Cherry Blossoms = Paradise=BLISS “Love the Magician”
Finding your bliss: Cherry blossoms promise: “Good things to come.”
Everyone’s Paradise is different. For some it will be just like church, for others it’s the eternal “fish-fry” described in Green Pastures.
Some people say it will be a place without animals, enemies, insects or unbelievers, others say it will be just like Earth. Some think it’s an endless loving embrace, others say a “roll in the hay” with “70 virgins.” (Imagine that being appealing!)
These ideas are understandably small and based on limited and very individual human knowledge. This makes Paradise a mental construct; some kind of an existence of all joy and no pain. We can almost barely imagine that. What we can’t seem to imagine is a Paradise where all participate; in other words, how can we feel joy if “wrong thoughts”, “impure behaviors” and “bad people” are rewarded?
Jesus was asked this question and his answer sounds suspiciously like “get over it.” He told a long story about toilers in the vineyards paid the same amount no matter how late they showed up, just because the owner was so full of generosity and joy.
Something to think about. I personally treasure the idea that Paradise is a place where “every tear will be wiped away.”(Revelation)
Once we have faced up to our personal inadequacies, admitted the power of our global longing and contemplated the possibility of severance, are we ready to surrender to bliss? Cherry Blossoms guarantee that ecstasy is coming. But what is ecstasy – how uncomfortable will it be and how will we recognize it?
Ecstasy is the blurring of our boundaries into the beloved. Time vanishes, there is only the ecstatic present. You have experienced this before. Disappearing in to the safety of a loving parent’s arms you felt connected to them in a galvanic way – you and they were part of each other’s being. This is the connection Jesus offered when he called God “Daddy.”
A mature connection with the Beloved is even more powerful, because we get to be both parent and child, recipient and giver, all at once and in the same moment. What joy!
Meditation: Long live the weeds and the wildness – Gerard Manley Hopkins
LOVE THE MAGICIAN
The Magician is a Capricorn
Bleeding cock’s milk from nipples
Pale like mine but
Maler.
Illusion, he says is memory
Of things that should have been.
Doves and rabbits he entices
From sacred groves between my legs
Placed by ruse, and freed by art.
When he dies, passion turns his eyes
To quarters.
He hears the world but faintly
Through his one good ear.
The other turns to me,
Safecracker’s daughter.
Trust the magician, voices tell me
He knows when to drop the dice.
Alysse Aallyn 