the sensual world
A line can be drawn from simple things of small consequence & no power to an experience of transcendence. Gerald Manley Hopkins, Victorian poet & priest, knew how to release the divine potential that lay waiting, unsuspected, in everything around us. For Hopkins, God’s power is expressed in the infinite variety of his creation, in ‘weather cold & raw, chestnut leaves touched with frost & limp. Sun today.’ When I come to my senses through a practice of sustained attention to my experience, I find myself the subject of an almost unbearable delight. It is as if I were called to give some account of what I have seen today (the musky blue color of a lake, the way the little houses look like studs hammered in swirling patterns in the earth way up from a plane) because the world needs to be made new in perception. It is what I owe to the earth & air & sunlight that sustain me, a way of reversing entropy, in a world that is spending itself prodigiously in every instant. ’It was,’ Hopkins says, ‘for this I came.’……Carl Lehmann-Haupt
when we kiss this sweet life of raw blooming so gently as to mimic a whisper…..we release an innate sensitivity to pure ‘suchness’…..
the sensual response to aliveness, to the evening sun,
After every tide of ecstasy, suffering & balancing, I peer, a strange & wet embryo, into the mirror of current reality. who am I in relation to others, to the universe? Each time I emerge, my vision moves to a slightly more prismatic view, to further comprehension, if only in the futility of human conjecture…..Carolyn Mary Kleefeld
