“The Equinox comes to-night--the pause in Nature,” he said at
breakfast, joy in his voice and eyes. “We shall have greater life. The
moment is ours, because we know how to use it.” Yet what pregnant truth
came with the quiet words, what realisation of simple, overflowing
beauty, what incalculable power, no language known to me can possibly
express.
And his wife, equally, was aglow with happiness and splendour as of a
forgotten age. In myself, too, remained no vestige of denial or alarm.
The day seemed a long, sweet period without divisions, a big, simple
sacrament of unconditioned bliss. Memory came back upon me in a flood,
yet a memory of states, and never once of scenes or places. I re-lived
a time, a state, when men knew greater purposes than they realised,
dimly and instinctively perhaps, not blindly altogether, yet taught of
Nature and the Nature Powers close upon their daily lives. They knew
these Powers direct, experiencing them, existing side by side with them
in definite mutual relationship. They neither reasoned nor, possibly,
even thought. They knew.
For my nature was no longer in opposition to the rest of things, nor
set over against the universe, as apart from it. I felt my acts related
in a vital manner to the planet, as to the entire cosmos, and the
elemental side of Nature moved alongside of my most trivial motions.
The drift of happenings, in things “external” to me, were related to
that drift of inner sensation that I called myself. Thoughts, desires,
emotions found themselves completed in trees and grass, in rocks and
flowers, in the flowing rivulet, in the whir of wind, the drip of
water, the fire of the sunshine. They told me things about myself;
they revealed a pregnant story of information by their attitudes and
aspects; they were related to my very fate and character. The sublime
simplicity of it lies beyond description. For this sacramental tone
changed ordinary daily life into something splendid as eternity. I
shared the elemental power of “inanimate” things. They affected me
and I affected them. The Universe itself, but especially the known
and friendly Earth, was hand in hand and arm in arm with me. It was
feeling-with; it was the cosmic point of view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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