I’ve been away from the old Flowerwatch Journal for a little while. Words have been locked in silence like seeds in the ice-covered ground. This is a good place to leave them when all you have to say is like moldy old leaves from last autumn’s glory. The recent augmentation of the world’s habitual self-torture was weighing heavily in my mind. So antithetical is it to the sweet-flowing reality of simple truth, that I found myself deeply bemused with it. Much like Frodo tempted by the Ring. On the other hand, if one is trapped by a viewpoint, it means that one has slipped into a hole one dug in the past out of ignorance and is simply in a position for new insight to come flowing in and fill the hole with new rich soil and new growth. The bewildering spectacle of the world, “strutting and fretting upon the stage,” as Macbeth said, “full of sound and fury, signifying [seemingly] nothing,” is an amazing force that opens one to new insights, if one is willing. Willingness is the inner force that summons inspiration when the time is ripe.
Without the renewal of fresh perspectives, it’s a terrible burden to lend one’s precious attention, the only real currency one has, to the world’s madness and expect some kind of equitable return. The world cares not at all for the individual. One must nurture the given garden of consciousness within one’s soul, which is, as Socrates once lovingly taught, where every good thing is.
The world’s need is an endless void that can never be filled. Succumbing to the habit of expecting visible Justice, one repeatedly challenges the world’s Wall of Hunger, only to find it’s unscalable. Its demons, its hungry ghosts, its endless thirst, its fleeing chimeras of beauty and passion, are cached safely beyond that Wall within a nexus of nothingness, and no mind or body can solve that great vacuum. It’s sole purpose is to ultimately, spider-like, suck the life out of each and every being. And it will, if one allows this to occur. This is why, for those who take up that two-edged sword and fight that “good fight” for worldly justice, every night, after the day’s long toil, “we sleep — perchance, to dream.”
The hope, the dream, the fantasy, the hunger — these contracting forces produce a vicious cycle spiraling into the void of the world, drawing one down into its insatiable maelstrom. Falling into dream, into hope, is the natural result of resistance to the inevitable voidness of the world. The world is a shadow of truth. Dreams are sought because it is not true, this world, this hungry ghost on which we build our homes and set up housekeeping. The only refuge is to let fall mere hope and vain dream and enter into the company of the soul and its ineffable Author. Such a liberating soul-movement awaits each one who longs for Justice and Truth.
The world is actually the crucible in which is born the will to “make the jump,” and to go beyond the merely visible. The effect of the bruital disappointment of the soul longing for an earthly perfection is actually, afterall, profoundly beneficial, though certainly the benefit is in rapidly passing through and transcending that phase of self-evolution. Aeschylus describes, in Agamemnon, the experience of one who begins to long intensely for a resolution to that dilemma, which attracts gradual, yet gracious insight redirecting the gaze inwardly, guiding one towards eventual transcendence:
Drop, drop– in our sleep, upon the heart
sorrow falls, memory’s pain,
and to us, though against our very will,
even in our own despite,
comes wisdom,
by the awful grace of God.
(Tr. Edith Hamilton)
The flowers of the land, as fleeting incandescences, as flickering reflections of a great reality, are one, tiny, remedial teacher of these things. Their fragrance nudges one to go within. Their fleeting life, leaving a stabbing wound of beauty that yet tingles with pleasure, coaxes one to seek their source beyond the passing clouds of earth. Even in this land of deathly jungles and dark haunted forests, life drops little glistening bread-crumbs of hinted truth which one might follow in order to secure the immortal realm.
The earth itself is such a flower. It blooms in this cosmos, crying out, coiling in agony, screaming in ecstasy, majestically still with confounding simplicity, or surging with desire and growth, with punishments and torture. The bloody earth, the ocean-bound earth, the glimmering earth, the dark, dark earth. The crystal sphere hollowed with gloom. The luminous orb transfixed with the spear of need. All of this is beyond words, yet written with the ink of lifetimes, the ink of innumerable tears cried in both grief and joy… and even the quiet tears out of numbing apathy. This world, this flower, this specter, this raises the dead to life. This rips the death from the living and sets them back upon the one Path that leads Homeward. Such a miracle is ineffable. Such a splendid terrible fate is incomprehensible. Such is our life.
