I said to the one who stood at the Gate of the Year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And the angel said:

“Go out into the darkness

                                    and put your hand in the hand of the One.

That will be to you better than a light

                                    and safer than a known way.”[1]

In this time of social and global uncertainties, and also in the context of personal uncertainties, as many transitions are being made, and we witness the breakdown of so much: if the spirit is strengthened either by grace or conscious practice, and most likely by both, then all may seem possible. Loreena McKennitt wrote in the booklet of her CD The Visit: “I have always considered the creative impulse to be a visit – a thing of grace, not commanded or owned, so much as awaited, prepared for. A thing also, of mystery.”

I do think that this thing of grace – this visitation – has to be listened for, prepared for, as Loreena says; but it is still a thing of grace and cannot be commanded. Perhaps that is what the world needs more of … the listening, the awaiting, the conscious practice of dedication to the sentient Cosmos: then new pathways will reveal themselves out of this deep Self.

NOTES:

[1] This poem was written by British poet Minnie Louise Haskins (1875-1957), and published in 1908 with the title God Knows. The poem was part of a collection of poems in a book titled The Desert. It was later made famous by King Henry VI, in a message to the British people in 1939 – a time of uncertainty; it had been brought to his attention by his young daughter Princess Elizabeth.