A dance of light
Part 3: Celestial times
A Dance of Light is a six-part collaborative project by Lisa DeLong, Nicole Pinnell, and James Goldberg. This project, created in a time of darkness, weaves together visual art, music, and poetry in a shared meditation on light. Starting on the 2020 Winter Solstice, we’ll be releasing one part each Monday. Part 3 was posted on January 4th.
Vessel
by Lisa DeLong
Gold leaf, ink, handmade watercolour, and collage.
interpretation
by James Goldberg
In everything, there are God’s seasons. Types of time layered over each other, clothing us against the cold. Learn to see. Learn to see. How we were, how we are, and how we will be.
Bottom: God’s Loom
Below all things. Before all things. Take spirit unorganized and weave it together. Into a plan, pristine as any veil. Our eyes shine like stars from the eternity before time, waiting. To pass through a border of blood into a world of flesh on our way to wild glory.
See the red line we all pass through. Blood of birth and rebirth. Nourishing, umbilical, flowing between us. Falling between us, in great drops on the garden’s dirt floor.
Middle: The Mortal Sphere
The universe we know. A vessel of light enters, ascends. It rises, like Sarah’s laughter over the impossible miracle of life. Like her husband and son, trembling up the mountain to meet death--and be released from its claims. Like Eve reaching for the fruit.
Like you. Vessel of light you are. Like you.
What divine geometry swirls around you. Within you. O vessel of light, can you see the stuff we’re spun from? The pattern made flesh in creation’s womb.
Top: Celestial Spacetime
In the heavens, stars. Beyond human numbering, human understanding. Sprawled out in splatters of golden light, galaxied glory fills the night. Pass through the depths to reach this height. Selves spilled out wild across the cosmos. Exalted beyond the broken boundaries of all our plans.
In the heavens, stars. Our sun is among them. We see its light in nineteen rays, extending in lines like a villanelle. Its light in nineteen rays (like the surah, like the psalm), declaring the glory of God.
That life-giving light. That transformative light. Adonai, Adonai. The Lord is my light.