We Are Light

"I come from nowhere. I come from everywhere. I am one. I am many. I am as we are – eternal, out of time."
Le Cirque de Soleil, Saltimbanco

“We are the Light, open, released over and over again.”
Martha Glessing, Wind Cloud

During the last day or two, I have been reading (again) the late Martha Glessing’s exquisite novel “Wind Cloud”, and Light is much on my mind at the moment: the sunlight coming through my kitchen window now in early morning, moonlight and starlight in the evening, flickering firelight in the old brick fireplace downstairs, the golden halo of the beeswax candle I light before beginning my morning and evening meditations, the glowing tip of a wand of smouldering sweetgrass incense.

Our lives, the lives of those who share this planet with us, the life of the planet itself and the calendar of the seasons are in an eternal dance, all of us spiraling endlessly round the Sun. We ourselves are made of light - we are creatures forged from the dust of stars which once shone brilliantly in the heavens and which may have ceased to exist millennia ago. Within the cells of my present metabolism are encoded the wisdom of the earth, the stories of ancient cultures, the star knowledge of unknown (as yet) constellations and "The Big Bang" which is thought to have engendered not only our own precious world, but our whole universe too.

The stardust of which we are made is in essence recycled matter, having assembled into diverse life forms over and over again, lived and died as those life forms, then dissolved back into the cosmic sea countless times. In our time, “we” have been many things, have worn many shapes and answered to many names. In this lifetime I exist as a tatterdemalion, specific and perhaps unique collection of molecules called Catherine or Cate, but in previous appearances I was someone or something altogether different:

I have been a tree with its roots reaching deep into the good dark earth,
I have been a lake sparkling in the sunlight,
I have been a hawk in rapturous flight,
I have been a dolphin dancing in the ocean,
I have been a mountain dreaming under the moon.

Buddhism and the teachings of other ancient cultures offer us a seamless paradigm, one in which we are all connected and exist in fundamental harmony, if only we had the vision and wit to recognize it. Within the glowing paradigm of such teachings, I am an ecstatically dancing creature who is made of light and stardust, and once upon a time I was a mountain - what a lovely thing to have been a mountain.