As a teenager I used to cycle home from school. Gazing up at the sky, I would notice the vivid oranges, purples and reds of a beautiful sunset, and one evening I vividly remember being in awe at an enormous rising harvest moon.
I also noticed how many other people walking on the streets did not seem to be aware of these amazing sights, and I was saddened that they did not look beyond themselves at the beauty that was all around them in the sky.
About this time I discovered the poetry of William Wordsworth, and I vividly remember reading these lines from his poem about Tintern Abbey:
“These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration…
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”
Here was someone who did look beyond!
Wordsworth saw “those beauteous forms” and he writes about what in his experience was hard to put into words:
“that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened”
For me, that captured my own experience – the experience of the transcendent I would now call it. An authentic, and quite common, experience, it seems. A spiritual experience.
The experience of looking beyond.
Lif4Gd 