rotates and then stops, delivering its exotic locations to our side. It is like water – a moving, watery pathway. But is it arbitrary in its movements? Does it by any chance bring us what we need? Or – more ominously – what we deserve? Can we influence it by our own actions?

I won’t even attempt to be scientific here. I won’t talk about cause and effect, or the laws of karma. I know the hard blows of life as much as anyone. But I will talk about goodness and mercy – and love. I do believe that goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life. I believe this despite the blows. And goodness and mercy also belong to that second world – the world of Chance. In believing in them I step out of the glittering fantasy world of ‘reality’ and into a moving, watery continuum. I also believe that this second world, in its rotating, stops for me exactly beside love, as often as it can – like a globe bringing a new country to my side.

So can we influence it by our actions? Not exactly. But prayers are as sacred as roses on thorn. Their urgency and repetition grow upwards to the very hand that turns the globe. That hand, the hand of ‘Chance’, knows exactly where to stop the spinning.

Pathways run like water under my feet

and I am still while the world travels.

Where am I going to who stands so swiftly?

Will place remember me when it arrives?

Chance has purpose, instinctual narrative -

where water flows, it embarks beside us,

where lands are far removed, it speeds them home.

Fair Chance, stop the globe for me beside love!

World within world, inimitable Chance,

I alone can admire your plan for me.

Though you may rotate as many degrees

as there are hurts in a half-year of strife,

you will stop at the exact point of love.

But my stillness has been hedged from top to toe

with prayers as sacred as roses on thorn:

so Chance may your most urgent plan be 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.

 Picture: The Dreamer by Caspar David Friedrich

It is the time of year when the hosts of Persephone begin to rise out of the earth. The time of mercy and unseen justice. I stand here a penitent. The sins I have committed lie buried deep in the earth. I have to find them again and color them green.

The lenten trees are massive now, giants

high above my bench in the penitents’ glade.

But some unrepentant blue tits dip

to the level of my thoughts and flash

around the nascent daffodils, yellow

before yellow was ever conceived. Song

prevails over process, over footstep:

the highest note beyond the range of ears,

rationale of reaching and removing.

I hear it now and always do. Always.

Even the simple act of looking up

is metaphor for justice that I seek:

the transformation of straining prayer

into many-colored forgiveness -

and such a one as will absolve the sins

I have no memory of committing.

I stand judged by the all-believing birds,

the towering trees whose gift it is to smile

into greenliness and wisdom and peace.

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

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Image: The Return of Persephone

And Still  (for . . )

Still I have your pictures on the wall, still

the Christmas presents wrapped in midnight blue,

with golden stars peeping out of the bag,

still my dreams filled with images of you

in every guise except the one too true

for me to bear, the one where you are you.

And still I’ll walk more swiftly every day,

barely sustaining measure in my pulse,

until my breath snags on your name and stops,

leaving me hanging in the air and still.

And still, and still I’ve learned to know myself

in the very lengthening of each day,

in midnight poems, daylit dreams, presents

left still-wrapped where the golden stars half rise.

With love, 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

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My shadow, meanwhile, is bundled up inside me like a lonely cloud rolled up with many others to form a single thick covering overhead. I long for the clarification of sunlight to let my shadow stand proud of me. But I know too that I have to draw my shadow out, to pull it into the light. If it appears too soon will it have found release? Or will it be forced to retreat again into its undistinguished cover?

I don’t know what this shadow is. It represents the degree to which I have clarified myself. I am not fit to stand under a new sun unless I have expelled this blackness. It is the darkness of the year, the cold, the unloved, the hurting side of me. It is the side which must crave its own excess until it can bear it no longer. I love my shadow and my shadow pretends to love me. But really it sings its song for the lost sunlight it remembers like a dim dream. It holds its candle for that light.

I’ll make myself clear by living out of the light. I’ll shun the early growth and wait for the full tide of spring. I’ll talk to my shadow, creep into its lair, tease it out from its own concealed shape. We’ll become friends, my shadow and I. I’ll tell it stories of life under the sun, of creatures that fly, of leaves that light like candles. I’ll promise not to leave its side. At last, in trust and faith that day will come when I can lead my shadow out from me, into the open silence, the cloudless light. And then I will know I have arrived.

Dear

Yes, hearth, light, song – these things have moved away;

disgruntled skies pour answers on the earth

to questions no one asked or thought to say:

do we grow old for nothing? has life worth?

I would stay buried, hibernating deep,

unless I thought my shadow could appear

above the ground, and stay and feel life leap -

but still I’d need to know what makes it dear.

Shape

And so I’ll have to play a pointless game

of hunt the shadow, looking everywhere

for what I’m not, to give me proof my name

is written underneath the sunlight’s glare.

But all the time the clouds pour scorn on mine

and other searchers’ hunt for what they are;

elusive as a tangent or a sine,

the perfect shape of life, now near, now far.

Waltz

And still today my shadow is a cloud

rolling within me, never free to roam;

but if its black shape one day should stand proud

I’ll know that light has touched my shell-like home.

My cold existence hankers for the sun

not least to prove my outline is not false;

yet I am still a work just half-begun:

some day my self and shadow-self might waltz.

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.

The weakest are strongest. From those who’ve been given much, much is expected. How can I line up these two thoughts? Well, in the first place, no privileges, advancements, gifts lie within your keep except that they were given to you. Does it make sense to flaunt them like an ornamental cloak? It’s not up to you to take pride in your abilities and opportunities as such – if they were given to you they can just as easily be taken away. No – something else comes into the picture which is even more important. Gifts are only half the story – they do not represent strength.

It depends very much on how you turn your hand. The softer side of any hand should be turned towards the open palm of one who asks. For many people the ground quakes beneath their unprotected heels and toes. (This is a story of hands and feet.) Do you notice them on your path of personal advancement? Do you take in the ones who don’t have the privileges and opportunities? The gift they offer is an unseen one: they offer you the gift to advance. This strength is invisible.

We are all in positions of weakness or strength at different times in life. The relationship of the open palm and softer side of the hand applies to us all. To continue on your personal path without noticing someone’s weakness is to miss an opportunity – the opportunity to give something of your strength and gifts, despite all the complications that might be involved.

I say this because at a certain point you arrive at a gate or a threshold and crave entrance. It might be at the end of life or at some other critical point. And what do you find at this threshold? You find yourself as gatekeeper. How mortifying not to be allowed in by your own self! The gatekeeper – yourself – announces that your privileges, gifts and strengths are as nothing. They are incomplete, they are one side of a coin – unless they are matched by a gift which comes from the weakest: the gift to notice, to help, to offer the soft side of your hand.

In this way the weakest are strongest. From those who’ve been given much, much is expected. I don’t say this as someone who has noticed all his life. Unfortunately not. But neither have I completely walked along in my ornamental cloak. The point is that there is no advancement without taking others along with you. Even if you are alone you have to take others. I’m aware of this door or threshold. I’m alarmed by the shadow of my own self raising a forbidding hand. Have I done enough to go forward? Hmm.

Masks

But vanity, pomposity and air

puff up the human liver at a stroke;

and gifts which God has given us to share

are flaunted like an ornamental cloak.

The softer side of any hand should turn

towards the open palm of one who asks;

there lies a gift which anyone can learn

who sets aside his proud and haughty masks.

Advance

And at the door I turn myself away:

I seek advancement, admiration, show.

The path I followed would not let me stray

and yet I did not ask why I should go.

I guard the threshold with my own mistakes

and can’t advance without the help of those

who needed me to see the ground that shakes

beneath their unprotected heels and toes.

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.

From one point of view dreams, symbols, imaginings – for example, poems or paintings – are figures, shape-shifted from our daily lives. A poem, then, might reshape a lost love affair; a painting, a phase in life. Psycho-analysis might justifiably point out the various sublimations taking place in our thoughts and images. Dreams are famous for this: not one element in a dream, down to the smallest detail, is without its transformed reference. On a larger scale a work of art might sublimate – consciously or unconsciously – a whole range of complexes. These might be individual, social, or universal human complexes, perhaps relating to a particular point of time – these are the symbols and metaphors of the national spirit or the Zeitgeist. Ultimately, a great work of art will configure divine, spiritual truths not accessible to ordinary, daily consciousness.

What does all this tell us? It tells us that we belong under particular skies, within a pattern of moon-shine, solar flares, stellar movement. We are geocentric – figures of earth, belonging to a landscape, to our own or to someone else’s portrait. In a sense we unearth our dreams from a particular position in time or space.

Is there any alternative to this? Well, we can turn the whole thing on its head and look at it from another point of view. From this perspective life itself is the dream or art-form. Our bodies, our surroundings, the earth itself are images of a higher imagination. This greater artistic power configures everything that happens to us – down to the smallest detail – according to a far wider pattern of necessity. The movements and purposes of this necessity are hidden in the formation of stars and planets not visible to our ordinary perception. This is the heliocentric position. Human life is made up of these two different frames of reference.

Our task is not merely to sublimate – although we will continue to do that as well – but to learn how to step up out of the layers of earth with free will, and consciously. No longer to be simply shaped by the silvered moonbeams and golden solar flares but – in a way – to skirt around the eye of God and to work out of our own free inner movements. I believe, then, that we can escape the two-sided necessity of dream: that in our actions we shape-shift our unconscious experiences, and that the life of our planet itself is simply the artwork in the mind of a cosmic dreamer.

It is the destiny of the human being to take a place midway between the geocentric and the heliocentric. And I find this difficult to accept because my heart hurts to leave things behind and change the shape of my dreams.

Sand

The earth embraces us, no matter what,

and guides our feet to walk upon its sands;

it leads us to the never-ending thought

that we may also tread the golden bands.

But earth must be transformed inside our stride,

with nothing left behind to fold or churn;

let every thought or feeling be my guide

to teach what feet and sand alone can learn.

Rule

Up to this body seas of spirit roar:

golden sands will turn their shoulder to it;

each grain of sand is made where waters pour:

origins they distantly intuit.

I’m born to think the thoughts that set me free

from heaven’s surge and earth’s insistent pull;

their constant echo turns me mindfully

to times and places I am meant to rule.

Design

The stars turn, the sun revolves, the moon flits

but I, an earth, remain within my layers,

and hope that given time my shapeless wits

will steer me from the silvered beams and flares.

I have my course to follow shorn of skies

and need to chart my place without their sign;

to move without their movement, skirt their eyes,

and tease out from my solitude, design.

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’m afraid that at this point, in the year 2012, I see the terrible monster of our age lying, all humps and coils, across or around our beautiful earth. And yet, in the spiritual sense, I see the brightest angels spread across the sky above us. What exactly is the monster identified with? Technology? Well, from one point of view consciousness has been technologized to an untold degree. But from another we all use it and live in it and express our humanity through it, if we will. It’s not decisive. The attitude that implants mechanization in our hearts instead of humanity? We can fight it – we can breathe with love and fire and remain ourselves. The striking cold of the mind? This is the one that frightens – it depends on the warmth of the ego to prevent the mind going cold.

But there is a way. We have friends in the future: future selves, future humanity. These people are looking back at us even now. Through our effort of will, through our hope and faith, through our joining with the angels in the sky above us, we create, link by link, a golden chain which reaches into the very hands of the people of the future. And then they will say of us, ‘They stayed, they remained, they believed – and that is why we are here now.’ In a sense there is nothing else to do but endure until the end – until the monster of our age has done his worst. And to hope that God will shorten those days.

This may seem apocalyptic. We tend to forget that the beast is alive and worming his way through human consciousness – through the heart, through the hands, through the mind – and attempting to lay hold of the human ego. If those hands instead hold the golden chain then a future is assured.

Proof

Can I write to the future that I know

you will be filled with faith? – I start it here;

that I can understand how you might grow

from the pains of this past? – I’ll be sincere.

The hurt and despoilation of our age

might force a change but then again I’d choose

to sing my purest song for you: this page

is proof that what I win you’ll never lose.

Thirds

The monster of our age, all humps and coils,

flattens out our earth with its deceit;

I have no truth to combat what it spoils

nor power to spike its heart into defeat.

But like a golden chain I link my words

to reach into your hands, my future friend;

and we may chop the beast in halves and thirds

by staying honest till the bitter end.

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.

Picture: Jacob’s Ladder by William Blake