A Gift of the Great World

A Jewel in the Eye

It’s a strange thing how no part of life is more complete than any other part. Infancy has its wholeness just as much as old age. You would never feel you were being short-changed in experience! Is it that the human being comes into life as an entirety and goes out as an entirety? What other possible way is there to see it? How could anyone invent the fact that people in your life are so necessary, that parents, friends, partners, children are somehow inevitable – in their sequence, in their position, in their impact? And even when someone passes away, the wholeness isn’t broken or interrupted. The union might be temporarily removed but the unity is not.

This is how I see it anyway. We are as if poured into life and life into us. We tend to forget this and act as if life was just a sequence of more or less uninspired accidents. Prevailing world-views today are depressing. Experts rhapsodize about how meaningless the world is – there’s no other way of describing the materialist vision. But to project yourself into wholeness is to do nothing more than acknowledge what’s there – the way you’re made, the way every part of experience is complete. From there it’s a short step to realizing, for example, that the human body is a perfect imagination of the stars – just as the ancients said; that time is the jewel in the human eye, not just a series of fragmented accidents, and that the earth itself is something held in trust from ancient times – something that rewards a recurring hunger and delights a particular thirst.

A Gift of the Great World

Learning to live is no game for beginners -
it is something quite fiercely dedicated,
a business that is poured into you, and you
into it. Its people are necessary,
not conclusions nor outsets but voyages
deep into experience both old and new.
You never can say what you are or they are
without the help of your gods or of the dead
who will shelter the importance of it all
just some heartbeats away from where you have lived -
and how they long for your longing for their help!

No beginner at the start nor at the end:
you enter a life complete at every point.
Birth is birth a million times over, and death
is what you’re born for, a gift of the great world.
An immaculate balance of elements,
this body, a composition tuned to stars.
But yourself, you are gathered out of the whole,
and returned to it, no less finished, one day.
The jewel of time is in the human eye,
which discovers earth again, an ancient trust -
a reward for hunger, a delight for thirst.

Best wishes, today,
Jay Landar

Photo: Cairn T Ceiling Stone, Ireland, by A. Murphy

©Jay Landar 2013. All rights reserved
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