“Diamond Moments”

“…those rare moments, exalted and divine, when people find themselves relieved of bodily burdens, of care, of doubt, of opposition, and afloat in sacred peace. Such moments may come while one stands mesmerized by the ocean waves meeting the beach in late brilliance under the afternoon sun: as the monolithic boulders, first outlined in laser-beamed quicksilver, dissolve under the glare of the light into empty emblems of nothingness; as the waters, in constant motion from every direction, approach, recede, and spill, one wave into the next, in headlong and sidelong collision; as perfectly parallel strands of wet luminance (like the silvery manes of Nereids) are combed across the top of an onrushing wave; as palest gray-blue waters, lactifluous and thickening like whipped cream, spill over the top of a jagged, low-slung rock and purl across the shingle onto cigar-toned sand raked constantly smooth; as thousands of distant semaphores flash signals to the heavens from the broken surf-aces and silent, perfectly formed echelons of broad-winged pelicans sail by in the distant sky. Or they may come as one walks down a street in Paris on the morning of a new day, on the way to a café, with one’s arm around the find of a lifetime, the love of one’s heart’s dream; as hips sway together in perfect unison, fitting one into the other as if by design; tranquility protecting the young lovers like tepals surrounding a tulip’s stamen and pistil and the world existing solely to regale their joy. These diamond moments may come in the midst of meditation, when one sheds the skin of the body and dissolves like an aerosol mist into the vergeless, empty-fullness, the silent, holy expansiveness of Consciousness. But howsoever they come, such moments form the summits and pinnacles from which humanity sees how life could be, what potential it holds, how heaven on earth can be made real and lived.”