When I was young, a film, popular at the time, made an indelible impression on me. Not for its content, which I immediately forgot, but for its title: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. Those words rolled around on the tongue of my mind for years, intriguing, compelling, deliciously incomprehensible…
Over time and the living of life it dawned on me that I had misunderstood entirely the nature of “Unbearable”. I began to see that The Lightness of Being is indeed Unbearable, but not because of any painful or poignant quality inherent in it. Simply, Being cannot be borne because it is weightless. What if there is nothing we need carry except a willingness to relinquish our burdens, nothing to know except freedom from our striving to know?
Why else would we use the same word for weightlessness as we do for illumination? Why else would we describe the pinnacle of spiritual advancement as ‘enlightenment’, surely the fusion of lightness with Light?
This book of journal extracts arose out of fascination with my candle flame. It grew into a joyous desire to pay homage, puny as that is in the face of the ineffable, to the marvellous mysteries of light in our world.
May the light that awakens you each morning fill you with joy.
May lightness grace your days.
As the sufi mystic Rumi teaches: “Be melting snow: Wash yourself of yourself”.