When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned

but found no repose in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad despair - in the shadow

She sees leaves dancing in the wind, sudden swirling gusts gathering in whirlpools. She becomes afraid.

"It's a ghost," she says, and refuses to step outside, into the waiting grasp of the phantom.

Her mother takes a glance through the door, sighs with impatience.

"There's no ghost there. It's just the wind," she says. To herself: "Where does the child get these ideas!"

"No ghost?" The girl echoes. She is confused between the evidence of her intellect and her mother's authority. She steps gingerly out, unsure as yet which to believe.

The bees are dying. The world without bees is a world without beauty. Without color. No fruits. No vegetables. No flowers. No flowers!

Do I want to live in a world delivered to weeds?

We are robbing ourselves of this beauty. The bees are the latest link in a chain of human sin - the sin of the refusal of beauty. Refusal of beauty: exactly as if we were tossing God's gift to us into the garbage bin, because we don't deem it useful. Useful as we define it, of course, which is usually some gratification of our self-centered pleasure.

One of Weil's definitions of sin:

consolation: an escape from the real by means of illusory substitutions which deny the harshness and aloneness of creation

Like the time I said yes to M, making of him a substitute divine spouse, an all-wise husband-prophet who would never abandon me. And who would rescue me from my guilt. Most especially from that.

Meanwhile, my buried envy of the eight-year-old crying silently because Jesus was perfect but she would never be able to rescue him from his father's plan - my envy said:

Forget that childish world. Get on with it. Grow up. Have some children of your own. Then you'll see that Jesus should have yielded to the temptation.

Our encounters with phenomena, of which ideas (psychological or otherwise) are metaxus, or intermediaries, to the divine (Bion's "O"). Experience is the bridge to O, the Mystery of Being. Properly understood, it is the way O unfolds through us. The Work ought to remind people, first and foremost, that they exist, that they have an experience, and that this experience emerges, continually and tirelessly, in search of realization.

This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

The essence of created things is to be intermediaries.

~Simone W