Faith
Is a Singing Bird
“Faith
is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”
Rabindranath
Tagore
When I
went outside to snap this picture of a beautiful sunrise this morning, a towhee
sang in the tree just off my porch. I am so mercilessly in love with nature, I
can’t begin to express it with the words I know, so I turn to poets, who seem
to have the ability to write language that is as beautiful as nature itself.
Here’s another example by Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore:
“The
same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the
world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy
through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous
waves of leaves and flowers.”
I have
moved my writing desk in front of a window, so that I don’t miss any more
sunrises. There are some things that are too important to miss if you choose to
live a soulful life, and sunrise and moonrise are among them. As an American,
most of what I see on media has to do with violence and discrimination, with
gun-toting, wife beating, and dirty politics, so when I can, I feed my spirit
with beauty. It reminds me that there is still eros in the world, even if human
beings seem devoid of it at the moment. The rest of creation has not forgotten.
Tagore said, “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand
bleed that uses it.” We, unfortunately, are in a violent spiral, busy making
our own hands bleed.
Right
now, with autumn, we are continuously immersed in beauty, but we must open our eyes
to see it. Something as simple as moving one’s desk in front of a window makes a
difference in perception if one has that intention. All the beauty in the world
cannot break through a heart that doesn’t want to see it. As Tagore said, “Everything
comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.” That
includes love and beauty and kindness and peace and all the other opposites of
violence and hatred. Given the hatefulness of our current political climate,
the only antidote is love. “Love is an endless mystery, because there
is no reasonable cause that could actually explain it.” (Tagore) Don’t wait
for any of it to make sense—just face this day with love and it will greet you
back in kind. Be the bird who feels the light even in the darkness.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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