A dim light
During the time of unfurling, when the days begin to stretch longer and all of nature is yearning toward the sun, inhale the world around you. Feel your lungs and your rib cage expand as you suck in the scents of spring. Allow the energy of this season to awaken your own energy, to encourage an expansive dream or a creative quest.
What do you want?
Who do you want to be?
How do you want to show up for yourself and others?
Maia Toll, “The Unfurling of Spring,” in Wild Wisdom Companion.
It’s been a long way, Caetano Veloso has sang. And so many others have walked this way. This precise way? Not sure. It’s been a while since I have posted here. I don’t even know who actually comes to a blog nowadays, written in different languages, talking about personal stuff with universal intentions, dreams, sweeping words from greastes and unknown masters of their own world, things that make and doesn’t make sense. A diary, a dietary journal, a copy-paste procedure, an ongoing exercise, something, a light. A dim yet fulfilling light to see what is around me, inside me, sometimes, even on the other side.
Recently, I have engaged in many things: courses, writing reviews, applying for job positions, training, and projects (Earth Charter Sustainable Education, Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Mindfulness for Women Prisoners). Teaching about freedom, technocracy, the possibility of coexistence, and pacing the violence within and outside us. I say, but sometimes it needs to be written to see if it makes sense. The interconnection with a superintelligence to set us free wherever we are. That dim light sheds its force as an irrational logic of the senses nurtured by everything around its focus. Breathe in this light.
I am rooting for you every morning.
I found this poem after a monk friend told me about Merton’s engagement with spirituality and social justice, and recently, another meditation colleague reminded me again. I write this while being home alone for the first time without my kids and wife. Learning to love what happened and what’s coming. It’s afternoon; it’s sunshine out here. Is it out there?
AUBADE ON A CLOUDY MORNING
By Thomas Merton, In “Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom (The Journals of Thomas Merton Vol. 6)”
Today no sun shines
Yet it is another morning
When in a distant room
Which I have never entered
No one sees your eyes first open
Only the dim light
which is now perhaps at this moment changed
Into the light you look at
And the day that is known to you
Knows the moment of your return
From the rivers of night
From that nowhere
That ocean of sightless quiet
Inviolate unknowing where your heart
Slept for me
For me restored itself to life and to the love
By which alone I stay alive
For whose essential and direct messages
I am waiting now pacing up and down
In this messy, lonely place
Waiting once again to live
And at war with my own heart
Because I cannot be there
To see your eyes reveal you
Opening not only to the light of my day
But to my own eyes and waiting heart
So that I might declare
As the one who knows best
That you are truly present again
That your identity
Has really been restored to the world
And your presence
The very necessary presence
And even the person of love
Has been thank God granted us again
For another day in which I can
Again breathe, work a little
Write something
(If I write for you
I can write something)
Try to exist
(If I am yours
I can exist)
Even though I am at war with my own heart
Because I am nev
er by your side
When those eyes first open
To recognize the new day
But if this is at least a day
That is known to you
And now seen by your eyes
Though without a sun
Its dim light is enough
I am satisfied with it
I look for no other.
May 16, 1966
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