By heaven and the night star!
And what shall teach thee which is the night star?
The piercing star.
Over every soul there is a watcher…
We find ourselves through an effort of discovery. That we are all born into this life, with years of uncovering to follow, is simple, and fact. The events in which we play part or which come upon us are the mirror, and our senses and our eyes, through the effort of discovery, open to all that is being reflected. Until we find the strength to open and see the good and the bad, until we look and see our failures and our graces, the glass is blank; the name is unwritten; and the night star, your night star, is for you invisible.
There is a reason for practice, and there is a value to discipline. When we draw to ourselves these small tools, and repeat them, repeat the words or the actions: if we repeat a caress and not a slap, if we repeat an affirmation and not a condemnation, if we close our eyes to take away what we think we see and allow what we know, if we breath out then in… then we have given ourselves a rosary, or a Lord’s Prayer for the body, some foundation that we ourselves have laid beneath our feet. Beneath our Selves, so that, walking through our days, making our best attempts, falling short of our desires, still we feel that the earth holds us. A life is a human life. And every moment that we live its beauty and its challenge, where it clothes us in beliefs, and tears those beliefs away, there is the treasure, not even as far away as the hand’s reach, within the circle of the hands and within the circle of the arms, pressed up against the body and the senses and the mind and spirit as though a lover, a light, waiting simply waiting for us to open.
We create — and we must create — the picture of our lives. We use the skills of painting which we learned as a child. We use the skills of painting that we gathered as we grew, and little by little our painting becomes clearer, becomes a human face, our face. We create the picture of our lives, but at first it is only the images we have been told to paint. At first there is this broken, fragile face, this guilty face, this sinful face; there is the shape of a house as though the square with square windows and the triangle top, and the tall rectangular chimney with the smoke puffing out, and the door always closed with a circle for its handle, and perhaps the faces looking out — as if those were the simple lines of a family. We paint ourselves in a corner. We paint with unskilled hearts.
Some think the effort is how hard we try to paint. It is not. It is how persistently we try to learn the art of painting.
Somewhere along the line of a life there is a moment when the mask falls away. As though the childish lines you carried of yourself were finally, irrevocably, blurred. As though by the hand of God. The lines, to be blurred, must be broken; and the mind, to be softened, must be questioned. We leave the small square of our childhood home when we begin to doubt that everything we tell ourselves is true. The grandeur of the real home of the spirit is made visible when the eyes cease to see the images they were taught to see, and begins to see the images it was meant to see.
Saint Paul’s eyes were cleared when the scales fell from them. The bible did not mention that the scales were his own. It was not a devil obscured his sight, though: it was youth and it was fear and it was the boundaries of thought. It was the mistaken impression that he was isolated from all other living things, imprisoned and alone within his body. While the eyes looked outward, they saw nothing, save an impassable void between his body and any other body, or his mind and any other mind. Invisible. The acts he committed against a religious house were possible, because he could not see a relationship between himself and any other.
Each life feels the pressure of truths weighed against it. What we tell ourselves is true is rarely complete, often fragmented, sometimes false. The body and the mind — our projection of our Self — awaits these moments of destruction that some light from the piercing star intrude on our darkness. While we wait, we paint the story of our fears and sadness and loneliness on every other being that we meet. It is not within me, it is caused by them. I am not lonely because I have isolated myself, I am lonely because I am shunned.
At some point, maybe late in life, hopefully sooner, there is a agent which moves and helps us see. If we live a passive life, if we feel no power to question ourselves, if the tide of lifeless images that the markets weave makes us dizzy, then we are condemned to wait until ill health or economic ruin or some other apparent disaster shatters what we held as true. Often we expend great energies to maintain that apparent truth, greater and greater energies, just as a lie must be covered with more and more lies, a lie like a crack in the mirror which, once touched, spreads like spider threads throughout the glass, which in turn must be mended, but only split further… often we expend such energies to hold the rough childish image of ourselves together, we do not realize that an effort of discovery allows the imperfect glass to shatter, and a newer, better looking-glass to form.
Saul’s agent of change was simply his own destruction: the world was waiting to tell him a truth, to fill the void with light. It came in the form of a man, Ananias, who ready to speak a clearer word to a man who had been helpless and blind for three days.
It doesn’t take effort. It takes surrender. To hear the words that are spoken with the voice of truth, not the voice of destruction, and to see a new image, your face without fear, your heart without fury to condemn those you have told yourself have gone against you. Saul did not and could not take away his own sight. What the world offers, we may offer ourselves, however. And in a beautiful form of misdirection, a sleight-of-hand, we may involve ourselves with patient digging, in the effort of discovery, in learning the art of how to paint, so that the energy we have is not wasted in covering the lies we tell to shore up our minds, but is instead given to building a foundation on which a larger house might stand.
Over every soul there is a watcher. This includes my soul, and yours.
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