Metamorphoses

“Each time that we live an emotional experience that emphasizes our finite nature as physical beings, we expand our level of conscious awareness of our eternal Divine Nature.” (The Journey Home, 482)

Today my brother sent me two recent poems, “Because I am his son,” and “Between these waves.” Since I read them they move gently in my mind. “Between these waves” begins, “I draw you close, My loves”; “Because I am his son” begins, “Because I am his son, I go.” Reading the poems in succession, I feel their rhythmic beat, the energy of all they mean to him, and now to me, rippling like the leaves touched by wind, sand moved by water. The “his” refers, here, specifically to our Dad, whose physical energy diminishes and still charms. I cried a little as I read Mike’s words – not because they depressed me, though sadness was there, and reached me; because the love shared expands me.

The quote above from Kathy Oddenino’s The Journey Home fits, again and again. As Mike wrote, we are “forging a beautiful simplicity between these waves.”

Another bit I read in computer-land today was about the LilyPad Arduino, a washable, flexible fabirc circuit system you sew together with conductive thread, so that your whole body becomes circuitry - Leah Cuechley,the creator, a fabric designer, says, “I am interested in integrating ‘feminine’ activities like sewing with computer science, mathematics and technology. I think that social issues more often than lack of talent discourage women from entering math, technology and science-related fields.” She hopes to help create environments where women’s interests are explored and represented. This may seem a strange or “invisible” segue with the above, but I find it fascinating – light-up clothing, snaps that say “here I am” by light, clothes that go dark when you put your coat on. I am learning about the reality of energy, and therefore how science, art, visuals and perceptions of all kinds of minds interpret themselves as expressive energy. The diminishing or expanding energy of us as people (physical energy) is a phenomenon in my mind a lot these days, therefore the infinite fields in which we create are becoming more apparent to me. Without the add-on circuitry, I am learning to know the language of my nerves within me, and the absolute intimacy of this language of life. Love lights me up. Fear frames the dark. How do we keep our circuitry going? What is our true nature as “spiritual beings”? I see signs all the time of our continuing to separate the reality of “the physical” (our belief in the physical as Real and absolute, even as we reinforce our belief in the invisible as simply “faith,” or “heaven” or….) from our appreciation of the love with which our senses invite and experience life when we know and support our true nature.

When I look at ideas, things, patterns, people whose thinking I’m attracted to, I know more of what makes me human, and why my personality is as it is in this moment of drifting time.

Borges, Crowley, epigrams, ephemera, symbols of stairways, ladders, nests and eggs, hatching –All invite me into the tunnels of my neuronal pathways which begin to enlighten me as I open my mind to the reality of us as energy first and matter second. We are our own creators, as made in the image of God. In an article called Metamorphosis (2007) about Rosamund Purcell’s “natural history” (2007), John Crowley writes, “An overarching category (if Purcell’s extreme nominalism can permit such a thing) is the category of the sublimely diminished, things that, as she says, are bereft of their original potential yet still familiar. “I have chipped these things from the matrix of the almighty thingness of our all-American world, and, as I did not stop to mourn their demise, why not revel now in their inevitable disintegration?”

Read again the quote from Kathy Oddenino'sThe Journey Home, “Each time that we live an emotional experience that emphasizes our finite nature as physical beings, we expand our level of conscious awareness of our eternal Divine Nature.” (The Journey Home, 482) I think again of Mike’s poems. I marvel at the moments of healing that happen always, the sun rising and setting, the moon phases as I know them. As energy we are never bereft of our original potential. As energy, we grow. Revel.