Visions of Light

Visions of Light

I went for my morning jog today under clear blue skies and a brilliant sunshine. What a good day for photography, I thought. But before such mundane thoughts could take hold of my mind, I was suddenly seized by fragmentary visions and memories of the past:

I remembered my "pilgrimage" to Borobudur earlier this year under similarly beautiful weather; that ancient structure was a magnificent sight to behold that day, with its weather-beaten stone reliefs and stupas against the dazzling blue of the heavens, supported by a backdrop grass and trees, bursting with a felicitous green. And up there, silent buddhas stared serenely into a verdant horizon of hills.

How beautiful is sunlight--it is like the physical manifestation of God's love. Sunshine invigorates and breathes life into everything it touches. The life that we possess in our mortal bodies are but tiny fragments of that Divine Light; how brightly we shine depends on how well we tap this source of illumination within us.

When we love someone, we share this gift of light; we bath ourselves in each other's radiance; we nourish in its life-giving energy; we become beings of celestial light.

Sunlight evokes such beauty. The leaves, the grass, the entire universe seem to sing under its presence. And this morning, I walked under a warm shower of sunlight, and occassionally I would peer into the azure sky and let the sun catch my eyes.

In the bedazzlement of it all, I would see myself as a child again, happily lost somewhere in an abode of trees where sunlight peeped through a riotous canopy of leaves, scattering its radiance over the crystal waters of a murmuring stream; and there in that splendorous pastoral paradise, we had revelled in complete abandon, in our innocent childhood games, with God smiling lovingly from above.