“You and I / Have so much love / That it burns like a fire, / In which we bake a lump of clay / Molded into a figure of you / And a figure of me. / Then we take both of them, / And break them into pieces / And mix the pieces with water, / And mold again a figure of you, / And a figure of me. / I am in your clay. / You are in my clay. / In life we share a single quilt. / In death, we will share one coffin.” Married Love written by Kuan Tao-Sheng in the 13th century, and featured in the collection The Oxford Book Of Marriage edited by Helge Rubenstein, published by the Oxford University Press in 1990. Its ISBN is 0-19-282930-0.
In a very simple way, maybe that’s how it would be done if we were to create soul mates from scratch. In my program tonight, I allude to the fact that it may be more complex than that. It may be something that is predestined. It could be that there are souls that follow one another through many different lifetimes.
My blog is short tonight but there is much to think about.
“When the white flame in us is gone, / And we that lost the world’s delight / Stiffen in the darkness, left alone / To crumble in our separate night;
“When your swift hair is quiet in death, / And through the lips corruption thrust / Has stilled the labour of my breath– / When we are dust, when we are dust!–
“Not dead, not undesirous yet, / Still sentient, still unsatisfied, / We’ll ride the air, and shine and flit, / Around the places where we died.
“And dance as dust before the sun, / And light of foot, and unconfined, / Hurry from road to road, and run / About the errands of the wind.
“And every mote–on earth or air– / Will speed and gleam down later days, / And like a secret pilgrim–fare / By eager and invisible ways,
“Nor ever rest, nor ever lie, / Till–beyond thinking, out of view– / One mote of all the dust that’s ‘I’ / Shall meet one atom, that was you.
“Then in some garden hushed from wind / –Warm in a sunset’s afterglow– / The lovers in the flowers will find / A sweet and strange, unquiet–grow
“Upon the peace; and, past desiring, / So high a beauty in the air, / And such a light, and such a quiring, / And such a radiant ecstasy there,
“They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew, / Or out of earth, or in the height, / Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue, / Or two that pass - in light - to light,
“Out of the garden - higher, higher…/ But in that instant they shall learn / The shattering fury of our fire, / And the weak and passionless hearts will burn
“And faint in that amazing glow, / Until the darkness close above; / And they will know - poor fools - they’ll know!- / One moment, what it is to love.”
Dust by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) from The Collected Poems of Rupert Brookepublished by Dodd, Mead, and Company and featured in the collection, English Prose and Poetry, selected and annotated by John Matthews Manly, published in 1907 by Ginn and Company, New York.
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Don Jackson
