Sometimes It's Dark

. . . notes on noticing glimmers of Love

I

Sometimes in the morning I go outside with coffee to listen to the birds. Bird song changes with the season and here in New England, where the winters have a lot less bluster than they used to have, bird song is already spring song. It's louder and more variegated than even a month ago. The loveliness is hard to resist.

Crows and ravens, chickadees and juncos, robins, sparrows, finches and wrens all lift their voices. The coffee, the light and the music gather as one and something hurt and angry in me softens. For a moment, the interior clouds part and the faint streams of light that are our hearts another way dissolve me gently in the grace of God's Love.

God’s Son is not a traveller through outer worlds. However holy his perception may become, no world outside himself holds his inheritance. Within himself he has no needs, for light needs nothing but to shine in peace, and from itself to let the rays extend in quiet to infinity (T-13.VII.13:5-7).

But as you know, it isn’t always like this.

II

Many years ago, homeless, jobless and mostly always drunk, I went to a family member's house when I knew they were on vacation and without telling anybody stayed a couple days.

It was a dark time. I didn't see a way out of the the life I was living save dying, and I was way less resistant to that solution than is safe. I mostly sat on the back deck, drinking and smoking, and staring at the line where open fields met forest. I knew where the guns were.

One afternoon, between vodka and unfiltered Camels, up to my neck in the interior maelstrom, two crows sang. In the cold October light, I made a little poem.

Far away
a crow cries and closer
one answers

I rarely like anything I write but I really liked that poem. I liked how it captured the call-and-response relationship between the crows. I could see a way in which the crows were together a call to which the poem was a response. And I could feel a way in which that dialogue - because it arose in relationship, me and the crows - was worth living for.

Is it clear? I knew the crows weren't talking to me. I didn't think God made the crows in order to save me. I just saw that I lived in a world that included crows and poems, and it was a world in which I wanted to live.

It's important to see that! It's important to see that moment as natural and ordinary. If we miss its ordinariness - if we make it too spiritual or supernatural or mythical - then we slip into the specialness that obscures holiness, and the happiness and peace holiness begets. What is given is already given, and it's enough. It's more than enough.

This was 1989. It would be another six months or so before the lifeboat truly arrived, but something happened that day that kept me afloat long enough to be saved. It still brings tears to my eyes. I did nothing and was given everything. Alleluia doesn’t begin to touch it.

III

So far as I can tell there is only one choice available to me: accept the Holy Spirit as my Guide and Teacher or don't.

However, in my practice and experience, when one knows that that is the only choice, then it is no longer a choice. One sees that the Holy Spirit was always the only Teacher and Guide. What we call "choice" is just remembering what was and will always be the case.

What does this look like in practice?

In the morning, when I take my coffee to the back porch or barn and listen to the birds, I become happy. It's hard to explain. I know that the life of birds is brief, dangerous and violent. I know they aren't making music the way Chopin or Bob Dylan do.

And I know that even as I rest on a bale of hay, eyes closed and ears wide open, that far too many of my brothers and sisters struggle with hunger, war, racism, contagion, addiction and all the many other forms of suffering this dream of ours so ably musters. Who am I to be so happy and free?

And yet.

Something in me - or given me - invites me without qualification or condition to precisely that state of grace.

Forgiveness turns the world of sin into a world of glory, wonderful to see. Each flower shines in light, and every bird sings of the joy of Heaven. There is no sadness and there is no parting here, for everything is totally forgiven (T-26.IV.2:1-3).

Are you familiar with Deborah Dana's work on polyvagel theory, especially the role of "glimmers?" Glimmers are moments in our day-to-day life when we perceive simple instances of beauty or coherence and the perception calms the body, allowing the mind to rest in its natural state. Unlike "triggers," which amp up our defense systems, glimmers inspire compassion and creativity by connecting us with the world through the body.

Glimmers are “micro-moments” which nurture and restore our capacity to share joy and bring forth peace with all our brothers and sisters. They are not answers but rather lights in which we see that we have been asking unhelpful questions, and thus living in unnecessarily restricted postures. There is another way, and glimmers light it up for us.

The practice of forgiveness in A Course in Miracles can be - doesn't have to be, but can be - understood as a way of giving attention to glimmers rather than to triggers, and allowing us (to paraphrase Deb Dana) to become safe enough to fall in love again with life.

When I truly hear the birds - when I do not filter them through lenses of judgment emphasizing sacrifice and personal gain - then I awaken a little. And it’s not unlike falling in love! I stop focusing on my healing, my recovery, my safety, my prerogative - and realize that I have been confused. Not wrong - not bad or evil - but confused.

And here is the thing: this confusion can be corrected as easily as listening to a crow cry in the distance. Truly a single note, heard clearly, undoes our insistence on narratives of personal suffering and salvation by opening us up to what is already perfectly given and already wholly present.

What is already perfectly given and wholly present?

Our inherent capacity to be miracle workers in a world starving for a way out of fear and fear's effects, which are legion. Which, by the way, plays exactly the way you think it plays. It is the active extension of love in a loveless place (T-27.VIII.10:1). We have no enemies; we have no personal interests. Our lives unfold accordingly.

Now are you ready to accept the gift of peace and joy that God has given you. Now are you ready to experience the joy and peace you have denied yourself. Now you can say, “God’s peace and joy are mine,” for you have given what you would receive (W-pI.105.7:4-6).

IV

Long ago, crows being crows called me back to the world of the living. There, in time, brothers and sisters being brothers and sisters taught me how to remember myself, saying over and over, in the many ways it can be said, "I would see you as my friend, that I may remember you are part of me and thus come to know myself" (W-pI.68.6:3).

If you would - if you have a moment today - take note of some little grace or beauty, and when you notice it, know that its presence means you have - for the moment - forgiven the world every sin you accused it of committing, and that God is revealing to you His Face so that you may live forever in the joy and peace that is all our shared inheritance.

Hold a thought for me as well - as I will for you - that together we might nurture this little light - this on-going glimmer - for those still lost and suffering. Crow-like, let us help them remember there is another way. Together we are it.

~ Sean