The light from the sun is everything – no reason to doubt the cultures who held it as Deity, or one of a pantheon of gods whose hand in our lives was blindingly evident.
Tonight the sun filled the sky, received by the full face of its consort moon, reflected with an anthropomorphic smile through the winter branches and from the winter snow, touching what was deepest darkness two weeks past, to brightest blue-washed avenues and fields, long vistas, shadows of night creatures sharp along the paths, and our steps revisited the moment we laid them, cups of snowcap, milky way, yesterday's echo.
The moon's mirror is dusty and gentle; we can't even squint into the face of the sun, but this translation, heaped into the boundless sky and poured into the windows and onto the yard, is palatable, even inviting, if not quite true in its rendition of the greater god, the one that prowls the day side of the planet, and leaves our awareness, til morning, to its own devices. The moon is not the sun. The moon's offered sunlight is not quite sunlight, however bright. Even if by that light we still might walk.
I see in my guides along the well-lit path the most highly-polished mirrors, whose words or beings, when you look upon them, create clarity and banish blurry sight. We can return, when the mind is weary, when the heart has had its fill of introspection, to the ground that has been walked, and to the gesture of acceptance with which those teachers welcomed us. Yes. It's almost as though a flash of that sunlight passed the eye, filled the eye without wounding it, and lit a corner of the waiting dark.
When I began to listen carefully to lessons taught by sun, it wasn't only masters who would bring the light along. In fact, the practices presented over the years and millenia are aimed at opening the eye, not describing the star. It is to find a state of polished grace to which you can return with less and less effort, and in that place know what is true and what is not. The value of arriving there is enormous. Your teachers are not always clear, frequently ingratious, and sometimes unbalanced or what would seem, from your vatage point, insane.
I recall a particularly intense engagement with a benefactor, many years ago. I had, in my characteristically incautious way, joined with a partner to start a farm. I seem to throw myself into deep water not to find out I can swim, but for the sheer delight of diving. As not everyone engages in this kind of sky dive, being involved with me in such a project can be a challenge I am afraid. In this particular case, on a hundred acres of retired prairie, endless horizons and spirit to fill all that space, we succeeded in working terribly hard for terribly little money, learned several hundred percent of our mistakes in that first year (my partner Dan would remind us this was to be expected), and with our dawn- to after-dusk work days blew out every fuse that hadn't already been unplugged.
The owner of the land had given it to us for the season. He wanted, at least in his best self, to support our community-supported growing project, wanted to see the land he inherited and held as steward put to another use. In the end, the conflicting emotions and presence of others in his familial home, the lack of receptivity to his unrequested advice (probably worthy, though with no space or structure to receive it), and to some extent our competence, led him to a space of paranoia and abuse. I recall the tension rising as he drove to the land and watched silently from the end of the long driveway as we worked in the fields. I recall his increasing need to "teach us a lesson", to the point where his lessons distorted fact. He removed and hid bits of machinery to prove my certainty about a practice of keeping parts was ill-founded (the part which had disappeared showed up a couple of days later).
Those are clouds: or should I say, those are a mirror, if you are polished enough to read the faces within it.
The same owner came further and further into our circle of two. At one point, inviting himself to his own, rented, kitchen table, he began to tell us what we were doing wrong. "I'm skydiving. You're looking from the ground, and tell me I shouldn't be jumping from planes?" He called us fakes for buying overalls and wearing straw hats instead of baseball caps. We were in it for the wrong reasons. We were play-acting. The land was iron, he said, iron. I was dangerous.
The moon's mirror is marred, and reflects the brilliant fury of the sun like a smiling silvery coin. The sunlight offered is not quite sunlight. But it is from that one source nonetheless. In the same way, in the froth of madness, still there are elements of truth, if not those features and suggestions that float on the surface of things. If you listen to the lessons taught by the sun, if the outer eye is blinded, sometimes there is a quiet darkness at the center of things that sees more deeply.
First, my skyjump had landed me right at the core of pain and vulnerability of a very broken man. He didn't force me to land there: I dreamed and wrote grants and planned with my partner, and through a lot of very very hard work succeeded in landing this non-paying job with free lodging in the fly-infested house of a borderline psychotic. Rather… droll. And a shiny surface.
Second, I found that even borderline psychotics speak from a current of life, and their fears, or their triggers, or their angers and challenges are in reflection to what is around them. This being was not acting out his own fantasies in a vacuum. He was certainly acting out fantasies, but I was not a vacuum, I very much existed — probably existed a bit too much for my own good and certainly for his own good. He was, for me, as much a mirror as the tractor-hardened silt of his land, as the 16-hour days learning everything about farming as a novice, as the flies that poured from the walls, as the incredible harvest, as my own strength and exhaustion were mirrors. Were we "fakes"? Yes, and no. Were we in it for the wrong reasons? No, and yes. Were we play-acting? Absolutely, though perhaps that was not a bad thing.
Was the land iron? No, it definitely was not.
Was there harm in what we attempted, and what we accomplished? No, not in the least.
Was our certainty — my certainty far more than my partners — misplaced? No, but misunderstood: a different kind of certainty, the kind a skydiver knows: I know I will jump and I will fly. I know there is earth down there, and I might land hard.
Was I dangerous? To his mind, yes, clearly. I knew what I knew. I would not ingest partial truths easily. It wasn't the first time, nor the last.
The mirror of a human heart is often cast with clouds. The reflective surface flashes rays of light and then retreats. To be in human company is to walk through a beautiful, flickering passage where each pair of eyes might open or close of their own accord, not yours, and each affirmation that arrives in open hands is a bright facet, where the fog and the cloud can fold in upon things as quickly as an ocean's whim – andthat is when you are welcome to look away. You know, when your outer eyes have been blinded, to listen for those moments that a voice speaks truth — and that, my good friends, is true. When a voice speaks for the good of the other, for the god in all, when it speaks with the light of full day and not of reflected and distorted light… then knowing meets knowing, and a better course of action can always be chosen.