The Great Sorrow

A dream from the other night defies description, but it also haunts me, so I have no real option. This is the best that, without poetic genius, I can do: It was a dream about love of life--the marriage of the soul to cosmic being--and it was shown to me as light. Every possible moment of a person's earthly life was, in the dream, a wave or particle of light's full spectrum, a minuscule beam of pure color and transparency. It was perfect in itself. It was also drawn into every other particle, and with each penetration the color of every other particle was transformed. These were an infinite flow of light particles that were, in their individual perfection, penetrated over and over by infinite others in flows of light that while already perfect, continually changed. There could be no end to this. But also no soul could hold such beauty as it entered, transformed and passed, only to be entered yet again.

And I was filled with a Great Sorrow which I think arises from the inadequacy of the human soul standing in the presence of the Ineffable that can only be glimpsed before it reaches the seer's point of blindness and gives way to invisibility. I'm reminded as I write this of the lament of Jessica Powers in her poem about homelessness. I believe I've quoted her here before:

...It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown
back from the noon of God to the night of his own humanity.
It is his grief; it is the grief of all those praying
in finite words to an Infinity
Whom, if they saw, they could not comprehend;
   Whom they cannot see.

I did wonder, though, as I awoke to the darkness of my bedroom whether the dream might someday be reversed, and I might awaken from the darkness into that unending Light.