Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless; the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur: the scattering of the first spring apple blossom, the turning, spiralling flight of a curled leaf in the falling light; the smoothing of white sun-filled sheets by careful hands setting them to air on a line, the broad expanse of cotton filled by the breeze only for a moment, the sheets sailing on into dryness, billowing toward a future that is always beckoning, always just beyond us. Beauty is the harvest of presence.
*David Whyte. Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. Rev. Ed.
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"We stand in vigil," wrote Richard Rohr of spiritual Contemplatives (Everything Belongs). "Vigil" arises from Latin "awake, alert, watchful," and prior from a root "to be strong, lively." Vigil is commonly used in a religious context of staying awake and prayerful when one would be sleeping, such as before a religious holy day.
Meditation, or Quiet Prayerfulness, is a vigil. A dear lady asked me to share what I meant by meditation. I focused on two words, "alert" and "relaxed." Sometimes, it takes more strength to relax than to exert, and vigil can be vigilantly subtle. This is like the young man who told me how difficult, when he first tried meditation, to meditate for just five minutes.
Tibetan Lama Sogyal Rinpoche observes, in Glimpse after Glimpse, of famed Tibetan female spiritual Master, Ma Chik Lap Dron, saying, "Alert, alert, relax, relax." This is important in prayer, meditation, and life.
I meditate daily, but what good is that if I get up and go back to sleep to the glory of this life, my life, and Nature around me? Life is the essential practice for returning to vigil, an awakened life, until we rarely, if ever, sleep again before the Beauty.
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Below is Mary Oliver's "The Sun," read by John O'Keefe; following are the words to the poem.
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone – and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance – and have you ever felt for anything such wild love – do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you as you stand there, empty-handed– or have you too turned from this world – or have you too gone crazy for power, for things?
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photographs.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
