What Lucifer Said

"A snake?
Who
started such a rumor?
I came to her
just as I was,
and she
mistook me
for a god."

Wild Angel

Today I closed my eyes and saw against a charcoal sky the brightness of an angel with its wings extended. Its white arms reached down toward me and I was instantly awed and afraid. For what could an angel want with me? I have done nothing to draw its attention, nothing to merit any prize from Heaven.

The angel's expression told me nothing, for it was blank and blind. Should I let it embrace me? But angels, like wild animals, are probably best left to themselves. They may bite, may have rabies; this one might have infected me with something holy that burned away parts of my soul.

Better not to risk it.

It was gone almost as quickly as it had come, though the sight of it remains emblazoned on the back of my eyelids, the posterior of my mind. Like lightning . . . Do we see angels backward too? Perhaps it looks as if they are coming down but really they are going up. In which case this one was never reaching for me at all except to ask for me to keep it grounded. Maybe Heaven is a terrible place, or at the very least boring, and the angels don't like it. Maybe Heaven mines for angels that have hidden here on Earth, and once striking them like so much gold, Heaven takes them up for a polish and fashions them into something lovely for God to wear on special occasions.

The Spiritual State

Not sure when I wrote this; I found the page stuffed in with a myriad of other items and notebooks from various time periods, and there is no date on it. Nothing fantastic here—as I've noted before, I'm no poet. But there's something in the sentiment here that speaks to me today.

this snowflake
that gleams inside me,
unique and bright—
you come to me and say
Your snowflake is like mine
and I shake my head,
knowing that is not
the nature of snowflakes

in this Temple it is easy
to say we carry the same cross,
wear the same star,
share the same candle,
but I know
this candle is mine
and I alone will decide
when to light it
and when
to blow it out

I pulled a rune this morning—not something I typically do, but I felt moved to do it—and extracted Raido from the bag. I'm not very well versed in runes, so I looked in my book and found this under the entry for Raido: "Stand apart even from like-minded others; the notion of strength in numbers does not apply at such a time, for this part of the journey—the soul's journey—cannot be shared." (Blum, The Book of Runes)

Saint?

I closed my eyes and saw you: the blazing yellow, orange, and red of your necklace, your headdress, your crown. Light shown from all around you, and yet you yourself were a dark cypher, features all in shadow.

I opened my eyes. Closed them again, and there was the sun, an orange sphere, and a golden bird catching hold of it in its talons, dragging it from the sky.

The Quest to Rise

He looked over at her and froze, an animal trapped in the brilliance of her gaze. The world split in two, the high and the low, spiritual and physical. Frightened, he turned away.

But he would return many times in his memory to the blank, angelic face that had so briefly lifted him. He would expend much time and energy in search of, not her exactly (though if only . . .), but of that higher plane she'd revealed to him, the place where love flowed freely between beings. He liked to think he existed in that place; he even made himself believe it, that he was above in some way. But at the core of him was the fear, the place where the physical world intruded on his ability to rise. He was a coward at heart.

Because in order to live on that plane, he was required to open himself. The love could only flow freely if he put up no defense.

To be shown something lovely and have it disappear is life's greatest sorrow. The retracing of steps, the reaching for that grail, is life's greatest purpose.