Light and Love

I'm in Aspen-Snowmass for the balloon festival and it is a perfect fall day ... bright, saturated blue skies with puffy white clouds, warm sun and cool breezes. Stopped for lunch at Rio Grande Park which had dozens of kids and dogs to watch play across the perfect green grass. After lunch I walked along the trail that led off in a myriad of directions and wound up at the Aspen Art Museum and wandering through the rocks in the John Denver Sanctuary reading lyrics and hearing John's voice in my head.

I was also looking for pictures of "light" since Diane Walker and I are continuing our Miksang photography journey and "light" is the focus this week. I am having trouble with this focus since all photographs are actually images of light. How to separate out just light and follow my intention to see the play of light is the challenge. But light seems to be the topic since I picked up John O'Donohue's Anam Cara which both Diane and I are reading and his focus was on light also. Here are some of his words:

"We are always on a journey from darkness into light. At first, we are children of the darkness. Your body and your face were formed first in the kind darkness of your mother's womb."

"Each day is a journey. We come out of the night into the day. All creativity awakens at this primal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other."

"Ultimately, light is the mother of life. Where there is no light, there can be no life. Light is the secret presence of the divine. It keeps life awake."

It was interesting for me to connect these words with my relationship that just ended where our main issue was over light ... his need for dark and for controlling the number of lights on at any one time and my need for light and resistance to being so controlled. There was no light and the relationship had no life. It was a metaphor made manifest and O'Donohue also connects the metaphor of light with love and offers this statement:

"When the human mind began to consider the next greatest mystery to life, the mystery of love, light was also always used as a metaphor for it's power and presence. When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you were jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning."

The synchronicity of reading this message at lunch and then walking into John Denver's sanctuary where his lyrics to "Perhaps Love" are chiseled in stone seemed like life is again chuckling at me or maybe with me. Light and Love ... something to think about.