While reading Hermann Hesse’s “The Living Word” (from Seasons of the Soul), I was struck by a quiet and enduring truth: that the Word, however sacred, however beautiful, is never meant to be held at a distance. It must be lived, or it loses its life within us.
His poem does not argue this, it simply reminds. And in that reminder, something in me answered: What happens when truth is no longer contemplated, but encountered, when it is no longer spoken, but beheld?
I found myself returning to a poem I had written some time ago, and I now read it differently:
When Truth and I Behold Each Other
When Truth and I behold each other,
my heart pulsates to the tempo of the soft-
spoken mist of rain that tiptoes
after the last bellow of the drunken
thunder has been silenced —
I forget this leavened flesh,
I am no longer
a tree walking
in my tannin espadrilles,
the alabaster egrets carry
my gesturing branches
across the turquoise oceans —
I am left with my eyes
sown in the meadow of the galaxies,
primordial light-years turn transparent
corneal sheaths
into the sun’s corona —
the brilliance is beyond diamonds.
— D. G. Vachal
Perhaps this is one way of receiving the “living word” — not as something we hold, but as something that overtakes us, reshapes us, and carries us beyond ourselves.
lilies, sparrows and grass 
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