The Stranger In The Amber: Bedtime Story

Hello loves.

Join me tonight for story time.

Tonight's story is inspired by the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 77, and the teachings of Meister Eckhart read through a Gnostic lens.

Sleep well, dear ones.

Transcript

Hello dear ones and welcome to today's story the stranger in the amber his name was thomas and he was a glass blower and he had a reputation throughout the city for producing the clearest glass anyone had ever seen other glass blowers produced glass you could see through but thomas produced glass that you seemed to see with as though looking through it sharpened the eye rather than merely permitting it passage no one could explain this technique including thomas himself he had learned the craft from his uncle used the same sand and the same furnace and yet the glass came out different some quality of his attention perhaps some quality of his stillness he was not a gregarious man he had one close friend a physician named lucius with whom he drank wine on thursday evenings and argued about everything lucius was a rationalist of the old school good-humored precise gently contemptuous of anything he couldn't measure thomas was not religious in any conventional sense but he had all his life a feeling he couldn't shake that the world was inhabited by something the world didn't quite contain like an overflow like a river that exceeds its banks the argument came to a head one thursday evening when lucius made a pronouncement that thomas found for reasons he couldn't immediately articulate completely wrong the south said lucius pouring wine is a product of the body when the body ends the south ends this seems to me simply obvious well it seems to me simply wrong said thomas explain thomas was quiet for a moment he held his wine cup and looked at the lamplight moving in it he said at last there is a moment you know it if you know the craft when the glass is neither fully molten nor fully set it is in between states and in that moment if your attention wanders at all if you are thinking about something else if you are anywhere other than exactly there the glass feels it i don't know how but the glass feels it and the thing goes wrong you are describing skill said lucius concentration i am describing something that was present before i was skill said thomas when i was an apprentice young terrified of the furnace still fumbling there were moments even then when something came through the work that had nothing to do with my ability my uncle noticed it before i did he said that one is not from you i didn't understand him then and now thomas set down the cup now i think that what i do with glass is not so different from what the world does with us we are the glass we are being blown the question of whether the glass is the breath is an interesting question but i think it mistakes what the breath is for lucius smiled his tolerant smile you are saying there is a craftsman i am saying there might be a craft whether there is a craftsman in the way you mean a person sitting somewhere with intentions and preferences i know not but that the world has the structure of something made rather than something merely accumulated this i believe because your glass comes out clear because the world is legible said thomas because when i am very still in the moment before the glass sets i understand something i cannot understand at any time any other time and what i understand is not nothing it is the most something i ever feel lucius was quiet then with a generosity that was his best quality he said tell me more and thomas did not easily because the thing resisted language but honestly over many thursdays over many years he spoke of the stranger he had become aware of not an external stranger nothing so intense as a vision or even a voice more like an interior witness a quality of awareness that watched his thoughts the way he watched his glass with interest but without attachment to any particular outcome he had started to notice it first in the furnace room in those necessary silences between operations then in the very early mornings and eventually at odd moments during the day a flash of something that seemed to observe his life from a perspective slightly outside it with a clarity that bore no resemblance to his ordinary muddled self-assessment he had not chosen this awareness he had not cultivated it with discipline or prayers it had simply grown the way a fire grows if you stop smothering it what does it want? Lucius asked once thomas thought about this i don't think it wants it's more like it already has it is more like an arrival than a journey that makes no sense i know but lucius who was old now and less certain of his certainties than he had once been nodded slowly he had his own version of this a quality of presence he'd noticed at the bedside of dying patients something that seemed to enter the room as everything else left quiet and unhurried not distressing but deeply strange he had always labeled it a projection of his own psychology now he was no longer entirely sure thomas died in the winter of his 71st year he had been unwell for some months and faced it with the equanimity he had always been not the performance of equanimity not the clenched composure of a man afraid to feel but the genuine article the kind of equanimity that can hold grief and peace in the same hand without dropping either his last significant conversation was with lucius who sat with him in the small room above the glassworks are you afraid? Lucius asked a lot less than i expected thomas said he was quiet for a moment outside they could both hear the distant sound of the furnace being tended by thomas's apprentice do you remember what i once told you about the moment between states when the glass is neither molten nor set i remember i think that is where i am his voice was entirely calm and i find i am curious rather than afraid curious to see what the glass becomes lucius who did not believe in anything he couldn't measure held his old friend's hand and said nothing but he felt in that room the particular quality thomas had spent 40 years trying to describe the overflow the presence that exceeded its container and he was despite himself not entirely surprised you