Читать книгу The Barn at the End of the World - Mary Rose O'Reilley - Страница 30

Space

THERE IS A BENCH in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia.

I can’t get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blossom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. “No intention,” as John Cage said of his music, or nothing but intention.

A wren dropped and died here last night, while I was pruning roses: a chick who couldn’t get the knack of flight. It lay in the dirt, shaking wings that ought to have gotten it airborne, but didn’t. I lifted it into a part of the garden where it would be safe from cats and where I wouldn’t have to watch it die.

Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can’t take in this business of eating light and turning it into stem and thorn and flower …

I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: apophatic mysticism, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and kataphatic mysticism, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assisi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant moments: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God’s arms.

When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, “Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.” That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism.

But, I’m sorry. I’m going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.