Starburst
“Dear ones, the light of God is moving through me this day… I am in His sea of Light, in that eternal land. Wherever I am, in this life or beyond, I am always roaming in that eternity. I want you to come there also, for you are my brothers an sisters and I cannot bear to see you left in delusion.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
Through a Glass Darkly
Ilness has stolen my words and clouded my vision, but not killed my hope that a new diagnosis and treatment will fix what has been broken a long time. Hope to be back to regular reading of favorite blogs, commenting and writing posts soon.
Bedazzled
“Sound and light affect our consciousness, for we (like them) are composed of vibrations.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
Beware the enticements of worldliness
lest it lead you to the frazzle of despair.
Look behind the Light of nature,
and let the eyes be
bedazzled by the Beauty
of God hiding there.
Feathery Fog
(Click on image to enlarge)
January trees
please and tease
their feather-arms
tickle the skies
gratify the eyes
their lattice work branches
the soft, silky brush strokes
of a winter masterpiece
An Apparition
Here one second,
the next, gone,
with traces only in our hearts.
The ephemeral nature
of all life.
Our loved ones,
people and creatures,
here with us
for a pause in eternity
and gone for seeming eons.
*
It is as the Hindus say
all “Maya,”
a dream of life,
an apparition,
some form of us
awakens one day
somewhere
we know not
when or where or how
right now.
The Spiders’ Secret
A chill wind blows the yellowing leaves off the trees. They drift down to the ground like giant snowflakes. The air is pregnant with the feel of the coming holidays. Fall has truly come, with the sudden drop in temperatures, a full 10-20 degrees cooler than a few weeks ago. This is the real Fall, no faltering Fall, but a Fall that will guide us appropriately into winter. November appears as a mirror image of March with its vibrant color of decay, while March is the decaying color of about-to-burst-forth Spring.
The birds are at the bird feeder all the time now. They are not stopped by our presence when we come to fill the feeder or blow leaves under it. Nothing stops them. They swoop around the feeder and the surrounding trees like Kamikaze pilots, darting here and there recklessly. The squirrels are in a frenzy as well, stock piling acorns and walnuts which they will retrieve without fail in a month or so in a snow-covered land.
To me, the trees are most beautiful at this time of year, when many of them are bare and a scattering of leaves remain on dark brown branches. The leaves that remain quiver daintily in their precarious positions on the tree limbs. Yet these are the survivors. The other leaves have fallen and gone the way all living things eventually go. Most trees have lost all their leaves and they stand in stark contrast against the blue sky, the stormy sky, the grey sky. But I find them most beautiful against the night sky, with arms reaching up to the darkness, trying to touch the stars twinkling between the branches, as moonlight dances on their limbs.
November holds the last glimmer of color. A carpet of yellow lines the woods now– and one can see inside the woods that are so dark and impenetrable in summer. Some forests have carpets of oak leaves– dark brown tan in color. Others are paved with variegated colors– vibrant crimsons against yellows and faded greens and tawny tans. The un-mown lawns are now taken over by the spiders covering the fields. At precious moments, one can see a world of webs that only appears in a certain slant of sunlight and reveal a silent take-over by the spiders in webs that sparkle secretly, mirroring the infinite web of creation.
The yellow, brown, and crimson leaves are complemented by the ubiquitous yellow, brown and crimson mums that appear on the roadside near mail boxes, on porches or along driveways. These tough little flowers withstand frosty chills and stand tall throughout most of November– hearty, generous souls, so giving in their colorful, velvety splendor.
Halloween pumpkins begin to sag a bit or shine with wetness as if encased in glass. They will soon be tossed– pine combs, wreaths and fir swags to take their places, and the season of lights will begin. Anticipation hangs in the air. Autumn seems the fastest season to come and go. I try treasuring each moment, but the minute/hours/days just sift through my fingers like so many grains of sand. Then Christmas/Hanukkah comes and fades in a flash and we are into the Nor’Easter blizzards of January. Another year is gone and a new one has come. Would that we could be in forever in the season of love, but it is also a season of loneliness and loss and darkness. It is good we are defenseless against time.
Now, at Thanksgiving, it is our time to give thanks. Inspired by the Native Americans, let us thank the earth. Let us give thanks to the trees for their constantly changing beauty, to the stars for their piercing presence in the night sky, to the leaves for their inspiring colors, to the sun for its life-giving power. Let us thank the Spring for its awakening hope, the Summer for its warm, thriving growth, the Fall for its beauteous bounty, to the Winter for a time of renewal. Let us thank the soon-to-come snow for its hushed, white silence that transforms our world, to all the animals for their pure souls, to our families and friends for their precious love, and, lastly, but mostly, to the Higher Power of our belief for the macrocosm of creation.
Happy Thanksgiving and may you each be blessed with the all-embracing, pervasive, pulsating Love in Nature.
A Wee Life
Oh wee one
how I envy thee
trudging up and down
the raindrop slopes
of rain and nectar
safe within the confines
of radiant yellow
succulent pink
in a self-contained
world of beauty
however short-lived thy life.
The Shower of Yellow
The horses are in the home stretch with the school-imposed end of summer approaching, Labor Day weekend, a weekend I look forward to all summer long for love of Fall. It is not a good way to think– the way I do. Religious leaders preach living in the present. This very moment in time is all we have. Literally. I have yet to overcome my hyperactive mind and many bad ways of thinking. And this year for some reason I am feeling melancholic about the summer ending. Perhaps it is because I am sick with a fever and not sure where the hazy heat of the sun ends and the lazy heat of the fever begins. Perhaps it is because it is a perfect day. A breeze whispers through what I call (in my ignorance of its real name) the “penny tree.” When the wind blows, the pale green leaves look like so many pennies shimmering down from Heaven. The sun is so hot it tingles on the skin– yet it is not the strong sun of July that burns quickly. It is a far gentler sun. The angle of its diurnal slant is different. Summer is definitely slipping away.
The bees, wasps and yellow jackets are having a heyday in the Goldenrod, Joe Pye Weed and Purple Loosestrife. The marsh is thick with flying insects. My eyes capture swallow-tails. Happily the monarchs are still here. A turkey vulture circles overhead. He must have spotted death nearby. Earlier I saw two golden hawks fly, sunlit, into the back field. A wisp of a cloud floats by in an otherwise perfectly blue sky. This summer has flown by in the blink of an eye like a fritillary flits by the flowers in the marsh.
The smell of fresh-cut lawn is intoxicating to my raw senses. Soon the grass will cease to grow and the lush green will look washed out. All of its inhabitants in the metropolis beneath our feet will dig deep underground or turn off their bodily systems to “overwinter”– an amazing concept to a mammal. Some fill their bodies with a type of antifreeze. Nature never ceases to astound. This summer I have made my peace with the insects. Terrified of them as a child, I have come to love and respect them, indeed hold them in great awe for the feats they accomplish. Our accomplishments pale as humans, supposedly so superior.
No longer do I see turtles sunning on rocks, nor snakes coming out to bask in the heat of the road. Some species of birds have already left– unbeknownst to me. I just know that some I used to see are gone. The sweet bird song of the spring mating season is a fleeting memory. One lone humming-bird flies around the marsh intermittently, causing great excitement in the viewing audience.
It is the time to dead head the flowers of summer. It is the time of Black-Eyed Susans and Peonies and Sedum. And soon it will be the time of the Mums.
With each gust of wind yellow finger-like walnut leaves shower down on our heads– like large, oddly-shaped, yellow snowflakes– a foretaste of snowfalls to come. The sun’s shadows grow long as twilight nears. Soon the white cloud “lions and tigers and bears” will retire into the black cave of night. And the summer will die, and in dying, give birth to fall. The comfortable rhythm of the changing season beats in our sometimes unhearing hearts.
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The Consciousness Stream
Look carefully below
to see the stream flowing
in between the tangle of greens
and the landscape of rocks
*
Look carefully within
to hear the whispers of God
in between the jangle of loud thoughts
and the overgrowth of emotions
*
Heaven lies in the quiet
trickling like a stream
through the spaces of the silence
Web Wonder
“As the thread is hidden behind the beads of a necklace, and as the dreamer’s consciousness is secreted behind the garlands of dream images, so the Divine Coordinator remains unseen behind the dream lei of creation… It is God’s consciousness alone that sustains all the dream appearance of creation.”
~ PARAMAHANSA YOGANANDA
Flutterbies
Tread lightly
for the wings of angels
flutter by our souls
as we plod on
in our own worlds
often unawares
of the Heaven inside us
because of the Hell of our thoughts.
ApPAIRition
This is the keynote piece from my new series called “ApPAIRitions” in which I explore the relationships between different views of the world. I have 20 of them which I hope to display at some point. They are diptychs and there are few triptychs as well.
MOONSIDE 
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