Autumn Prayers

Above me,

beneath me,

falling to earth,

Autumn prayers.

Kokoro

Kokoro

You will gain little from these words set adrift from my emotional ebb and flow.

This afternoon a crack of lighting woke me from a dream. Out of the darkness a blinding flash lit stone slabs and mountain peaks. I'd found the stone tablets on a mountain. They were 21 century copies but I was impressed as the writing sizzled in the rain but it wasn't the tablets that were important. It was the illumination by lightning.

I had been reading, 'Kokora' by Soseki and its fatal pessimism clung to me. Empathising with the characters had the effect of recalling in exquisite detail the lives of tragic characters in my own life. It was as if a spotlight, out of my control, illuminating them, all unhappy and insane, one sadly dead.

A spotlight can light up many things. I once worked a carbon arc spotlight at The American Ice Show in Istanbul. I was so ill with dysentery that walking to the show and following the skaters round with my arc light was all my conscious life. The hissing arc light would sometimes even wander off randomly and illuminate someone in the audience until an American voice on the headphone woke me.

That arc light has given me hope, a vision beyond human kind. We can choose what we shine our light on, what we focus on and what we see. Our whole vision can be transformed. In Van Gogh's case an 'ordinary' young girl was significant.