In our former home, I hung a gallery
of mirrored balls and glass crystals
on a rod in a west-facing window.
With afternoon, came magic:
The sun bounced off all that sparkle
and sent confetti-bits of light
pirouetting around the room,
iridescent prismatic rainbows
splashing and twirling on the walls,
watercolor brush strokes of light.
In our new home, I set out to recreate
that magic. But nothing worked. No window
here caught the morning or the afternoon
sun just right. I thought I would have
to give it up…but then a new thought!
What if I hung the mirrors and crystals
outside where the sun could find them?
Would the light ricochet and come to
play in the interior rooms of the house?
It did, but there was something more…
As I was hanging my sparkling amulets
from the balcony beam, I felt on the verge
of learning something. Then, there it was:
The body loses ground to gravity and time.
The fair face fades. The mind forgets what it
meant to remember. The fire-in-the-belly
burns down to a campfire. Now, paradoxically,
mysteriously the locus of my life is becoming
twain–
One locus is fastened in the intimate beauty
of the individual, sacred, innermost life;
the other locus is fastened in the bittersweet
loveliness of the whole of creation, everything
that resides outside of what I usually call me.
It is at the intersection of these impossible
opposites I begin to glimpse that I am that I am.
Ann L. Keiffer
August, 2010
Photo Credit: Flickr danagraves Creative Commons License
