Angels

Firstly, how beautiful is the statue pictured, from a cemetery in Dresden? I love it. (Thank you to Veit Hammer on Unsplash.com.) It is not exactly the picture to go with this poem I wanted to share, but it was too beautiful not to use it.

You could perhaps raise some theological quibbles with this poem, but it also glances off a number of philosophical ideas that we have discussed in a group I am. One being the nature of reality, and the other subjective experience. One thing we can be sure of though, if we're going to claim anything about the bible, is that angels do exist, and yet we can't (or most people mostly can't) detect them, so there's that.

ANGELS,
by Mary Oliver

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads.

I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.