The expansion of the universe is not measurable like the increases and decreases of everyday life. There is no “outside” to observe the expansion of the universe. Does this sound familiar? I wish I could understand it. I also wish I could understand how meditation expands, heals and integrates consciousness and makes me know I belong to the whole. We can “understand” it, however, from within, by understanding that we are understood. At the top of the chain of consciousness, there is no inner and outer, no distance between us and God. Here and there, “God will be all in all.” [ . . .] [Meditation] saves us by restoring us, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the knowledge of the intrinsic beauty and goodness of human nature. From this we come to see the beauty of holly hocks and cyclamen again, of trees, creepy crawlies and giraffes. Beauty is the manifestation of the whole in each part. Only the eye of the beholder needs to be whole for this vision of God – as “all in all” – to be regained. Then we see creation as ever new.
After meditation: “Saint Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell from Galway Kinnell
Poems at www.wordpress.com, December 6, 2012.
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Picture: Flowering in Bonnevaux, September 2021
