blue love

Islamic miniature depicting Muhammad's visit to Paradise from an 1808 Kashmiri manuscript of Bâzil's Hamla-i haydarî

Blue has been my favorite color for as long as I can remember. My security blanket as a child was a blue wool blanket trimmed with blue satin. I still have it. But, another blue image arose during a meditation recently: a blue flannelboard.

Flannelboards were a thing when I was a child. Mine was blue felt with a black backing. I had sets of flannel-backed items that I could arrange on the board to create a story. Many of these were Biblical images. Some were fairy tale images. Probably there were others.

When the recollection of the flanneboard arose, I was of course curious. What was the most salient feature? The board? The images on the board? My experience of creating stories? No. It was the blue. That was the feature that compelled my attention.

The word that came into the foreground of the experience was "firmament." This is not a word I use very often. Probably my only associations with it are from the Bible and from hymns. But "firmament" it was.

What does "firmament" mean?

In the context of the experience, the firmament was a blue expanse that was a dividing line that didn't divide. It was a border between material and immaterial, but it didn't divide those; it united them.

Historically, "firmament" had a similar meaning, but without the paradoxical overlay. Islam-- well as other, older religious traditions--postulates seven heavens or heavenly realms, each less dense than the previous. The seventh heaven was paradise. (Now you know what you are referring to when you say, "I was in seventh heaven!") The heavenly realm closest to earth was the firmament (raqi'a). (There are also seven heavens according to the Talmud, the first being raki'a.)

This first heaven was made of water, and the firmament separated the waters of earth from the waters of the first heaven. We might call it a permeable boundary.

So what's love got to do with it?

The affect that accompanied my experience of the firmament was love. Turning attention to the feeling, everything became visible through a filter of blue love. At first, the blue love was filmy, translucent but not transparent. As I paid attention to it and allowed it its way, it became perfectly clear. Absolutely transparent blue love.

Then I noticed there was a flavor of Father to the blue love. Because our perception of capital-f Father is related to our fathering parent, I could sense a presence of my father, whose eyes were bright blue.

As I navigated the experience, I saw myself as a child roaming the woods and fields of home. No one followed me. No one bothered me. I simply went wherever I went, free to roam as long as I eventually came home. And then I saw it, the blue love. It has been there through my entire life, and it has a function. It is a guardian.

Am I saying something about the absolute truth of blue love? Not at all. You may never experience blue love. It came as a surprise to me, not something I had heard of or thought about. This was simply something my soul needed to understand. And now I have shared it with you. Perhaps it will spark your own exploration. May it be so.