Sunday, November 19, 2023

Golden light, and going "overseas"

On November 18, I went back to the coffee shop that has a framed photo of the Empire State Building and noticed something else on a wall there, this inscription:

In a serener bright
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear
Each little discord here Removed

The lines (misprinted slightly) are from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Here's the whole thing:

I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing –
The spring decoys.
And as the summer nears –
And as the Rose appears,
Robin is gone.

Yet do I not repine
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown –
Learneth beyond the sea
Melody new for me
And will return.

Fast in safer hand
Held in a truer Land
Are mine –
And though they now depart,
Tell I my doubting heart
They're thine.

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

Then will I not repine,
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown
Shall in distant tree
Bright melody for me
Return.

Five months earlier, on June 18, when I wasn't blogging, I recorded a sync related to "golden light." I was on a long walk and stopped for a short break in a coffee shop I had never been to before, called Golden Lumière -- the latter word being the French for "light." Its logo was an hourglass in the form of a double crystal, with a total of 34 facets. The upper chamber of the hourglass was full of coffee beans, with liquid coffee dripping down into the lower chamber -- perhaps an allusion to the hourglass-shaped vacuum coffee makers that are still popular in Taiwan.

At that time I had just started reading Joshua Cutchin's very long book Ecology of Souls. I read some of it there in Golden Lumière, including this passage about near-death experiences:

"I didn't ever see a person in this light, but to me the light was a Christ-consciousness, a oneness with all things, a perfect love," an NDEr told Moody. "I think that Jesus meant it literally when he said he was the light of the world." For another survivor, Jesus "was not in a body, but was a being of light in the brightest white, golden light, it did not hurt my eyes."

I read that reference to "golden light" during my first and so far only visit to a coffee shop called Golden Lumière.

In my sync notes taken at the time, I connected the juxtaposition of the word golden and a double crystal with something else I had recently read, in Pleiadians on Autism by Sigal Alexandra Porat:

These days Alexandrit's energy appears in my mind's eye as a triangle composed of three gold bars, with a Rutilated Quartz crystal, or sometimes a pearl at its center. The gold bars are the energetic tools I used to work with in the temples of Ancient Egypt. Working with these golden instruments once again touches the depth of my soul, awakening my knowledge and the ancient memory. The Herkimer diamond, which also appears in the picture at the start of this chapter, helps me connect with Alexandrit.

A footnote at this point explains, "A Herkimer diamond is a double-pointed transparent quartz crystal." The text continues:

Alexandrit reminded me of a significant experience I had when I was 12, following my first trip overseas (a Bat Mitzvah gift from my grandmother). I was not as excited about the flight itself as I was about the encounter awaiting me "there," overseas. At 12 I was still so innocent. There was only one channel on Israeli TV (in black-and-white, and we couldn't even imagine the Internet back then), and I was exposed to very little of the outside world, as I was dreamy and detached by nature. In my naïveté, I was certain that "overseas," (which in Hebrew literally translates into "out of Earth") actually meant a place outside of planet Earth. These days it seems utterly unrealistic for a 12-year-old girl to think that. I was supposed to know something about geography, but I was really detached.

This latter paragraph, about the author's misunderstanding of "overseas," didn't mean anything to me in June. Now, though, it syncs with Dickinson's poem about the Bird that goes "beyond the sea" -- implicitly to another world, not just "overseas" in the ordinary sense -- and with William Wright's speculation, mentioned in my November 18 post "Little Skinny Planet," that "the sea voyages in the Book of Mormon -- those of Lehites and the Jaredites -- may actually have been space voyages." Migrating birds that fly to other planets also appear in The Little Prince.

2 comments:

WanderingGondola said...

"Beyond the sea" instantly brings to mind Bobby Darin's song of the same name. I've had it in rotation ever since it was used in the 2007 game BioShock (set in the ruins of an underwater art-deco city, a secret utopia fallen foul through excess and revolution). The song itself mentions both flying like birds to see the singer's love, and her location being beyond the stars and moon, which could be considered a golden light.

I'd forgotten "Beyond the Sea" was based on a French song called "La Mer" (translating to "The Sea"), written about the sea instead of a woman. As far as I can tell, the French mer and both English mer- and mere all have the same etymological root. (It's more coincidental that mer means "folk" in one of the Elder Scrolls elven languages, though it's mostly used in reference to each elf race, eg. Dunmer for the Dark Elves.)

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

The Darin song mentions “golden sands.” The Chinese name of Golden Lumiere is literally something like “golden sands of time,” the word used for “time” being a somewhat poetic one which includes the Chinese character for “light.”

There’s a Moody Blues album called Sur la Mer, from which the most successful song was “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” another link to Darin’s lyrics.

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