LUMINOUS

WORDS THAT AWAKEN

June 4, 2021, 4:24 a.m.

luminous

            It’s still dark outside in Mystic as I begin to write this morning, but it’s fun to realize how many lights are lit all over the world – lights in homes, in sprawling stores and small cafes, in cars carrying special passengers on roads and interstates, in hospitals helping the world rise up from the darkness of illness.  This world, in many ways, is always luminous, always glowing with different kinds of light – from varieties of lightbulbs, of course, but also, metaphorically, from people’s inner lives, from the human spirit that diffuses effulgence into even the darkest corners.  

            But this morning I’m understanding, once again, that this inner light, this shining that all of us sometimes feel inside us, comes not from us, but from a source as vast as the endless spread of stars above us. The universe, and life itself, is a constant floodlight, a dazzle that never started and will never end – and, as I sit in my softly lit study in our small home in our small town, I am an irreplaceable part of that radiance. Like all of us – all humans and squirrels and antelopes and blossoming peonies, and specks of dust – I am shimmering like a star, at all times and in all situations, a light that can’t help but be bright.  This is a cosmos of  luminescence, even at 4:50 a.m. in still dark Mystic, Connecticut.   

            Today, I hope I can simply open my inner eyes and behold the luster that lives in the heart of each moment. I don’t have to do anything to make the light shine. In fact, I just have to stop my ceaseless doing, and begin, each moment, a new life of seeing – of simply  being aware of  the astonishing shine in every here and every now. 

A ROAD IN JUNE 
Friday, June 4, 2021

A bird is singing on the fence across the road. 
He has a friend. 
He wants to lend 
her happiness and friendship and a load 
of joy. 
A boy 
in love he is, a bird who probably showed
another girl 
a whirl 
of songs just yesterday along this road.