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Radiant Poetry

Thomas Hood
The Departure of Summer
(This is the first stanza of Hood's poem).

Summer is gone on swallows' wings,And Earth has buried all her flowers:
No more the lark, the linnet sings,
But Silence sits in faded bowers.
There is a shadow on the plain
Of Winter ere he comes again,--
There is in woods a solemn sound
Of hollow warnings whispered round,
As Echo in her deep recess
For once had turned a prophetess.
Shuddering Autumn stops to list,
And breathes his fear in sudden sighs,
With clouded face, and hazel eyes
That quench themselves, and hide in mist.

RADIANT SONG

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. 

Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. 

You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze. 

Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine! You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light. 

Shine on you crazy diamond. 

Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze. Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Shine on You Crazy Diamond – Roger Waters, Pink Floyd

Dancing with The Shadow 

Real Light Working 

Remember when you were young, 

you shone like the sun.

Shine on you crazy diamond.
   

The world of self-improvement is a great adventure but it is not the journey of the soul. The soul is not some ‘thing’ that is improved upon or something to be perfected.  You can improve on something but you cannot improve on the nothing that lives the eternal potential to be and is everything.

Does this mean we are to do nothing? The answer to this question is the answer to many spiritual questions.  This is the answer, "Yes and No."  Real self-improvement requires practice.  You are practicing not so that you can be improved but that you can be revealed. You are a revelation. You don’t make that revelation happen. What real self-improvement is doing is preparing the ground for such an inner happening.

One of the issues that one meets along the spiritual journey is the issue of the shadow.  This is a term given by the soul friend Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, to those aspects of ourselves that we disown.  Most everyone has a shadow. This writer certainly does and meets with its power on regular occasions.  This is frightening and if it does not scare you or make you feel uncomfortable then it really is not the shadow self.

My shadow issue is around violence, emotional abuse, neglect and alcohol.  All of these are aspects of my personal shadow.  Because I am graced the knowing of what it is to be at-one-ment, it does not mean I live as one who always feels whole. There have been and will always continue to be wisdom teachers who are what Jim Marion in "Death of the Mythic God calls “cognitively enlightened” but not emotionally enlightened. In making this statement I am not in any way claiming to be enlightened.

I have, for the most of my life, walked this world with a sorrow that is unsaid.  It is not by accident in The Anamcara Experience – Ready to Radiate eCourse that I am drawn to tell the in-depth story of the Irish folk Song “She Moved Through the Fair.”

This song is my song. I am both the young lovers. I am the one who has the whisper of eternity and comes to tell him that it will not be long till our wedding day.

I am also the one who refuses the call and is scarred by dreams of its invitation.  I have learned that this is something that happens. The more powerful the call to the surrender to the young love that is the invitation to eternity, the more the resistance, the more temptation to regress, the more the shadow appears.

What people tend to do when they see the darkness arise within themselves is to run the other way.  This is natural to the ego but it is the refusal of the invitation from the soul to grow.  This is the way consciousness grows in us.  The Hindus call it samsara – the world of suffering.  One as a hero journeying into Love takes this stuff and uses it to turn the lead of separateness into the gold of at-one-ment.

Will your life be more comfortable? Again, the answer is Yes and No. There are stages along the journey into Love. Always there is a three-fold process at every stage.  There is the birthing, the living and the dying.  Always along the journey what once assisted, now becomes a resistance. Does this mean you should despair? Only if you think you can do nothing about it. At a point in the process there is stream entry. This is where you know who you are and that the Universe intelligence that is Love will not now let you go.

To become an Anamcara is not a journey into all that is sweetness and light.  You are already that. You don’t make yourself sweet and loveable because this is who you are.  What you do is practice working to transmute that which is unloved into that which is Love.  The real work is not done when everything is going incredibly well. 

This is the experience of well-being.  There is nothing wrong in this experience, although I will qualify what I mean by ‘incredibly well.’ When life is going incredibly well you are drinking, metaphorically speaking, from the wellspring of your connection to the One Source.  This is living water. What happens when you sup at this wellspring is that you give it away. You have power. You have energy. You have vision. You share. You have faith in this sharing.

If this wellspring arises from the true source of well-being, which is your connection to the Source, then you will be grounded. This does not mean your life situation is not difficult. It means that the ground upon which you have your being in form is known. Does this mean you won’t have shadows appear in your life? No, it does not.

The shadow energy within you is very powerful.  It is powerful within this writer. I suspect it is the powerful within all writers.  Writing is one way in which I invite the seeing of such shadows. Storytelling and story writing is a way in which I have invited the dance of shadows. This has been a long and noble tradition throughout all world cultures.  We see this happening in all great movies, the contemporary way of carrying on this tradition.

In my personal shadow are issues of shame, anger, rage, violence and other lesser invitations.  When they have sought to overwhelm me I have looked for and asked for support in many ways. The hardest part of this process is often overcoming the resistance to saying and admitting, “I cannot do this on my own.” The ego does not like this one little bit.

So the sorrow that never was said is often the sorrow held within the dynamic of the family, the community, the nation, the world.  When you, as an individual, take it upon yourself to integrate the shadow within yourself you become the proverbial black sheep of the family.  This is the meaning of one of the more difficult passages in the Bible where one of the greatest black sheep that ever lived said, “Unless you hate your mother and your father you cannot follow me.”

This statement comes from one of the greatest wisdom teachers who has lived in form as the invitation to the birthright of knowing you are the flow of eternity. What is he saying? Should this teacher of Love have been arrested for inciting hatred?

All families have shadows. This includes the family called the nation. It, too, has a shadow.  To grow in Love is to move beyond the family script.  It is to transcend the conditioning of time and culture to come into the flow of who you are and not what you have been made to be.  To do this takes tremendous courage.  To do this means to step outside the fold and become what I call in The Anamcara Experience an Outsider.

The Outsider is a sort of shaman.  They take on the shadow of the family, the community, the nation, the world.  The greatest shaman was the wisdom teacher Jesus who took on the world shadow.  This process is called Christing and has little to do with what would be called christianity (please note the small ‘c’). We see the shadow of the church collective in its attitude to women, to homosexuals and to indigenous cultures that are other than what is the prescribed as ‘the true way.’  This is from a collective mindset who claim to worship the leader that is Love.

To be an Anamcara is to know resistance.  It is to know that self-improvement is something of a paradox. You are invited to learn and to keep on learning.  An Anamcara invites you to lean all sorts of things – poetry, storytelling, songs, geancannach (love talking) – but they are not inviting you to be an improvement on who you are.

In this journey into Love, be very kind to yourself.  As it says in the wonderful poem Desiderata by Max Ehrman:

You are a child of God. You have a right to be here.

You are the creation of the Mother/Father source of Love.  It created you for its own joy.  Very often it feels like you are so far away from such an idea, let alone such an experience. However, that never changes the truth of your existence.

As it says in A Course in Miracles:

Nothing real can be threatened,

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God

Remember to be of good cheer. Practice kindness to yourself.  You are not alone.  All those who have journeyed through the shadow of death (death of the ego) are with you and ever will be.  What appears dark now is never dark in eternity.  You are given a great opportunity to live as a light worker.  Only you do not do this by denying the dark.

“Shine on, you crazy diamonds!”

    © Tony Cuckson  2008