GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

The dark night of the soul. A time of dissociation and suffering that promises to overwhelm all in a plunge into absolute despair. Have you been there? I have been tested by that darkness. I will be tested again. How do we find the courage, the faith, to hold on when all seems lost?

Last year, I could not paint for a long time. I could barely put two thoughts together. I started this painting for a friend who also was going through a profound tragedy. His suffering was beyond belief. In the attempt to understand that darkness I sought with my paint brush an aperture to let the light in once more. I discovered the light had remained constant  even through my despair.

 To see clearly  without a trace of fear…. to know certainty without the least lingering doubt we must first face the possibility of the deepest darkness. Against the light that sits at the centre of this mysterious, beautiful  Creation darkness cannot abide. 

I know that now.

RAVENS CIRCLING IN THE NIGHT

The black birds turn silent around the axis of the moon.  There is a place in the depth of the heart darker than the depth of deep space.  The void itself.   An infinite possibility not yet defined.   A yearning towards.  Creation evolves from the purity of the clean slate to the infinitesimal encompassment of the Divine. A paradox. Both are true at once. A reminder to embody the shadow depth of the emptiness we are moving away from… and always toward. Ravens circling in the night. 

WHITE WATER…WHITE HORSES

The difference between the miraculous & the mysterious is hard to define. The miraculous occurs when the mysterious becomes manifest. White horses in the moonlight in the blue water of baptism, the baptism into the fantastic beauty of the certainty of Creation. We are left breathless. We stop in our tracks. The horses have come to this moment because they are borne of the moon and of the clear Glacier waters of the far mountains. They know. You and me, we glimpse the miraculous but must move forward and learn to live in the mystery.

DOVE

The white bird rises. The moon rises full, white as the bird above. The air, still. Silence reigns. The only motion, a stirring of wings. No owning this knowing. A certainty beyond knowing. A knowing beyond certainty. Amnesia after this moment, also, certain. The white bird rises.

ACORN

In Hindu tradition there is another trinity I subscribe to.  Brahma creates the Universe. Vishnu sustains it. Shiva destroys it so that it can be recreated anew. In my current practice my mantra is “arise, abide, subside.” The circle is complete. Our time comes to an end. The works of man sink gracefully into the sand. My body ages like the fallen trunk of a giant oak, merging softly & slowly with the green moss. My memories…  the vast reefs of my accumulated knowledge have already begun to blink off like galaxies  in a cooling Universe. Can I accept this? I do accept this. The acorn rests in the breezy grasp of the great Mother. She sees me. She narrows her gaze ever so slightly. & so it begins once again.

LITTLE RED

The earth itself is alive. There is no separation.  The smallest grain of sand mirrors & sustains the crests of Annapurna. The mustard seed enfolds the full Amazon river basin. The red squirrel scolding my presence in his northern spruce grove embodies the fine filaments of living light that thread through the mycelia webbing the entire surface of this cerulean sphere from the single bacteria to the great blue whale in the deep black sea. The wind knows. The waters breathe. The magma below sways & throbs. Light sparkles & cracks through the impossibly intricate networks of my human body. I am not separate from nature. I am of the natural order… no more,  no less. My mind is the sky above. You & I & the Red Squirrel. We know. We know. There is no separation. The earth itself is alive.

Kuan Yin and the Little Red Squirrel (or "Acorn")

Kuan Yin & Francis of Assissi. One from the East & one from the West. They both spoke to the animals & the animals gathered to listen. Who told us two-leggeds we somehow have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, over the cattle, & over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth? One sentence in a dusty  old Hebrew text just does not cut it for me anymore. Alive in the Anthropocene age- the last great extinction underway- my true allegiance is not with my fellow man but with all the  myriad creatures in this the living Creation. The right to live of a little red squirrel on a jack pine in northern Saskatchewan is equal- exactly equal- to my right to breathe the blue air of the vast abiding sky. All sentient beings- each and every one of them- will enter into the Kingdom, not just blind, self-absorbed, greed-filled Man. I listened with the snails & the wrens & the elephants  to St. Francis & to Kuan Yin. I have ears to hear. I hear.

ABOVE THE INEVITABLE EVENTUAL

REDTAIL DREAM

Gloria told me her dream...

Lost in the snow storm on the edge of a great glacier. Crevasses yawn before her. Great shelves of ice crack & crash into depthless sea. All around the avalanche enfolds... Devastation - certain. Despair - close. The headlong tumble. She falls... & falls.... 

“Open your arms…. stretch your fingertips.”A voice - familiar -  beckons... "Fly out,  fly  out Gloria....out  from the churn of the chasm of cloud.... from the collapse of the world." 

The emptiness of the empty sky abides.