|
|
feature :: mark koslow
Excerpt from Sun and Sunlight (a Little History
of Light and Color)
So then,
Given that St John's city of Invisible Light
and Plato's vision of colorless essences,
were good fairy tales, curious fantasies,
dreams of power and glory
that served some empire builders,
it is time to give up these dreams of intellectual empire
and come down to the lovely earth.
I realize now that color is not
"a metaphor for the Lightless Light" as I once said.
I was wrong and I find some joy in admitting it.
The light that has glowed inside my chest since childhood
must be the same light that I have seen light up
the eyes of Seals in the sea
or the eyes of Marmots sitting up alert on rocks.
It is the light that warms the fur of chipmunks
the light in Louis Armstrong's trumpet----
the light of being that lights up the plant Anemone
also lights up the sea Anemone,
glowing in its translucent green tentacles.
The light that lives in me illuminates plants
and I am not better than Armadillos,
or multicolored fish swimming in a school
beneath the luminous surface of the sea.
There is me and you and the sea and the birds
and the birds of many colored feathers are flying
and the fish are bright lamps of primary colors
and all of us belong to the
community of a rainbow-world
and all of us are beings that love light.
Given that I realize that neither the mind
nor nature is an empty void
nor is there an invisible spiritual plenitude
or "imaginal" world
and that Dogen, Milarepa and St. John made up some nice myths
about mind and light
but that reality is just not like that---
I am at last
free to wonder at the transparence of the veil of the air,
and to love air and light itself,
and to love the way light through water
spreads the crystal edge of liquidity---
and the way mist at twilight gathers
the greening hints of lilac roses
or all those mystic evenings where
the sun sank into a rainbow sky
and the rainbow wrapped itself into my mind,
and I know the warm light that I feel in my body
is the same warmth that lights up colors in the sky---
and the wonder of colored space in the sky
is the reason why my eyes are round
and that is why I love this world and abjure religions and
beliefs that ask me to give up attachment to the world.
I know longer love death or the chimerical fictions that arise
out of the question 'what is beyond death?'.
I love this world and the light falling on the edges of my fingers
the into the light of my wife's green eyes,
I love this life and hope for more time ---
and I hope---
for the life and time of my children's eyes
and my children's children's eyes
and may we all have many years
of grateful seeings and intimate embraces
and endless sand grains, minute and multi-colored jewels
falling toward the final days
of my seeing and your seeing
and the gathering community of seeings
glowing out of a wonderful earth
where being is rainbow.
Mark Koslow
|
