FLAME OF LIFE

This is where I meditated last First Day. My mind was drawn to many reconstructed villages which I have visited over time. This led to thoughts of the people who constructed and lived in them long ago. The connections between places and times and people in the time/space continuum was palpable. I thought of J B Priestley's dream which he recorded in his book Man & Time:

“I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds of the world. It was a noble sight, this was a vast river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then in a flash, bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort? As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, not one of us all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again and time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a pace, that the birds could not show any movement but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on, and as soon as I saw it I knew that this flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real, but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men or creatures not yet shaped and colored, all were of no account except as far as this flame of life traveled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it, what I had thought of as tragedy was mere emptiness of a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I never felt before such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.”

The picture is from Silver Springs State Park. I think that the village was built by the park, the school system, owners of old buildings and generous benefactors (and probably the love and labor of people who value old things.) Notice the size of the pine trees which record in their own way the passage of time.