I missed it. At least the camera missed it. By the time I realized I wanted to capture the glorious explosion of flowers haloing out from a stand of neighborhood trees, two days had passed and the flowers were turning gray.
That was weeks ago, and now it’s a strange mercy: to keep from feeling bereft of the opportunity, my heart is instinctively reliving the moment of seeing them in first bloom. I’m there again, my inner doors blown wide open to let all that beauty flow in. I’m still dazzled, elated, alive with how much I love(d) that experience.
This revival sparks a memory of Rumi’s comment: “Love is lightning… and also the Ahh we respond with.”
Feeling the timeless Ahh can sometimes take a bit of work if anguish, or anxiety, or anger (all from the same word-root meaning narrowed down, constricted) clamors for attention. The question becomes Narrowing down from what? Constricted what? This is where the polarity is revealed in the positive opposite.
For example, in this recent case, the only reason to feel sadness about missing the pink-trees photo was that I’d been so exalted by them in the first place. Disappointment highlighted the positive value and opened the way to re-feel, re-be, the ecstasy of it.
I almost hesitate to invoke here a painful image I’ve used before, but it seems important: I’ve spent a lot of time (and several blog posts years ago) wrestling with my impatience about apparently blasé recommendations in popular culture to bypass pain and think happy thoughts. So I imposed a rule on my writing, to consider the whole spectrum of human experience: my test case is a child with severe burns and missing limbs in a war zone. If what I write might apply even to him or her, I might have arrived at a universally helpful idea.
Applied to the war-zone example, this horrific pain might be at one end of a polarity, with the joys of an ideal childhood at the other. Holding these extremes in mind, as connected with each other, part of the same substance, makes it possible to allow the agony into awareness without being overwhelmed by it, without having to ignore it. With further contemplation, an apex point can form above the two extremes, joining and transcending the opposites, can expand into an all-encompassing, tender sensation of embodiment that lets good dreams arise within whatever nightmares there might be, lets perception move beyond entrapment in polarized impressions.
Maybe not coincidentally for this dark-and-light theme, we’re in the season of Equilux – in most of North America on March 16 this year. The moment called Equinox – at 10:29 UTC on March 20 – is the moment when Earth’s ecliptic – the plane fanning out from the equator – is perfectly aligned with the center of the Sun (details at Equilux).
Throughout these moments, and Solstices too, the extremes of light and dark ahead, the expression of pink trees and my Ahh will still be glowing. My plan is to keep remembering.
More springs of living memory:
Rosebud
All Seasons, All the Time