Condensing Ruusbroec

 

Our essence, our being, our existence, our essential unity

‘hangs’ in God

for, ‘we possess this unity in ourselves, and in-fact, above ourselves.’

 

My goodness, try as I do, I cannot progress in my reading today. I feel thick and condensed within a translation, well not even that, within an introduction to a translation of Jan van Ruusbroec’s Spiritual Espousals.  Crammed full, as it is, with an amazing density I cannot fully get, a condensation of Spiritual non-steps and steps that seem to act as a mesmeric: To whit

My essence ‘hangs’ in God!  apparently. It seems to hang always and all ways, never given or actively wrought by good deed or sin, but indeed, is somehow ever present within and above floating lights of unity and love.

And how peculiarly happy I am to drift to this English translation of genuine mystic Brussel-Dutch wisdom. For these words fizz my tongue with intangible taste,  ungrasp my mind in conundrums of sense (less earned than set deep upon and within distant joyful thumping gulps that call towards my unravelling heart).

To gleam free the eyes behind my struggling eyes, to move sense to essence, to ungrip this wrestling ego, to welcome in the noticer that always rests in the Breath within my warming breath, I resolve to go back to my cushion and in contemplation to gather again around the plainly blank fractures of silent still light.

 

 

Fissures of man in the night of sense

as I sit

fogginess fumbles and sages profess bland

magnificence upon unclear shafts

that enlighten darkness with out

and offer deliverance within.

untamed, infinite, un-chartered glimpses

and likeness to these reported experiences is all.

 

Right now, unravelling blankly

in this shifting stillness I maroon

upon the plumpest cushion of nothingness

while hunger and thirst ignite the yearn

and burning embers agitate for

peace filled light.

 

thoughts laid down once and again

draft worries for wings

attempting to glide so far beyond

this intricate stack of ego and story and sense and

this senseless fluttering so often immerses

the purest of breath into such whining

defining nasal pretence, and yet.

 

still here I sit,

vainly thrusting trust forward to

pointless bottomless shining pit

to intimate flow so distantly familiar

that shakily, as if to drown in waves

of loveliness I wash the wish

that Love becomes my watering bowl

and I become the fish.