Click here to see the Handwritten poem (pdf file) or read the transcription below:

The Dimensions of Awareness

It is night,
Dense cumulus nearly fill the sky
creating irregular mobile patches of starlight
The light is inconstant, being scintillating interludes
scattered among the barely discernable clouds
Each tiny, blinking patch appears, to an obsessive
so evanescent and changeable as to be inconsequential,
And yet, being light, it draws the observer again and again
to its unpatterned ‘presence’, its unique and uncaused appearance
So faint and brief that nothing is illuminated by it
yet so insistent in its sparkling that it invites notice.

How far has it travelled to reach the observer’s eye?
What event is its source? And what does it mean?
And where does it go to once within the eye of the observer?

The scudding clouds escape to the East and in their wake
great myriads of stars track their departure and expand
to inhabit the night sky.
What appeared as tiny iridescent formless patches reveals itself
in a splendrous panorama to be an uncountable array of
troubling points, hinting at vaporous forms, as the eye
follows a broad, medium band stretching from horizon to horizon.

How and why so many?
Some seem so faint, so barely discernible
while others, still ‘pointed’ shine with trembling brilliance
Captured by means of his discovery, our observer only slowly
becomes aware that the etched outlines nearby. and even
the luminous surface of the distant lake, stand out in
slightly sharper relief.
At first he reasons, ‘It is only time and adjustment’, and

and returns to search for his skyward companion.
Finding it and feeling once again that indefinable connectedness
he muses, ‘ Even the sky seems more luminous!’

This shared quality of trees and lake, and the sky itself
nudges a possibility into the periphery of his mind –
of other companions, of other constants-of-light,
He begins his scan upward – to one side, circling down and turns
There!!
A crescent moon has risen behind him,
barely a quarter of its roundness displayed in solid luminescence,
into the faintest of encircling lines completing the lunar orb,
perceptively quicker in its motion across the sky, our observer’s
new companion appeared, almost eager to share its greatly enhanced light
bathing the proximate world and coaxing it to reveal its
shrouded details.

So much to see!

Bushes displaying their fragile leaves,
Contours of rocks appearing – sharp, ovid, some with gently
extended shears and iridescent spicules,

Trees marching away, in near chaotic patterns,
reaching as far as the lake’s edge
Even the gentle motion of wavelets contouring the lake’s surface.

Steeped in shimmering, fluttering and statuesque ‘new’
world, our observer, intoxicated yet simultaneously awed
by the wondrous sights,
weeps – because he cannot possibly digest this joyful visual assault, and
laughs aloud at his ridiculous good fortune.

‘Not only am I alone, but now, with the light seeking out
and filling each crevice, each cured surface

and undulating motion
My world is so populated with real companions
that every shred of loneliness, every tendril of meaninglessness
has vanished’

Within inexplicable gratitude welling up within him
our observer begins to move, to explore his new-found world
as he walks, magical things appear, seeming to coalesce
spontaneously out of the darkness.

Shrubs, grass and pebbles take on form and attribute,
Tiny rivulets of water wind their way before his wandering feet

Pine boughs caress his cheek, and here and there
little creatures – some in flight, some scrambling and
darting between low bushes –
all newly seen companies that bring delight and awe
to the already powerful ‘Present’.

Moving slowly towards the distant lake – looking, noticing,
delighting in and seeing ever new forms and patterns
An instant musing, a nudging of perception, surfaces
as he sees through the heavily foliaged trees towards the water,

‘Something about the leaves…. and the water…
why are they now so different?’

And it dawns – at first a mere impossibility,
then, in a crescendo of resonant recognitions –
‘There is colour! In the leaves!! In the water!… In the sky.

Slowly, with a trembling near ecstatic but hesitant expectancy,
our observer turns towards the impelling Source and,
As his gaze travels the near – and the horizon,
a moving spectrum of colour fills his expanding Present,
From the back-becomes – violasceous of the sky overhead, through
the deep, then lighter hues of blues and even more tentative,
near pastel greens and yellows,
his eyes come finally to the rich, full blending of orange-red
landings that fill the Eastern sky,
In the periphery of his gaze lie collected the fragments of the
kaleidoscope of colour that this Source has imparted to his
‘near world’.
From deep earth-browns and brazen reds of wings, to wavelets
0f turquoise tipped with slate greenish-white tassels capping the nearby marsh grass,
the sumptuousness of this visible feast, and all it might
portend, fills and overflows the inner spaces previously
vacated by loneliness and welled out by gratitude.

Our observer now stands silent, present to the miraculous
and layered unfolding of this world, from the first
scintillating patches of starlight to the densely textured
‘Whole’ before him.

With the initial burst of full radiance from the rising Sun
he experience, for the first time, the real significance –
the gentle et overwhelming power – of the full spectrum of Awareness