The Magic Hand of Chance

Dear Friends,

The image above comes from the Cloud Appreciation Society.  I encourage you all to become members of it (cloudappreciationsociety.org), and you will receive a daily cloud photo in your inbox.  Clouds are often thought of as what blocks the light, as if antithetical to light, but actually we see clouds only because they are also phenomena of light, and we see light all the better because it is transmuted and transmitted by clouds, as with these aurora borealis. 

This vast skyscape put me in mind of what Keats wrote,

When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge, cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance....

He is willing to read a "high romance" in the light and shadow of the clouds, concealing and revealing as they do the starry night behind them.  The night has a face because it is turned toward him meaningfully.

How will he, how would he, "trace their shadows with the magic hand of chance"?  The hand that writes or traces this way is partly guided by the human whose hand it is, partly by forces beyond it (magic, chance).  He is living right at the transitional point between the universal and the personal, where the human reaches up and the heavens reach down.

That is where we'll go today in meditation.  It is a transitional point in the year, and a propitious moment for us to notice the magic hand of chance in our own comings and goings, the ways in which we are both solar and lunar, both sources and mirrors of the light.

with love,
Michael