Stillness 6-26:
Long ago, a teenager friend was having a sleepover and we were talking late into the night, lights off, the room dark. Suddenly, she pointed out that, as we talked, our eyes were fastened on the only light in the room, a small patch of moonlight that was drifting across the corner closet door. We’d both been staring at it while we talked, without even realizing it.
More recently, I had another experience of light: I’d sunk into a state of deep meditation and became aware that I was in a no-place/no-time realm. I asked a Being who was with me if they could show me more about what the spiritual world was like. Very willingly, they led me up along a path and the light became so intensely beautiful that I had to turn back. They paused and said, “That’s enough for now,” implying that, with practice, I could stand experiencing increasingly sublime Light.
I think about Light a lot during this time of year, since where I live June is when we have so much of it. It’s as though it guides me out of myself, pulls me up and out into a world of beyond beauty, beyond warmth, and beyond peace. Light is not the opposite of darkness—we need the dark in order to see the light. It’s part of the experience of it. We also need the dark to weight the glory of the light in such a way that we can tolerate it as humans. Because of the density of our bodies on this planet, beautiful Light has to be filtered so we can stand it. But we’re always drawn to it, like a luna moth to the moon. Midsummer reminds us that there is a Light body in each of us that we’re always trying to reconnect with. We are each aspects of the Light.
If you could see yourself as you truly are, in all your beauty, power, and grace, you could hardly stand it either. I wish I could show you.