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Showing posts with label alchemist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alchemist. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

emerging

i keep taking these deep breathes and holding them in my chest for a bit just to savour them.  my awareness of the air around me has changed.  i can feel things riding, floating, finding their way to me.  it is quite effortless apart from my observation of the invisible.

amazingly i have managed to turn myself right-side out.  as though all my internal twisting and morphing and knotted thinking has come to a conclusion of this particular phase.  the reflection is different even though the body from everyone else's eyes still looks more or less the same.

for such a long time it was about letting go.  letting go of all the things that no longer serve me.   i have succeeded.  the allowing is to begin.  to open up to the parts that do serve me.  that rocket me along into the fullness of living.  we are here for joy.  for understanding.  for courage to find ourselves among the stories being played out by the lives through whom we embed ourselves.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Soul of the World

For a bit now, I have been slow-reading a book called Soul of the World: Unlocking Secrets of Time by Christopher Dewdney. It is both a philosophical and practical look at the many ways we think about, interact with and function within the boundaries of time. Dewdney is a highly acclaimed Canadian poet, and his work is infused with the kind of mesmerizing language you would expect from just such a writer.

Initially I was drawn to this book (while roaming around Chapters in an altered state of bliss) by the title. Just prior I had finished reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (for the second time cause it's that good) in which the main character, Santiago, a young Spanish shepherd pursues his deepest imaginings. While doing so, he comes to understand the soul of the world and is guided somewhat supernaturally through his journey by reading the omens that he encounters and opening to the possibilities in life. To stumble upon a book titled Soul of the World on the heels of The Alchemist seemed itself permeated by fate.

Here is an excerpt...

Later, when darkness was firmly established, I went out into the yard again to take a look at the night sky. I was shocked. The night was stuffed with stars. I felt like the only person in an enchanted planetarium, bewitched by the demiurge of night. It was as if another order of darkness had been revealed, as if a layer had been peeled away to reveal a truer darkness, a deeper night, that fill me with dizzy awe. I wondered if the owl I'd seen in March was nearby, sitting on a branch in the secret reaches of night, its eyes sparkling with mystery. The sky was so clear and transparent it seemed that space was somehow closer to the surface of the earth. And everywhere stars. Clusters of stars, necklaces of stars. They sang like destiny in silver notes, and I could see them for what they were - distant, atomic fires of unthinkable immensity, inconceivably remote in time.

Starlight is pure history. Perhaps all time - past, present and future - exist at once, everywhere. But the stars take the prize. The night sky contains starlight that started its journey to earth during the Roman era, during the age of dinosaurs, and even from before the earth existed. In the vastness of space, light seems to slow to a crawl, and the vacuum becomes a crystal jelly.

Above all else, words have always been my heart's seducer. This one is a keeper.
Namaste.