Lammas Hymn

You wake just after Sabbath dawn in the season of Lammas, the harvest time of Lughnasadh, to discover that during the blackest hour a rose burst open. You are amazed, but your amazement is nothing compared to the amazement of the rose.

To marvel "at" is separation. Perhaps only the distance of a breath from your lips to that mysterious billowing cloud-kissed mountain of petaled emptiness, perhaps only a glance from the pupil of your eye to the Beloved, yet still, there is an unfathomable abyss between the seer and the seen!

Be not amazed at the rose; be the rose's own amazement. Softly explode in the dark, spilling ambrosial curves of stillness over asymptotes of thought, until there is no beholder.

Wonder is the flower, undulating into leaf and pollen, feral pulse of sun and moon suffusing the vacuum between heartbeats, swirling here a molecule of pearl, spiraling there an amber ray, weaving Ida and Pingala into chromosome, sushumna, Milky Way, globing bells of silence into bowls of bone, unstruck yet humming, Christing every atom from its wave of possibility.

Ferment the nectar of solitude. Distill the un-created sap. Hypostatize your particles like sediment in wine. Remember your body. From what else shall the Beloved make honey?


Photo by the visionary Kristy Thompson