One More Thought about the Bright Angel Trail

(This is a follow-up to "The Bright Angel Trail" posted Oct. 1st. I believe it was Flannery O'Connor who said, "You shall know the truth and the truth will make you odd." The following may put me in the category of odd but I'll choose odd over silent. - Dawn)

In the earlier Musing about the trail of Divine Love issuing from a morning glory and experienced while hiking in the Grand Canyon, I wrote that there's a "necessary living" to which we are called and that I hoped to continue listening to the flower and my trip long after the story was posted.

No sooner had I posted it than I heard something else, actually several things. I realized for me there's a necessary listening I must do and that I betray my purpose here on Earth and am unfaithful to myself when I'm not attentive on a quieter, deeper level.

It isn't uncommon when listening for me to hear things that I know I must share or release onto the internet air waves. These messages at times take a circuitous route. I hear something, jot it down, accidentally, intentionally misplace the jotting, then feel out of sync and disconnected until I realize I've allowed fear and apprehension to silence me.

This happened just after posting the Bright Angel story. I continued listening for I had been captured by the Light coming from the Morning Glory. I thought of how plants carry the light of the stars and that we ingest plants and in turn carry light likewise. Despite what my poet friend Mary Ann says, I edited myself since I've no science or astronomy degree. (Mary Ann says there's no need to explain what I write. That I just have to write it.)

Then I heard the third thing, the thing I noted on the back of a crumpled piece of paper, then placed at arms length literally on a nearby footstool and avoided for days. It reads:

"I imagine the Bright Angel of Divine Love in the eyes of a child about
to be trafficked or an animal about to be tortured. I imagine the light of that Bright
Angel being glimpsed, being seen by the dim but still present Bright Angel in
the abuser. I imagine this meeting of Light and Love initiating a great waking
up, a waking up that births a healing heard around the world, the sound of
Bright Angels being freed from their prisons of trauma and shame."

I set aside this notation fearing someone would think I had no business writing of torture or trafficking if I've never experienced it. Yet I am reminded of it daily through emails regarding the unconsciousable treatment of children, young men and women and as well as animals in our country and our world. (The global yearly profits from trafficking people for sex and forced labor is 31.6 billion dollars! Trafficking is the third most lucrative black market just behind drugs and weapons. These numbers are five years old and staggering!)

Leonard Cohen sings, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." The first time I saw this in print I thought, 'There's a crack in everything including the hardest of hearts and that's also how the light gets out.'

I believe in invisible circles of life, light and love, circles of interconnecting reciprocity in which we live most of us unknowingly. I imagine a dormant, untapped reciprocity between the light longing to be freed, longing to get through the crack in the heart of a Bright Angel who was abused and is now an adult. I imagine that Light connecting with the Bright Angel in that person's potential victim.

Some will say this is too simple. I believe the unfolding solutions to so much lies before our very eyes. Some will say this can't be done. I believe we must try.

Won't you join me by offering your Bright Angel, your divine heart, to help turn up the power that's been dimmed in others for whatever reason so the Black Markets around the world become places of Divine Light.

-Dawn! The Good News Muse, 8 October 2010

P.S. Colette Bercu founder of "Free for Life International" will speak on trafficking Friday Nov. 5 at 7pm at Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville as part of "Sojourning Women - Women's Global Voices on Interfaith, Immigration and Violence." For more info click: Sojourning Women II.