Solstice Secret

'The world will be redeemed by beauty.' ~Dostoievsky

Our work is to behold beauty everywhere. To discover the whole blue sky in every cell of our flesh, sixteen billion light-years of emptiness in each atom. This is the dharma, the duty of the human mind. Why then would we waste one precious breath in argument and blame?

Solstice is a peak in time, a high pause in the year, when we can taste the transcendent embodied through our senses, and see the majesty of light solidified in the quiddity of a hummingbird's throat.

The Hebrew psalmist said, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." The ancient singer did not say, "believe" or "contemplate," but "taste" and "see." Solstice is an auspicious sensory moment, a time to taste and see. See what? Bliss incarnate in the commonplace.

What is bliss, ananda? No fleeting feeling or mere pleasure that comes and goes, but the quality of limitless expansion. Bliss is the dynamism of over-brimming stillness. Bliss pervades all of creation and, when apprehended, makes everything suddenly weightless. Bliss is the fullness of Being, the true parousia, when the formless overflows and sparkles in the transcendental quiddity of any form. A pine cone, a fallen crow feather, lady bug on a fern become the faces of Christ.

On solstice we see everyday miracles boldly. A wild poppy, a pebble in a stream, a sod clump, an infant's tear, rainbow oil on a sidewalk puddle: Govinda glances and blinks at us through the slightest thingness. Just for an instant, before we perceive the creature, we see God's un-created gaze.

At the core of our soul is an inward eye that sees the face of divine Beauty shining through the ordinary. With this inward eye of the heart, we embrace every creature in the space of forgiveness, and only then does the world begin to change.

For an instant, Lord Govinda and the cowherd girl, Radha, frolic in the meadow of our senses, playing hide and seek with us, just so that we may be stunned into silent wonder. Then God and Goddess hide their loveliness again within the shadow of this earth, yes, even its sorrow.

One name of Krishna is Shyama Sundara, meaning "the boundless blue sky of transcendental beauty." The human mind, in the glory of stillness, is a pelucid lens, transparent, silent and amazed, witnessing the darshan of God in a particle of holy dust.

Please, don't waste one breath of this precious bewilderment! Let the mind melt into the eye of the heart.