Love's Pure Light

Xmas again. I feel like a hamster on a wheel. The same old songs. Like an old friend you’re glad to see is still alive, but soon as he opens his mouth he says the same things he always says.

But today, a couple phrases from those songs caught my ear.

“Beauty everywhere. ““Love’s pure light.”

I thought “I’d like to feel that” and then, not to soon after, as if in answer to my thoughts, I did. I saw it. I felt it. Love’s pure light. It was pretty ugly, actually. It was the ugliest beautiful thing I ever saw. It’s like this…

For my soul to survive, on the subway, I have to find at least one beautiful blond. If I look and I don't see her, my heart sinks. No angel, no Heaven. If there is no beautiful blond, I look for brunettes. Red heads as a last resort.

Today, I got on a car and it was empty. I knew why in a second, someone had taken a crap in there. God awful smell. The guy was still there. Definitely no beautiful blond, His nose was blood red, the bridge of it shiny and sore. He'd either been hit, or fallen, probably in a drunken stupor. He looked up and caught me staring at him, and rage and hatred filled his eyes.

Uh oh.

I readied myself for anything.

Then all of a sudden, he punches himself in the face. Hard. And again. Pow! Then very calmly, he fixed his coal black hair, combing it with swollen fingers, combing it, slowly and methodically.

I had to find the beauty in him, in that broken, ugly man.

And I did.

The beauty was that he was so angry, he had to hit someone, but he didn't hit me, he didn't want to hurt me, so he hit himself. That was beautiful. His face was ugly, what life had done to him was uglier. the smell in that car was...can a smell be ugly? Yeah. It was ugly. Nasty ugly. But everything together, the whole moment, was. Something else. the light shining from the fractured mirror of this guys face, his soul, peeking out. Still. Like he was down there in the rubble of this collapsed house of himself, looking out at me, and there was no way I could pull him out. Too late for that. He knew it, I knew it. But he saw that I saw him. I just kept staring at him. I couldn't keep my eyes off him. He didn't seem to mind. Probably been years he'd avoided people's eyes in shame, or people looked away in embarrassment, or fear, but now as I looked at his disaster of a face... he was taking it in like sunlight on a flower that's been in the dark a long time.

A flower in Hell.

It was the ugliest beautiful thing I ever saw. The old songs played on over the speakers. Old songs, old words, old hopes, old dreams. Old me. With my old heart still capable of holding love, maybe able to hold more love, this old heart, stretched out as it’s been by pain, suffering, sorrow and the relentless stomping of the years and days.. “Beauty everywhere, Love’s pure light”. The song sang again, reminding me of what I'd wished for and what someone, something had delivered. Love's pure light. And the darker it is, the brighter and more beautiful the light is. A Merry Xmas to you all. Be kind to each other and yourselves. It’s a rough world out there.