Queen of the Night

The Queen of the night takes over my tropical paradise on special summer evenings without warning. Night blooming jasmine has invaded the land and spread everywhere. This green, invasive, fast growing plant lines the driveway and forms thick impassable hedges, seeming quite commonplace and ordinary.

Like all of us, the jasmine has her moments of splendor. She will never reveal herself fully in the daytime. Her majesty comes when she releases her romantic fragrance in the evening, perfuming the mountainside with spicy vanilla. She is anything but subtle. Small tubular pale yellow flowers trumpet an aphrodisiac, sending strong notes to dominate the air waves. On those mesmerizing moonlit nights, the queen announces herself with a swift intoxicating jolt.

I am only too happy to take her majesty in as she sends her sultry, damp, exotic smell wafting through my open bedroom window. Reminding me of the way my mother smelled to me as a child when she and my father had a special date, life has dressed up to go out for the evening.


Copyright © Bentley Kalaway 2009

Clarity

Clarity is never done, never over with. It moves in spirals, each cyclical completion patiently answering one question while gently introducing another. Clarity is the eternal gift giver, recycling all of our moments until they come back around empty and uncharged, now able to evoke only gratitude and exude only peace.

When the space within us and between us is clear, we become more. More real, more now, more true. More in touch with our own exquisite and subtle detail which is suddenly brought into breathtaking focus for the duration of that miraculous second, that gap between our thoughts where clarity turns on all the lights and makes itself at home at the same time that it scurries out the door to continue it’s earnest spiral quest. There’s a multitude of experiences to gather and much to learn. Then clarity will return.

Copyright © Bentley Kalaway 2009

The Aroma of Trust

Trust smells like sun dried sheets you crumple into your arms and bury your face in. The scent is of a world uncomplicated, pure and childlike, nourishing in its simplicity. The aroma of trust has no edges to fall off of. It presents no circular staircases to climb. It is as pungent as fields of grasses and flowers that stretch as far as the eye can see in all directions. No places to hide and nothing to hide from. Trust smells like waking from the most delicious dream of absolute knowing, having found perfect guidance and secret blessings, which pour into your being a sweet completion, like stirring vanilla into warm pudding.


Copyright © Bentley Kalaway 2009