“Life was a cosmic holiday.”

Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass was perfectly visible—either by the light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out from our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and color, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and the macrocosm were at length atoned—at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home—to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me—sense after sense indescribable, because no corresponding word, no likeness or imaginations exist wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed—yet ever expanding, ever making room to receive—was the conscious being where things kept entering by so many open doors! When a little breeze brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which responded their sweet TIN-TINNING**, myself the joy of the sense, and of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean upon which a ground-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new waves; yet the joy was ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.



--George MacDonald, from Lilith: A Romance