The Lake of Beauty

 

Image of Jordan Pond where everything can seem so clarifying and sacred.

The Lake of Beauty

by Edward Carpenter

Let your mind be quiet, realising the beauty of the world, and the immense, the boundless treasures that it holds in store.
All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your Nature so specially fits you for — that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It will surely come to you.
Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference.

Therefore do not begin that game at all.
Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so still;
And let them become clear, so clear — so limpid, so mirror-like;
At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful beauty,
And the antelope shall descend to drink, and to gaze at his reflected image, and the lion to quench his thirst,
And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his own likeness in you.

The poem quoted above first appeared to me while praying Midday Prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book. It returned to me recently while I was desperately seeking some wisdom to discern a way of being in a chaotic situation. It now accompanies me daily as part of a new spiritual practice!

In my anxiety it did indeed feel as though waters were spilling in all directions; I was struggling to find the source of the inner spring. The dissipation felt like weakness, certainly confusion. Yet struggling against water, tides, currents can also feel endlessly frustrating. Think Sisyphus!

Then the redemptive image: “hold them still, so still”

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It feels as though, when I get to that point of letting go, I stop striving and something invisible enters to realign, reorient.Those random flings of water coalesce; they become stronger, focused…and “clear”.

I find myself staring then into the center of my being which is simply and magnificently an image of the sea of all grace, imageo dei. 

Antelopes, lions, vipers and lambs all swim in the same water as that which makes me, well me!