Surrounded By Beauty

You've probably already seen the amazing pictures in this article, which seems to have been all over the internet lately. If not, you've got to see them.

I've been thinking about the pictures for the past few days and realizing that what I like most about them is that they show that the world really is the way that I think that the world really is: far, far, far more magical and enchanting and wondrous than we normally take the time to realize. But there they are, all the time, in your yard, every evening: exotic and beautiful creatures, stranger than any science fiction alien, and covered in jewels! Every night. Tonight. Tomorrow night. The night after that one that you'll spend slumped in front of the tv being sold cans of beer and drugs and cars. And the night after that one that you'll spend making mystical love to your lover, that you'll always remember as "that April night when we made love and the breeze blew the curtains and the tiny, tiny sliver of a Moon showed me the curve of my lover's neck and I knew that I was loved and that our ritual to the Goddess was so, so deep."

And who's to say that they're "just" asleep? Who's to say that they don't know how dazzlingly lovely the water makes them? That they don't co-create the beauty with the water, working every night to make a more awe-inspiring work of art? I don't know; maybe they're just asleep. Maybe it's even more magical that something that special can happen when the creature's all unaware of it. Do they wake up and go, "Hey, I'm soaked?" Or, in a drought, do they wake up and say, "Damn. I didn't get hardly wet at all last night."

I don't know. I just know that the magic's all around, there really are fairies and every kind of other amazing and even unknown life forces dancing all around us. And all that's required of us is the task required of every Witch: pay attention.

I drove home from work today along Spout Run, with high banks on either side covered in trees and plants that are all that amazing Spring green that only lasts for a few days. And the sun was almost just overhead and every single leaf was not just Spring green, but incandescently green. It was like suddenly being inside the green heart of the World. And all I could think is that this forest has been doing that -- that amazing thing of creating, with the Sun, a visible experience of the heart of green -- for centuries. Over and over. I'm 54, and it's the first time that I've been there and been "awake" at the right time. But it happens every Spring. And I drove the rest of the way home remembering the Rumi poem: Don't go back to sleep.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

~Essential Rumi
by Coleman Barks

Picture found here.