Solar Consciousness

My friend writes me fairytales sometimes that always turn out to be far more than just some little entertainment. Like all myths, they come right out of the collective unconscious and always mean more than they might seem to at first. He wrote one for me back in September of last year that ended up tying in not only to real things in my life that had immediately preceded it, it also became significant again this past week as I was reading The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism. In the fairytale, he described a city and a well and emeralds and other things, and it turns out, as I learned from the book, that he perfectly nailed a highly mystic Sufi experience in his description and plot, without ever having heard of that particular experience at all. When I told him, he was like, “Well, awesome.” This is why I believe in God, people, and in spiritual things. I have had so many experiences where I unknowingly did something because it felt right, and come to find out I had just enacted some kind of high and hallowed thing. La ilaha illallah – there is no god but God – there is nothing but God.

In the fairytale, he cast me as the heroine, and I sang a little song at the well called The Flower of the Sun. I actually wrote it last night, at least the words, and it’s Sufi, too, and was inspired by the concepts in The Man of Light and in the fairytale. Here you go:

The Flower of the Sun

There is a rose the shade of copper
That grows in a garden on the upper
Gallery of an emerald house.
The columns there are set in rows
And open to the northern sky.
The house itself sits very high,
For its foundations stand astride
The sheer face of a mountainside.
There is a well in the garden’s center
That one can drink from if one enters
And ascends the house’s height.
The rose sits in an earthen pot
Set upon a balustrade.
The flower itself casts no shade,
For it is the distilled essence
Of the solar luminescence.
It is the Flower of the Sun,
And just as the world had begun,
It sprang forth from a tiny sprout,
And bloomed, and put the darkness out.

-Susan Brooks