The light of the soul throws sparks, can set up flares, builds fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of the soul in shadowy times like these, to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch lights from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.
At a conference on the Iranian poet Hafez I attended recently, one of the older Persian speakers suddenly leaned forward to the audience and said, "Make your work The Face of the Beloved, and let what you create be her lashes, her mole, her lips." To do that would mean carrying all these gifts, letting the radiance of the World beyond the world shine into each cottage door you come to. Doing so requires both huge strength and the capacity for a kind of visible luminosity, an active principle that can only be born from a great stillness.
