Long Awaited Song

The clouds broke last night

inner light shining through

the blackened mass,

winds breaking over the tides,

the unforgiven released,

the unrepentant returned 

to outer darkness.

Now comes the morning,

clouds racing across the sky

the earth breathing freely,

unfettered from the manacles 

of cruelty and ignorance,

lifted on the wings of a great bird

to soar above the land

with the long awaited song

of freedom.

Don Hynes

© donynes.com

Heavenly  Magic

Uranda  July 14, 1954  Colorado

Heavenly Magic is all too often not keenly felt or perceived. The magic aspect of reality tends to be obscure, except in certain moments of life. But what is the nature of this magic? If one sees a glorious sunset and is caught up with the sense of its beauty, there is magic, something beyond mundane description. I might illustrate with a little incident from our recent trip. After clearing into the United States at Bellingham, Washington, we got over Olympia and the clouds were very heavy—many of the mountains there were absolutely hidden with dark, forbidding clouds and heavy rain. I flew west and picked up a little valley running out toward the coast—we were under very dark clouds; it was almost like night. As we approached the end of the valley out toward the ocean, there was a glorious opening, a pattern of light. There were some lighter clouds out over the Pacific, but there were certain patterns of fingers of light, carrying tints of rainbow color. Kathy described it as something like the Portals of Heaven. Now this particular scene, coming out of this forbidding weather, down this very beautiful valley and the opening beyond into the light, the delicate colorings, the ocean, the little town [Grays Harbor] all combined to provide a real sense of magic, something exquisite, beyond description, but something very real that penetrated all the avenues of awareness and perception. That is Magic.

In those moments when there is a sharing of the sweet essences of friendship, moments when with some other person there is a quietude, a heavenly atmosphere, all sense of adverse pressures gone, the Beauty of Life emphasized, a peace within and without, those moments are moments of Divine Magic, beyond description, beyond the fulness of comprehension. One is left with the sense that, whatever one can see in it, there is more than that which is seen, and that is Magic. When we begin to touch into the reality of God's Love, to sense it and to know it, to abide in it, when we begin to let it fill body and mind and heart, something utterly exquisite, something which may be indicated by some means such as words, as I use them, but something utterly indescribable. That is Magic.

The beauty of Truth, with all of its intricate designs, its basic structures, its formations, its applications endless—something of it within the scope of vision in any moment but always, where there is awareness, a constant sensing of something on beyond, something yet to unfold, something exquisite in its grandeur and in its delicacy, something for which one needs to have eyes to behold great things and eyes to behold tiny microscopic forms, something that gives promise that there is an ever-newness, something beyond description and without end. That sensing of the beauty and the vastness, the endlessness, that is Magic. Divine Magic relates to our awareness of a central field, regardless of how small or large it may be, fairly clear, but a realization that it is not framed and shut off but goes endlessly in all directions from the point we see. Divine Magic—which leads into the incomprehensible Light, that which brings freedom and creates.

We begin to see something of the ever-expanding realization and expression of Heavenly Magic. You come out of the valley, from under the dark cloud, and there we see the Portals of Heaven, the Beauty of Being, the Wonder of Life. We are letting the Spirit of God come through our capacities of Being without distorting it. For the Spirit of Life in you is a part of the Spirit of God. At any point along the path where any human being honestly recognizes the Truth and is willing to receive some assistance in examining what is true and what is not, and he begins to turn his response and attention, his interest, in the direction of the things of Heavenly Magic, he will find that the only real power in Life is not on the side of evil but on the side of that which is Divine, the side where we know what it means to live to the Glory of God and the blessing of the children of men.