My Wabi-Sabi Angel
"Absence of proof is not proof of absence." 18th Century Poet William Cowper
It all started with one of those random thoughts - ruminating tirades actually - that can sometimes over- take one in the process of getting dressed in the dark on a cold rainy morning. In a Joycean sequence of oddly connected thoughts I remembered growing up annoyed with my birth name (Delia is my middle name and one I much prefer). What triggered the memory was an incident yesterday in which someone who was reading my name from a chart mispronounced it, as usually happens. Not only do people get the first name wrong but the surname as well. I suppressed a sigh and responded politely but inside was this gnawing feeling of not really being me when I hear this alien name spoken aloud. Apart from the lifelong frustration of people getting the name wrong, the saint whose name I bear and whose excessive desire to 'serve' ruined her health and brought on her early death at age 24, was held up to female children as the "ideal" way to lead one's life. (No wonder I embraced Taoism and Buddhism instead!) Now the memory of yesterday's annoyance had brought the tediously virtuous saint to mind and intruded on my morning. After a moment's thought, I wished her well and once again turned my attention to other matters.My Wabi-Sabi Angel
A few hours later the saint's name came to my attention again , this time in an article I was reading on a Llwellyn publication website about Angels. The article is by Chantel Lysette of whom I knew nothing until I read the article in which she related a possible Angel encounter that happened to her in a churchyard, the church itself bearing the name of my "patron saint". Of course. Coincidences do get my attention! The saint in question would not be found in the top ten or even top fifty list of most popular
saints and yet here she was intruding on my early morning and now again in the midst of an article on Angels. I happened to glance at the computer clock just at that instant: 9:44. Time prompts like this happen to me daily and recur in many different contexts. Darned if the author didn't go on to discuss her own experience with numbers that she associates with Angels, numbers like 4: 44 and 444 coming up again and again in her life. I also encounter multiples of 11 daily in the form of 'time prompts' from digital clocks (11:11, 3:33, 4:44, etc.), on store receipts (77.77), on car licence plates (65 92 74...), on the totals at the petrol station (44.11), etc. I, too, have associated these numbers with an Angelic energy, one that I often wish would be a bit more specific about what the message is supposed to be. To me it feels like a kind of protective presence but that could be pure projection on my part. There is no way to know for certain what, if anything, the number thing means but I can't see any harm in tentatively ascribing it to what feels like a sentient energy. In any case, the realisation was dawning on me that all of these little things were adding up to synchronicity. What was the link? My stained glass Angel? I love my stained glass Angel but I have no name for her so I tend to think of her as the 11:11 Angel. Something finally clicked and I suddenly turned my attention to my stained glass Angel and really LOOKED at her for the first time. I mean, I've had this Angel since 1997 and she has moved house with me six times since then but I never really SAW her until now. Like RIGHT NOW.
saints and yet here she was intruding on my early morning and now again in the midst of an article on Angels. I happened to glance at the computer clock just at that instant: 9:44. Time prompts like this happen to me daily and recur in many different contexts. Darned if the author didn't go on to discuss her own experience with numbers that she associates with Angels, numbers like 4: 44 and 444 coming up again and again in her life. I also encounter multiples of 11 daily in the form of 'time prompts' from digital clocks (11:11, 3:33, 4:44, etc.), on store receipts (77.77), on car licence plates (65 92 74...), on the totals at the petrol station (44.11), etc. I, too, have associated these numbers with an Angelic energy, one that I often wish would be a bit more specific about what the message is supposed to be. To me it feels like a kind of protective presence but that could be pure projection on my part. There is no way to know for certain what, if anything, the number thing means but I can't see any harm in tentatively ascribing it to what feels like a sentient energy. In any case, the realisation was dawning on me that all of these little things were adding up to synchronicity. What was the link? My stained glass Angel? I love my stained glass Angel but I have no name for her so I tend to think of her as the 11:11 Angel. Something finally clicked and I suddenly turned my attention to my stained glass Angel and really LOOKED at her for the first time. I mean, I've had this Angel since 1997 and she has moved house with me six times since then but I never really SAW her until now. Like RIGHT NOW.
I have photographed my Angel several times but the photos do not scan well so I decided to use other images of Angels to illustrate this post. Below is a very similar Angel to mine. It's from a website called Aniyah's Angels. This Angel is more professionally executed than my Angel but this is the closest example to the style and design of my Angel that I could find on the web. The artists offer a wide selection of colour combinations.
This free-standing stained glass Angel above can be found HERE
My Angel is not physically perfect, something I had previously failed to notice - unless perhaps I picked it up subliminally at the time I found her. The colours of my Angel's dress are muted and her wings are colourless frosted glass. As I gazed at her just now I began to notice some of her peculiarities: her skirt of muted lavender and pale blue panels is longer on one side than on the other. The soldering of the lead joins is not the work of a master but of a student. Other things that are obviously meant to be symmetrical, aren't. And that's when it 'hit me between the eyes', literally! I was seeing her through my 'third eye', the organ of spiritual discernment. And the recognition finally dawned on me: she's a Wabi-Sabi Angel! And had I not just published a post on May 25 about being a Wabi-Sabi psychic, one who sees the perfection of our life's path including all the detours, potholes, and barriers we must work around? How wonderful that my lovely Angel is perfectly imperfect, a visual reminder that life unfolds in the way we need for our greater growth and spiritual development to proceed.
My dear Angel is also a genius, I'm convinced. She contrived for me to find her in one of the unlikeliest places on the planet in a city I had not wanted to move to and she was well hidden on a dusty under-shelf of unsold and rejected items in a shop storeroom. But despite all that, she called out to me in such an unmistakable way I knew I was going to find my Angel on that day and in that particular shop full of stained glass sailing ships, stained glass windows, experimental pieces, and a lot of kitsch! Had I stopped in the main room of the studio and not continued my search, I would never have found her. But she implanted such certainty in me that I kept looking. The artist who owned the studio seemed quite surprised that I wanted the dusty and rejected Angel. Now, 17 years later, I finally understand why. He saw her as imperfect and not the best work that his apprentices had done. When no one bought her at Christmas, he had hidden her away not expecting anyone to buy her.
The one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that I love her face. Actually its just a shape as in the photo above, like an up-side-down tear drop made of pale beige-gold striated glass. There is something compelling about this featureless face. There is just this lovely oval shape through which I feel I can see something of the eternity in which her spiritual counterpart dwells.
This morning has been a miniature journey from the house-cleaning 'catch up' day I had planned to this epiphany about looking and really SEE-ing that which IS right in front of me. It's nice to be awake at last. Thank you, Wabi-Sabi Angel.
© Delia O' Riordan 2012
If you would like to learn about Edward Burne-Jones or Andy Lakey 's Angels you'll find books on both HERE.
Link for When Angels Whisper (article) by Chantel Lysette: HERE
Images: Angels by E.C. Burne-Jones, courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons.
