Light on the Page

A Home to The Unknown

We are all such small, unmodelled things – but at the same time we are equal to the millenia. We feel so minute and powerless in the face of world changes and yet the great cycles of time bow to us in the course of their turning. This is what it means to be human. How does this happen? It comes about because the spirit is homeless. It blows as the wind blows. No one can say precisely where the wind springs from or where it goes to. However, for the length of time that a cloud stands in the sky, that body of vapor gives a shape and face to the wind. It gives a home to the unknown. The human being is like that body of vapor. And yet the cloud has its own properties, its inner consistencies. It has the imagination and intelligence to create great shapes from its mass.

Of course the cloud is not a conscious thing. I am not talking here merely about conscious intelligence. I am talking about the part of the human being which becomes shaper and former – not just as manipulator of the world but as shaper and former of its own spiritual being. Traditionally we play the passive part in religion: we are the created and God is the Creator; we are the supplicants through prayer and right-living, and God bestows his Grace. It’s right to think this way. But at the same time we are spiritual beings and the spirit wants to form itself just as the cloud – if it were conscious – would want to take possession of its imaginative shapes, its cathedrals in the sky.

In this sense we are equal to the millenia; the cycles of time bow to us. The spirit is a being which captures its past and exalts its future – while at the same time, in the quietness of its heart, dwelling with the Being which comes and goes as it pleases. I am shaper and shaped and give, for a time, a home to the unknown.

As a poet and author I give shape to these thoughts. They allude to the high and to the eternal; but they are also small and mortal, as a man is before his Maker.

 

Rich Door

 

The rich are what the world makes them;

the poor sit by their bowl and hope.

I am both of these and neither.

Lean in my wishing, replete in dreams,

I hear your call, divine Teacher,

and will learn to have nothing, yet be full;

never to stray from your voice;

and to sit by the circle of life

until its rich door should open.

 

Skies

 

But still I have myself, unknown to me

as the final shape of clouds – known

only to the wind: its subtle mind

before and after every change. Made

of what makes me and maker too

I come back for the wind and press its name

into mine. Clouds, you are as gods,

yet none of those, for you scatter

in the brisk, unknown skies.

 

Shaper and Shaped

 

So can I learn to be

the cloud which gives to wind a face,

which knows its sky-borne shapes

spring from its own pre-powered imagination

but will not claim the homelessness

of wind as its invention?

Then in my quiet heart alone

with the Being which comes and goes

as It pleases, I am shaper and shaped

and give, for a time, a home to the unknown.

 

Best wishes, today,

Landar

 

© landar 2011. All rights reserved