from Light: All that is seen and unseen...

I'm sitting at my desk in my office watching the sky turn to day with each bolt of lightning. It's such a beautiful sight: that momentary flicker when the pitch-blackness, for an instant, looks like day. There is an excitement involved in the cognitive dissonance inherent in a light sky at night. (Maybe I'm part Inuit.) Even if it is only for a brief moment. Funny how thunderclouds seem to bring night to day, yet they can bring day to night.

That gets me thinking about light and dark both literally and as concepts. Is there a more powerful metaphor for our existence? It's ages old, but never overplayed. Light and dark -- it is the perennial metaphor from which all being springs. And since existence as we perceive it is the mind's great metaphor, it is no wonder why we identify with this mother and father of all symbolism. Darkness falls, it is all encompassing, but light always shines through. Have you ever tried to completely darken a room? It's almost impossible without solid walls or special curtains. But light, light so easily permeates. It seamlessly eradicates darkness, irradiates the abyss.

Darkness is the great receiver. The vessel that light enters and fills fully. Without the darkness to receive we would never see light. Do we see the air we breathe? Does fish from the other age-old symbol see the water in which it swims? Darkness creates the vessel of the void. Without it there is no there there. Not only does light need a void to fill, it needs something off of which to reflect. So our great vessel is illuminated with all the colors of the spectrum because the matter inside absorbs and reflects the light, emitting varying permutations of the pure photon stream. Light and dark and all that is seen and unseen exist in their interplay.

How would we perceive dark without light? How would we know light without the vessel of darkness? What is beyond? What is light without dark, what the mystics think of as "the boundless"? Some believe that God is so great that it exists beyond light and dark. That God is the boundless that preexists light. That light needs the void. The void is the great receiver of the divinity. And all of existence springs from the distillation of this divine light -- from its pure boundless form to its contained state within the subatomic particles that give rise to our reality.

But the boundless light just is. Its purpose is unknowable to us, here in this universe. To us, the darkened void creates purpose for the light. More than just being, the light illuminates, irradiates, creates. But at its essence, it simply is.

So I ask, not rhetorically, what is light without dark? What is content without form? What is being without purpose?