Golgonooza

                                                             "Fireside" 1956 by Winifred Nicholson New Year Snow by Frances Horowitz For three days we waited, a bowl of dull quartz for sky. At night the valley dreamed of snow, lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings flailing the hills. I dreamed a poem, perfect as the first five-pointed flake, that melted at dawn: a Janus-time to peer back at guttering dark days, trajectories of the spent year. And then snow fell. Within an hour, a world immaculate as January’s new-hung page. We breathe the radiant air like men new-born. The children rush before us. As in a dream of snow we track through crystal fields to the green horizon and the sun’s reflected rose.   It is no surprise that Frances Horowitz's publisher, Bloodaxe, chose a painting by Winifred Nicholson to adorn the cover of...

Elizabeth Krohn was on her way into her local Reform synagogue to hear Kaddish said for her beloved grandfather, who had died a year previously, when, in the parking lot, she was struck by lightning. She finds 'herself' outside herself - her body lying on the tarmac, and after assuring 'herself' that her two young children are being cared for, thinking herself dead, she follows a golden light upwards and will spend 'two weeks' in heaven before deciding to return to her body, and as a transformed person, pick up the strands of a very different life, some of whose outlines she has seen in her altered state.  She returns confident that death is simply a gateway to another modality of life, that we are accompanied in our life by a 'celestial double' and slowly through a cycle of reincarnated lives will reach a transformed state where we become the celestial companion of another soul. This unfolds from our perspective in a linear progression but from an etern...