May you have an illuminating Epiphany!
Here is a poem about the birth of the Solar
Deity's true avatar, and how those wise men that felt his coming and sought him
out, in the end, saw that with his birth came the death of the world they lived
in.
The flash of light reveals all the things
in the darkness, that once seen shall never be unseen again.
The Journey Of The Magi
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted,
refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor
and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack
of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns
unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high
prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all
night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate
valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of
vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the
meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves
over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces
of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we
continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too
soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say)
satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen
birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this
Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death,
our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
By T.S. Eliot from https://allpoetry.com/the-journey-of-the-magi
By James Tissot - Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum; Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 2006, 00.159.30_PS1.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10195787
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