There are black and white days and days of full glorious colour. Weather. The one thing we can say about weather is that it is always there. Basically there is nothing we can do about it; it has to be accepted. Oscar Wilde said everyone in England complains about the weather but no one does anything about it. Drizzly days, halcyon days.. also tsunamis and hurricanes.
Meteorological weather affects our mood.
But our moods, or mental states, themselves are a form of weather. For no obvious reason sometimes our mood can mutate from sunny to drizzly, from peaceful sunset to raging storm.
Some people actually prefer the cloudy, understated kind of weather and find that continuous Californian sunshine becomes tedious after a while. They like the change of seasons. Others move home and family to get as many hours of sunshine as possible. Some people prefer full colour action epic movies, others film noir.
There is however an undeniable truth that, whatever our personal temperament, sunlight brings out the colour in the world as a black and white overcast day does not. The most pure white light is itself a concentration of the spectrum of colour, some bands of which are beyond the capacity of our physical vision to see which make up what we call light.
We could not even see or like the cosy drizzly day we spend in front of the fire at home were it not for light.
I am the Light of the World.
We meditate because we have seen enough, whatever our temperament or the stage of the journey we have reached, to know that this essential, unconditioned pure light of consciousness is within us. It is also beyond and behind all forms of weather. It is the distillation and expression of the only “I” that can authentically be named.
Laurence Freeman OSB
