It seems that the human condition requires images. Reflection in material form of higher realities. I love to make patchwork quilts. Choosing a delicate balance between the pale and the dark squares of cloth to create an harmonious balance between living in the world, and seeing into the ‘Higher Place’ whence we all came and will eventually return. The patchwork shows the devolution of matter into light in the space of a few squares of symbolic colours, like a master artist illustrating Nature’s balance. Like the pans on the scales the ancient Egyptian goddess, Ma’at, uses to judge our hearts, requiring of the Pharaoh, representing all humanity to, “plough the land on both sides of the horizon”.

I chose a piece of dark blue cloth sprinkled with pictures of tiny white stars in a night sky. I held it up to a window. The sunlight shone through the white stars in the cloth. They took on the appearance of pin-pricks in the cloth, holes in our concept of reality. The light itself was indistinguishable from the pathway it shone through, holes in the darkness. Of course, when the fabric was manufactured, the printer had added blue pigment to the white cloth. To me, this became a reverse process of how the light shone through the darkness when the ‘Light’ was separated from the ‘Darkness’ on Creation-Day. But fabric printing is always done in the reverse, to create the obverse that we observe in our daily life in this sphere of existence. And the light kept shining through the doorway provided for it.

So, the cloth patches were combining in their predesigned pageant to symbolically tell me about this ultimate balance between ‘The World’, and ‘The Great Light’. They intuitively told me about that the greater reality they were reflecting. The cloth was like a doorway for spiritual light to penetrate our earthly darkness as long as the images we devise don’t become a dead metaphor like the scaffolding around a temple under construction. A temple that houses the altar to the Invisible God.

Honeycomb from a beehive has a thin wax covering over the golden distillation of the life-giving nectar refined by the bees for their sustenance. When light shines through the wax, you can see the golden spiritual essence that our words search to describe in vain, to reveal the inner light of everything. – Amanda F. Rooke.