Free Flight into the Wordless

Dear Friends,

Totalitarianism and climate change continue around the globe. Our meditative work is related to them, but not in outward opposition or combat.  It is related in several ways, for example when we turn the energy of our work into "subtle activism," and when we join with other elements of the world in its sacredness.  Evil forgets and limits the scope of who and what we are; progressive meditative practice remembers us into the earth and the earth's larger environment.

Novalis, in his "Hymns to the Night," refers to the night as a power that "opens innumerable eyes" within us.  A Zen master says, "Throughout the body are hands and eyes" -- meaning acts of perception and acts of compassion.  The extra senses opened in us when we feel outward, beyond ourselves, into the night, are not separate from what they see.

Here's the Whitman again:

"A Clear Midnight"

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Today we will return to take just the first line of the poem as our meditative theme, and understand it to refer to our hour together, as well as the hour of midnight.  Though we start with words -- the words of the poem, say, or of this very sentence -- we jump off from them.  And then we are free.  Flight is an image of freedom because of the speed (really the immediacy) of every kind of understanding, also however as an image of the movement of understanding, the -ing of it.  And flight represents the weightlessness, the effortlessness of understanding -- its  miraculous release from constraint, its delivery of light.

wishing you joy in all you do,

Michael