Lumbre
"Santuario de Chimayo (NM)" - wood block print by Gustave Baumann. (Image courtesy of Jim Burklo)
It's that time of the year, when shadows fall long across the land. When turning leaves flutter in the breeze. When the cusp of day and night brings whispers of cool air over still-warm earth. It's that time of delectable effulgence radiating from mountain cliffs, from dry grass on brooding hills, from stone walls. When the smallest pebble glows on the ground, drawing attention with its stretching shadow.
I marinate in it here in Ojai, California, a verdant valley nestled between mile-high mountains running from southward-tilting sunrise to sunset. I've steeped in it on drives through fall-colored forests of oak and maple in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I've savored it on the golden flashing leaves of aspens and cottonwoods in the Southwest. I've been spellbound by its glow from the bark of redwood trees struck by slanting sunbeams in the Santa Cruz Mountains: the first time I can remember that sight was at the age of four on a Sunday drive with my parents.
It has haunted me for my entire life, but only lately have I claimed the term to express it:
Lumbre.
The word in Spanish has an alluring range of meanings. Light, but also splendor. Fire, but also firewood. The light of a burning match, but also the match. Lumbre connotes not only light, but the fire that generates it: not only fire, but its potential in the fuel that can release it.
Lumbre reflects the consciousness of another age, when people believed that the light of the seventh heavenly realm of perfect divinity made its way through the lower six heavens down to earth, and hid itself in the bodies and souls of people and things. That divine light, trapped in human hearts and even in those of trees, yearned to return to its source. The 14th-century German mystical preacher, Meister Eckhart, compared the soul to a spark rising from a wood fire at night, glowing and then extinguishing on its way to ecstatic reunion with the divine Light far above the darkness here below. The light is latent within the wood and within the soul. Fire releases the light inside the wood. Spiritual practice, in its many forms, releases the light inside our souls that longs to return to its Source.
I discovered the word as a consequence of my enchantment with Tierra Lumbre, as the landscape above Abiquiu, New Mexico, is known. It is a huge basin rimmed with steep red-orange and gold cliffs that seem to generate the ever-changing light that reflects from them. After hiking up one of the mesas, sitting on the glowing rock at its edge, lumbre soaks into me even as I contemplate with eyes closed.
In a deep hollow in Sisar Canyon above Ojai, bright sun spangles pale rounded boulders with high mountain water splashing around them. Arresting my attention, the lumbre from those boulders ignites the lumbre within me, in a yearning that satisfies itself with itself.
Here I attach an image of a wood-block by Gustave Baumann, one of the great Santa Fe artists of the early-to-mid 20th century. It is an aspect of the Santuario de Chimayo, a little adobe chapel in the New Mexico mountains that has been sacred to thousands of pilgrims over the past 200 years, myself included. Lumbre, infused in gnarly tree bark and dry grass and irregular sun-splash on adobe, leaps off the print like a lover embracing the viewer with open arms. It is New Mexican lumbre, flowing through Baumann's inner lumbre, flowing with the lumbre of deep bright ink onto paper, inflaming the lumbre within the print's admirers.
Lumbre: the light that makes artists, poets, and preachers ache with longing.
Lumbre: saying the word aloud delivers me into its rapture.
Lumbre: it exudes from the word itself.
The Rev. Jim Burklo serves as Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life, University of Southern California. This post is republished with permission from his blog, Musings, on ProgressiveChristianity.org.