Come, come, let me tell you how I am changing…
There have been moments recently when beauty has visited me in a groaning pain which rises from deep within my belly. It squeezes itself through my solar plexus which feels overgrown and knotted, and, as if becoming harder and more clear, drives through my throat, forcing my mouth to open and tears to seep out of my eyes.
The experience feels impossible to know in its weave of grief and wonderment and yet, is so clear, so true, it speaks to the only aliveness that I have ever known. I remember it in my blood and bones, in my skin, in the electricity of my being. I don’t have any memory in my mind, with me.
It is a memory of somewhere else. I have seen pictures of hummingbirds and butterflies, of ferocious seas, sunsets, moonlight on water and I know the artists are trying to conjure what cannot be called forth in time, but may have entered them as they touched the canvas. I hear Beethoven and music from the Amazon, I hear the Shakutchi, the words of Seamus Heany and it is there, as it is in the roses of our grandmothers' gardens.
It is here a trillion times a second, and we are, most of us, blind to it. We miss it, especially if a human channels it, looking instead at someone's CV, or details of their choices, trying to piece it all together in our mind, trying to map out a feasible story.
We can know it only if we have eyes to see it. The eyes form an infinite web across all things unseen. We have forgotten how to see, we are mistaking the unreal for real. The real is in transcendent aliveness.
I know it when it visits me like a ball of light being dragged from my womb to my skull, but it is always there. Then I am in pain and I am in awe. I am in pain as I experience the passage of beauty through me, and I am humbled by this beauty, by this light. The light hurts as it strikes the things I am attached to, as it rumbles through the centre of my body, shattering scrunched-up love, bulldozing my trembling will, my fearful silence, my confusion and illusions.
I spend so much time in flight and survival, in pointless excess and shuffling matter around to suit a craving, to ease an aversion. It is as if, in darkened rooms with crummy love, I have come to know myself, and somehow, she became real. Uninitiated and in the dark, I am a heavy, needy thing. And I seek out heavy, needy things.
But in these moments when beauty visits me, perhaps in a sincere word, through the alive presence of another human being, I am both suddenly in grief at the weight of me and my stories and by that very same measure, by the weight of me, I am bound in gratefulness. I am as I am, bound to this body, the depth and weight of being alive, and I am eternal. I am suddenly made aware of this.
There, the alchemy. This is the privilege of being human. We can know this. We can notice and honour the channels of others. We can raise them up. We can be reverent. We can be beautiful, and in being beauty we can help others remember so we can remember. a trillion times a second.
All the beauty and all the gifts, surge up like water from a source, through the matter, through all that has been, is and will be lost and we surrender and hold it, in stillness. This is our work today. We must hold these things as they come, and we must help each other do it, because it is vitally important now that we wake and stay awake.
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