Light and Buoyancy

For many, many months I’ve been working with memories, and for many weeks Ken, my fellow students and I have also been working with light in numerous ways…light that illuminates, reflects, warms, and guides, and a correlative feeling of buoyancy, a lightness of being. We encounter these ‘light facets’ in the world around us, but also within us. In our studies and practices, whether tracking memories, or exploring whatever we face in the current moment…we are invited… Being beckons…

“Starting with our own inner concerns, can we open a cosmology of light? The discipline that could lead to such lightness is a simple one. It starts with fully inhabiting the situation we find ourselves in… we have buried the ‘lightness’ of awareness; have pulled it down to earth through the gravity of thought and conditioning. But we can do otherwise. We acknowledge this possibility in the moment we confront the darkness in our lives. In the depths of darkness, there are traces of clarity.”
‘Dynamics of Time and Space’, p.211’

So when Ken awakens to gingerly get out of bed bleary-eyed, with a mind somewhat unencumbered by preoccupations, is it so far-fetched that he might tumble into the light…?

The Day Begins
By Ken McKeon

September’s getting on,
I should be too,
Softly rolling out of bed,
Hours before dawn,
My feet finding the floor,
Then shuffling inch by inch
Toward the open bathroom door,

Slowly coming to a stop,
Eyes opening now
To the dimmest of lights,
The door filled with it,

So much so it seems to be
A mirror, a deeply open
Reflecting, makes sense,

Not a surface, but
Nonetheless even so it seems to be
Mirroring everything, even
Becoming this room,

The small rug, the sink, a tub,
And me too, now sliding the door
Open, the light is holding
Me up, revealing me as I
Enter the shower,

Finding out to my delight
That everything’s
Right here, even
The morning, its

Grey tones lightening up
Just as they should,
I am so ready
For this day to begin.