Rhythm & Respiration

Rhythm & Respiration
Reflecting on nature-based therapy, learning, well-being and value-added life ...

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Star gazing ... Advent, 2017

Star gazing


The summer sky is languid and light,
Boiling with stars and satellites, planets and jets.
Meteors and fireworks tour the night like paramecium in a warm pond,
Or flash in sudden sparks as from a stoked campfire,
Marshmallows exploding in an indigo sky.

December nights are different; the sun cold and cloaked by five.
Winter stars reach long fingers like narrow spears from there to here,
Brittle and gleaming: ice-ladders through the deep dusk of space.
December stars hold hard history and an arctic earth mirrors back their lore--
Written in frost and ice and shimmering rain dropping like icicles,
Sending nano-sized units of dazzling light-arrows into slow pupils.

December days are flagrant with earth-bound stars, too.
Bare branches crossed and twisted reveal organic carvings of the five-pointed stars we drew as children.
Flocks sweep overhead, murmurs of evolving shapes: round and robust, sudden star shapes flickering and sliding between the tops of trees.
Rocks, rain-clean, gleam stellar fissures, while mica and quartz wink back the winter sun.
Stars are all around and we follow them, drawn to their shape and shine.
We reach for stars as children, tracing their shape with our finger—hands high in the air or eyes bent, following a cracked line in a stone, a row of tracks crossing the good earth, a bedewed spider web, a frost-edged stand of dying thistle.
This is our child-voice rising from that deeper place where wise men watched for signs and recognized heavenly messages.

Those wise men following the Bethlehem star, held tight the wonder within like a touch stone, saw the nature-sign sketched on high and journeyed …
Reaching for the earth-edge of those silver-gold light threads tumbling from the night sky, weaving a carpet of light before them,
The language of earth and heaven understood by each clay-heart breathed into Image dei,
Moving in synchronic rhythm with star fire, earth-sign, well-deep joy, and Spirit-wind …
Crossing the earth keel-deep on camel-ships,
Sailing under desert wind through silent night, child heart calling to Child Heart.

Is it any wonder that the animals knew first? Why they are so deeply woven into the Nativity?
There is for them no self-conscious social persona, no conflict with earth-heart and soul-core, no theological wrestling with words at least a stone’s throw away from this Present Moment.
Blessed are those who live in the Present Moment, for there the Eternal is.

So be now … body-hearing, soul-listening; feel this through your bones, this star-stirring Wind-swept night, holy laughter bubbling and rushing like joyful angels;
Reach for light threads curling all around you, luminous in the night;
These ladders between heaven and earth begin at the gateway of your own heart;
Now, journey, heart-eyes wide and strong, tread deeply to the Manger,
Dove-wings like Stars all around.


Merry Christmas,  
Faith 
www.faithrichardson.info






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