"Sunset Alert!!"

This is the text I received a couple nights ago from Joy. I grabbed the camera and ran out the front door almost slipping on the ice. There it was in all its pink glory behind the evergreens and birch

trees, quickly fading into gray. I wish I could have caught it sooner. Now, I wait for the next sunset alert!

Our temps have dropped again. The predicted high today 18. I can see the sun trying to show its face and a couple of patches of blue on the gray mantle above. I put my face to the window and catch the sunlight when it breaks through. I automatically smile when it lights and warms my skin and eyelids. It's become a kind of meditation for me as I stop to breathe in the light. I invite it to fill my body. I continue to take deep breaths and feel it saturating my body from head to toes. I hold a big ball of light in my chest area and behind my eyes. I imagine every pore filling with sunlight.

Pastel painting of Bene by Susan Kirsch 2014

I wonder if the animals in the woods are sun worshippers, too. Are they happy to see the sun like me? Our little Bene has always sought out sunlight, even in Arizona. He loves to lay in whatever patch of sun he can find while the sunbeams dance all around him.

  

Golden sun in Belize

"Even after all this time

  The Sun has never told the Earth "You owe me,"

look what happens

 with a love like that,

    it lights the whole sky." - Hafiz

"I wish I could show you,

When you are lonely or in darkness,
The Astonishing Light

      Of your own Being." - Hafiz

Sunset in Belize
A sweet memory  

"There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun..." - Thomas Merton

Merton is describing how, on an ordinary day as he was walking on a busy street he was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all the people there on the street.




He says, "It was as though I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are."  

"It is precisely this beauty and this dignity, this core of reality, the person that we each are in God's eyes, which we must respect in the other." 

The Merton quotes here are from "A Seven Day Journey with Thomas Merton" by Esther de Waal. My copy; tattered and highlighted,
a much loved book that accompanied me on a silent retreat to Old Snow Mass, Colorado many years ago.

My friend Joy and I rented a beautiful home near the monastery there where we began our day driving the short distance to the chapel in the stillness just before dawn. We walked through the darkened halls of the monastery to enter the chapel which was an elegant, simple design of wood and stone. The monks in their hooded robes sang morning devotions. The acoustics were perfect there. The male voices  hauntingly beautiful, breaking through the silence and darkness.  

Later, when the sun came up and I'd had breakfast, I'd grab my Merton book and climb to the top of a little hill. My view was the nearby mountains that were draped in brilliant fall colors. It was perfectly quiet and I was alone to do my reading, meditation, journalling and sketching. I sketched the mountain, I prayed and talked to God. It's the only time in my life that I felt I actually heard Him talk to me. Not a voice but a very gentle, powerful, insistent, loving message. It was, "Fall in love with me, Susan." It was clear, unmistakeable. Like hearing someone's thoughts inside your head. Personal and intimate. I cried. I laughed. I felt exhilarated afterward. The memory still touches me deeply.

I believe that God is everywhere, in all of us and in all of nature. So it follows that we need to fall in love with ourselves, others and all of life.

See the Light in others. Reflect it back to them. Let our own Light shine.     "...The astonishing light of our own being..."