Quite often we find ourselves staring straight at the answer, the truth, what we are searching for. It may be so simple and artless that you tend to overlook it. True words, so simple that they can be hard to really take in.
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In honour of the Sunday. A time for quiet and depth. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton V". This poem has my strongest recommendations. Check out the illustrator, Cloudpine451.
Brilliance/brilliancy is intimately connected to darkness. Indeed, you can ask what is not connected to darkness. Brilliance, however, is seemingly so different from darkness as it is phenomenologically experienced as brilliant light, white glitterings, flashes of insight. And at that last bit we are at the crux: Where do these flashes of insight come from? Where, if not from the unknown, the wide timeless space we sense as a darkness. This is also a pool of possibility; unmanifest stars, to boil it down to light. One can easily end up hunting for these flashes of insight, to call it that, these glimpses of light that seem to come from nowhere. All understandable. Perhaps it is better to think of brilliance as part of a continuum; or simply as itself, manifesting when it sees fit to do so. As usual, poets have been here before us. T.S. Eliot has a formulation that keeps popping up in my mind as I ponder this theme: "The surface glittered out of heart of light" (Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton" I). A sentence that has trailed within me for a while is this: "Resting in the unknown". Sits perfectly with me. A piece of music I often think about when the theme of brilliance/y crosses my mind, is Stravinsky's Petrushka, played on the piano. Underneath is a brilliant (!) performance by Maurizio Pollini. No light without darkness, no growth and insight without pain and loss, no truth without hardship. All of which is beautiful.
Not hard to spot the beauty of darkness.
The following quote from the innovative and influential thinker Carl Jung is spot on for this blog: This is so true. As I state in the subline for this blog, the whole person is welcome, or actually vital, in order to live your full potential as a human being. A human of being.
Why should we fear the dark? Our dark? In the dark lies potential, possibility, newness, creativity, beginnings. Darkness refreshes your system and might surprise you with where it brings you. Again and again, if you let it. Making the darkness conscious. This could be my new slogan. Lately this has been running through my mind: When you open your mouth and bats fly out. This has been the general feeling. When I have felt the words I have spoken, both out loud and silently, they have been bats flapping quietly and blackly. What does it mean? It means exactly what it makes you feel it means. My words have been bats flapping. And connected to the pit of my stomach, which is connected to a rather larger something. All around you, everywhere inside you. At all time. And time itself is part of this which envelops and inhabits you, is you. I am of course these bats that are flapping too. Confusing? Not really, if you don't try to wrap your mind around it. Try your being instead. |
AuthorWoman, not afraid of tapping into her dark places, which are pools of power and renewal rather than areas to fear. The hub of this blog:Archives
April 2014
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