🌱 Three lights

Light is everywhere, waiting patiently to be noticed

A special mid-week post to share a few brief moments of wonder. Enjoy!

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Watercolor by Julie Gabrielli

Read this poem aloud, or better yet, listen to the poet herself reading it.

Annunciation, by Marie Howe

Even if I don’t see it again — nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does –

And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as towards a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

1. Air

I’m sitting cross-legged at the end of a yoga class while the teacher wraps up. I notice someone’s water bottle standing alone in the space between her and us. It’s a clear orangey plastic and the water inside glows with light. The room is dim. The lights are off for savasana and the windows are distant. It’s clear that no direct shaft of light hits the bottle. The water is in league with light to defy gravity in the vertical column of the vessel. In that moment, I see light as a medium dense and real as air, and as ever-present. 

My substance can glow just like that — as the light flows around and through me. The difference is that I am not always so transparent. I can choose, in fact, to be opaque. To refuse to glow. Yet it costs me nothing to glow — the light is free and ever-present. It will be there whether I admit it or not. In reality, I can’t choose to admit it or not. Just like air, light enters me; it lives and moves in my cells. It’s my choice whether to shine or to hunker down in my opaque cloak, my armor. 

2. Mass

“The sun does not realize how wonderful it is until after a room is made.”
~ Louis I. Khan, American architect, 1901 - 1974

Something amazing happens at the Pantheon. First, the facts: built in the heart of Rome in the 2nd century AD. The coffered dome is concrete. Stones used in concrete mix vary from travertine and old terracotta tiles to lighter tufa and pumice near the top (clever Romans). The dome is twenty-one feet thick at the base, four feet thick around the open oculus and weighs 4,500 metric tons. 

I am awe-struck leaving the dusty, hot, noisy city and entering the hushed cool. In architecture school, we learned that the Pantheon marked the city as the center of the universe. The oculus connects heaven and earth. The place hums with a vibration that seems to be everywhere and nowhere. Modern voices echo as whispers from the past.

The great oculus at the top is filled with the penetrating blue Roman sky. The solid shaft of sunlight ignites a spot that waters my eyes to look at. Veined marble blocks in white, ochre, slate and sienna form a pattern of squares and circles on the floor. Surely, that sun would have burned a hole in any other material.

I stand at the circle’s edge, about to dive in and be consumed by the light. And then the circle inches across one color of marble into another. The sense of this movement dizzies me. I am seized for the first time in my life with the bodily certainty that I stand on a planet, hurtling at inconceivable speed through space around a giant star. I lose myself watching the spot creep its slow journey across the floor. 

Before the Pantheon was built, the sun shone everywhere without discrimination. The Romans hoisted all that concrete up into their blue sky to honor the sacred forever.

Sunrise on Trappe Creek

3. Love

Hearing Marie Howe’s poem for the first time moved me to tears. How can a single poem of ninety-six words elicit the same response as the event itself? 

It hailed me 

I’m with my husband on a thirty-four foot sailboat in a gale. Steering into the wind and crashing down the waves is utterly consuming, the word afraid no match for what I am feeling. Wrenched from all that I know, I am beyond fear, beyond any namable emotion. I focus on my job to point the boat into the wind while he attempts to repair the broken mainsheet block. Immersed in the drama, the surreal darkness in daytime, the deafening wind, the cold rain and spray, the extreme motion of the boat as the bow slams repeatedly into the water, I do my job. I stay focused.

And then.

We break free of time. The storm raises its skirts to reveal a luminous yellow glow around the entire horizon. The wind and rain seem to halt. I shimmer with energy, suffused in glowing calm, full, complete, one with it all. The world, not just the Bay, is entirely round and gold and glowing with me in it, a newborn crab in the palm of a vast hand. 

So integral a part of it, no longer in my body, I am the Bay, the sky, the world, the golden light; I am all of it and none of it. Bathed in the certainty of this love, I begin to weep with joy. The electric charge in my body hums on and on. 

Tilting within myself

Events like this defy attempts to name or describe. This is not a topic that can be known, analyzed, picked apart, turned into a neat story. Believe me, I have tried. How does one net a liquid living light, or contain the energy that drives the universe? It doesn’t want me to tell stories. It wants me to let go and be ravished.

I was blinded like that

Touching other realities has always been part of human experience. Through attention, presence and noticing, the artist courts a relationship with the material of the everyday. An artist might seek to describe something quite ordinary, say, the sound of rain striking leaves. A column of water in an orange plastic water bottle, sunlight heralding planetary movement, or energy shimmering from a stormy horizon are invitations to transcendence. Like all art, Howe’s poem arises from the luminous wholeness behind our broken world. 

Being no one

My fascination with what happened on that sailboat is a distraction. Reason would rewrite it as a trick of terror, the chemical response of survival instinct. Marie Howe’s poem saved me from this desecration. The last lines flung me right back there, bathing in the dangerous pure love of belonging, the light of being chosen. Chosen to know that I am made of this. Chosen to know that every living being here with me is made of this. I wept bathing in light, I wept hearing Howe’s incantation, and I weep now, tasting the defiant ecstasy of enchantment.

What uncanny experiences have moved you?