On Luminosity: Embodying the Light this Solstice

"Never forget your real identity.

You are a luminous conscious stardust being forged in the crucible of cosmic fire."

Deepak Chopra

Happy Solstice, dear family! Whether you are in the Southern Hemisphere and it is the peak of the light for you, or you're in the Northern Hemisphere where we are in the midst of the darkest and longest nights, we are all given an opportunity to contemplate light on this day. For Summer Solstice, it is a beautiful opportunity to open to the light all around you, and for Winter Solstice, we are invited to become the light ourselves, to embody our radiance.

"Every being you encounter contains 14 billion years of radiance.

So each being you come across has had 14 billion years

of radiance compressed into it."

~ Brian Swimme

I am in North America. It is cold where I am. The snow has lasted for ages, simply refusing to melt. The sun begins its descent to the horizon before I feel I've barely begun my day, golden hour peaking in early afternoon. I often struggle with these dark nights, but I am reminded that it is an invitation to bring the light into my home, lighting candles, setting up twinkling lights, and kindling my inner light. It is an invitation to remember the luminosity that we already are.

The video at the end of this sharing is of Brian Swimme, one of my favorite evolutionary cosmologists, riffing on the glory of the radiance of the sun and what a teacher our central star is. He reminds us that "every being contains 14 billion years of radiance." That includes you. You are a part of that evolutionary story, a compression of 14 billion years of radiance.

As Rumi reminds us, "your radiance shines in every atom of creation yet our petty desires keep it hidden." We already are luminous beings. We sometimes dim or forget that light, but we are invited to remember and reveal that which we already are.

This Solstice, enjoy the transmissions and the beauty of light. Here are a few images that I captured or that a friend captured of me; may these quotes help this remembering of the light that you are. Deep in your bones you know you are made of stardust, born of the cosmos, interconnected with all that is. I invite you to take a moment, pause, receive some deep breaths, and open to your luminosity.

"Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object."

Joseph Campbell

"Even after all this time

the sun never says to the earth,

'You owe me.'

Look what happens with a love like that.

It lights the whole sky."

~ Hafiz

"Your radiance shines in every atom of creation yet our petty desires keep it hidden."

~ Rumi

"Beauty itself is not given to us by anyone;

it is a power we have within us from the gate, a radiance inside us."

Marianne Williamson

"Even if you haven’t used psychedelics, though, you almost certainly have still experienced this same livingness to all things in the world around you...a moment where the world around you took on a shimmery glow, colours suddenly appeared brighter, sounds louder and clearer, physical sensations amplified and, most notably, you could FEEL the world around you.... you could almost feel the luminosity of the world around you within, and you and the luminous rested in harmony as if you were one." ~ Shelley M White

"Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine

presence everywhere,

here and now."

Joseph Campbell

“The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.” ~ James Joyce

"Are we just a fragile atomic and molecular lattice suspended in the void, or is there something more to us than that? When we come to understand that space is a highly potentiated energetic medium shining with vast luminous force and shimmering with intrinsic sentience, this certainly engenders a completely different sense of what underlies our physical organism. This understanding can lead us to quite a different self image, to put it mildly. This infinite potential and radiance is continuous with who and what we are. Such a perspective gives solid scientific footing to a fundamentally abundance-based world view which is a much needed antidote to the scourge of nihilistic materialism and the fear and scarcity-based world view that our culture suffers from and which is a major contributory factor to our species collectively behaving in ways that are a menace to our living planet."

~ Mark Cummings, The Quantum Plenum

"Rest in the shimmering emptiness

That is the source of this world,

And remember who you are."

~ Lorin Roche,

The Radiance Sutras

"Dissolve into radiance"

Lorin Roche,

The Radiance Sutras

If you want to listen to Brian Swimme speak on the radiance of the sun, have a listen below. It's an older, low quality video, but what he shares is still beautiful. So many exquisite mysteries of the universe remain as we circle our central star. If you want to skip right to what lessons he learns about relationships from the sun, go to 4:07.