Halo around the Sun in Utah [photo image from U.S. NASA, seen via National Ice & Snow Data Center]
Halo around the Sun in Utah [photo image from U.S. NASA, seen via National Ice & Snow Data Center]
This gem about seeing with our other eyes arrived in my email inbox this morning from Transfiguration Monastery, a contemplative Benedictine community not far from where I currently dwell.
This poem by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Lisel Mueller (b. February 8, 1924), speaks, to me, to the epic shift that we’re all in the midst of now from the overly developed reliance on the left-brain, rational, analytical ‘reason’ to the emerging Age of Fusion, as I might call it, that once again welcomes and values the brilliance of our more whole-seeing and whole-sensing indigenous mind and heart … the right brain, heart-centered, intuitive, poetic genius that was set out to pasture (or worse) in the Age of Reason.
The Poet and fellow-Aquarian Lisel Mueller says it beautifully:
Monet Refuses the Operation
By Lisel Mueller
“Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Halo around the Sun over the water [image from U.S. NASA 'Weather Trickery']
Halo around the Sun over the water [image from U.S. NASA ‘Weather Trickery’]
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.”

[“Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language.  Louisiana State University Press.]

Big Love,

Jamie