Divine Web

Dusk. The days go by like this. Filled with the wonder of changing light. Darkness falls, there is a moon or not, a sliver or full. Dawn comes – the nubs on the bare branches nose their way into fists and then the leaf fingers open. Shade spreads like a slow liquid across the terrace, each week a little wider, as light softened by emerging leaves as it strengthens with the gathering of spring toward summer. The steady flow of days does not divide itself except by light. And in adhering to its course, cleaving to its current, some old fracture in me heals up like a bone given rest. Some old split between desire and action, between idea and emotion, between spark and dream, between ardor and immediacy – between body and soul, dissolves. Out of time I am carried into wind and weather, into the drift of unbroken enduring affection among all things, a communion in which body is no longer an object I inhabit, but a vehicle of presence that sustains the experience of all other bodies in their joining – tree to earth to sky to bird to seed to shadow in an endless continuity. Then I know why I am here. Then I behold the great belonging in which all things are made one. All things are at home in themselves within the whole. Body and soul are then a singular participation in the divine web of Spirit made flesh.


Elizabeth Carothers Herron
Parabola
Fall, 2005