Delight & Energy

 

    Gary Snyder wrote the following: 

"Delight is the innocent joy arising with the perception and realization of the wonderful, empty, intricate, inter-penetrating, mutually embracing, shining single world beyond all discrimination or opposites" 

    Wow, Gary, what a thought! It's hard to say why exactly this struck me. Perhaps, it is because this is the first time I have seen an experience so fundamental to my experience expressed in words. Why haven't I reflected on this before? Maybe in the moment of experiencing this delight one is too full of rapture to pause and think. Why stop a beautiful thing? 

    It must be a kind of delight which causes humans to pause and to consider making a movement toward the Beautiful. I see the sun setting, clouds dancing in the sky, and birds singing hymns as they fly into the coming night. I stop and realize no painting has ever amounted to this much splendor. I am inside the magnum opus of an Artist Who paints with the breath of life. What can I do but imitate? I fall down into the clay from which I came and, taking some pigment, begin to create. A painting, a poem, a song, anything to try and grasp at the revelation of delight which has suddenly washed over me. I want to be like You! I want to set souls ablaze with the delight which gives life and draws us out of our mundane existence to something, Someone higher! 

    So I do. I create my own definition of delight, saying: 

 "Delight is a ray of Divine Grace breaking through the curtain of reality, drawing up the body-soul-person from the mud of the Earth to the Uncreated Light behind it all; a face-to-face conversation with Beauty, which places the newly illumined back on familiar soil, now walking in the garden with feet like an angel's. 

     And how splendid is the mystery of delight? What does it mean for us to walk amidst our fellow creatures who, like us, can share in something as wonderful as this? What role has this played in the unfolding in the history of our world? Were the people drawing on cave walls affected by delight? How can we cultivate a sensitivity to delight in world today? 

 

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