Читать книгу Color - Karen Speerstra - Страница 13

A few years back, I wrote a book called Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart. The title comes from Hildegard of Bingen’s belief that we are all sparks of the Divine flame. It’s a collection of thousands of quotations about various aspects of our spiritual lives. Inside my copy I have taped the E. E. Cummings poem thanking God for “this most amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirit of trees and a blue true dream of sky…” and whenever I opened that book, and read his poem, I thought: “Someday I’m going to write a book about color.” I knew I couldn’t ever be as eloquent as Cummings’ words, but something inside me kept nagging: “Write about color!” So, now, each early morning as I write, I watch my Vermont dawn drizzle grays and pinks across my southern office window and I place words, like shards in a kaleidoscope, in patterned flashes across my computer screen and remember we’re all sparks. We’re all elusive color shards.

Jane Roberts described the modulating panorama of light this way: “Light has valleys and peaks, but the colors and intensities are never the same. Sometimes light seems to cling to an object, hugging it. Sometimes it scurries around the edges of an object like a tiny insect, glowing, moving so swiftly that you can’t really follow it with your eyes.”²⁰

Like Benjamin Franklin, “I am much in the Dark about Light.”²¹ And I’m not alone. For centuries, Hebrew scholars have sifted through the Bible for clues to figure out how the author of Genesis could say in those opening verses that there was darkness and then God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” But this was before verse 14–16 when the sun and moon and stars were created. So where did that first light come from? Where is it today? Some believe this primordial light was hidden in a stone passed down from Adam, through succeeding generations. Others think it’s hidden in the Torah. It’s been with us all the time, many say, just waiting to be seen.

Quaker theology teaches that each of us has a palpable inner light. Worshipers silently wait until “they can hear that place where the light of God shows itself in full agreement.”²² Most mystical traditions refer to the Divine One as the light-consciousness whose absolute nature is joy, peace, and boundless creativity. Light-consciousness, according to all sacred scriptures, loves its creation. The mystical scholar and teacher Andrew Harvey writes about what he’s learned from his mentor, Father Bede Griffiths. “Every pebble and fern and fish is a unique creation of the Divine Light, infinitely loved and cherished, and entirely inhabited by the Light.”²³

When Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century Benedictine nun who taught me about “divine sparks,” was three years old, a dazzling light appeared in her room and made her shudder. It took years for her to build up enough courage to realize the divine nature of that light and finally write about her experiences. As an adult, she became brave enough to call herself “a small sound of the trumpet from the Living Light.” When she was forty-two, she wrote: “Heaven was opened and a fiery light of exceeding brilliance came and permeated my whole brain and inflamed my whole heart and my whole breast, not like a burning but like a warming flame, as sun warms anything its rays touch.”²⁴

It took Hildegard ten years to write her first book, Scivias, which is a contraction of the Latin phrase, Sci vias Domini or “Know the Ways of the Lord.” In it, she describes one of her many visions. She saw a being of light seated on a throne “of wondrous glory, of such brilliance that I could in no way apprehend him clearly… and from that light seated on the throne there extended a great circle of color like the dawn.”²⁵

Shortly before she died on a bright September afternoon in 1179, two streams of light appeared in the sky and swept across the small bedroom where her frail body lay. Her “trumpet” was silenced but her overtones keep ringing. The light she described still illumines the paths of many who follow her wisdom.

The Daoist sage Lao Zi said, “Use light to develop insight.” Ah-ha! Light enlightens. When we say “I want to be enlightened,” what do we mean? Lit up like a Christmas tree? Washed in Divine Light? Have our inner darkness burned away?

Helen Greaves was a medium who communicated with her dear friend Frances Banks after Frances died.²⁶ Sister Frances Mary had lived in the Community of the Resurrection in Grahamstown, South Africa. “What’s it like where you are now?” she asked after Frances died and Frances replied: “What is left is essentially Light, is Reality, is permanent and is true. I call this my new Body of Light and that, indeed, is what it truly is. A body of Light, not dense and material and dull and heavy as the physical body, not insubstantial, shadowy and unreal as the astral body in which I have been sheltering, but brilliant, encelled [don’t you love that word? Encelled.] with Light, ethereal in that there is no weight, no dragging down into matter but is enmeshed with color and beauty into form and substance… I still have a mind, I still have a body, but both are inevitably changing and because of that I feel as if I am emerging, like a grub from a chrysalis to a butterfly. Gradually I can function more readily and for deeper periods in my Body of Light… I feel as though I am starting on a Path of Light which leads upwards and onwards into Realms of unimaginable beauty and wonder and of which I have, as yet, but the faintest glimmer of comprehension.”

“The Soul,” she said, “is Light infused… or infused Light. The shutting away of the Soul is darkness. As the sun is the carrier of light-beams to the earth, so is the Son the Second Manifestation of the Divine Energy of Creative Mind, the transmitter of light-beams to the Soul.”²⁷ This Light Frances talks about, through her friend Helen, penetrates us and becomes Essence within us. It is all color, all harmony, all Light in One. We carry this Light within us. We “wear” this energy moving through space.

An ancient Indian text states: “There is a Light that shines beyond all things on earth. Beyond us all, beyond the heavens, Beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the Light that shines in our hearts.”²⁸

As our consciousness expands, it seems, we let in more light. The Irish poet John O’Donohue said light unfolds its “scriptures” of color. Light is the “greatest unnoticed force of transfiguration in the world: it literally alters everything it touches and through color dresses nature to delight, befriend, inspire and shelter us… Color is the visual Eucharist of things. In a world without color it would be impossible to imagine beauty; for color and beauty are sisters.”²⁹

Light blends into each object so completely that as Henry David Thoreau wrote in one of his journals, “we can hardly tell at last what in the dance is leaf and what is light.”

C. S. Lewis, as quoted in The Inklings, said light is refracted through us and then we, in turn, splinter it from “a single White to many hues, and [it is] endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind.” We’re color-generators. Like multistriped whirligigs, we spin light and color to all we meet.

I’ve read that there is a bit of graffiti inscribed on a Cologne cellar wall where some Jews hid during the Nazi occupation: “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when not feeling it. I believe in God even when He is silent.”

We live in a graffitied universe; there are “light” messages everywhere. But if we look at this light will we get cataracts on our eyes? Will our skin be so reflective and dazzling from God’s radiance, that we’d have to walk around with a veil over our face as Moses did when he came back down from Mount Sinai, just to keep people from freaking out?

What if one day, like Moses, we all actually become lighter — and even more colorful? And I don’t mean by losing weight by drinking fewer sugary drinks. Or by raising our vibrations and becoming less dense by eating no meat, although that might be a factor. What if we actually become more light-like? What if we could even learn to communicate with light? Heal with light? Power all our transportation and our homes with solar? We might rediscover what our ancient ancestors knew about light and color.