Light is the way of joy: WHERE TRUST WOULD TAKE ME & YOU
Beauty is about angle. While we worry about its physical appeal withering over time, accepting that everything changes can sooth our anxiety. Shift your perspective and you will find beauty. It is always somewhere there. Lurking behind the translucent window curtains or the holes between the shutters, the light’s flickering appeal seduces those open to join in the revelry of appreciation. No need for anyone else’s presence, your solitude can immerse in it. Wholly like in holy water of divinely purifying force, TRUST WOULD TAKE ME & YOU beyond our limitations.
Light is the way of joy
To see beauty, it needs light. Light showed me the way of joy gushing from the simplest things. And so, sun is the path to discovery. Its golden brightness journeys the round of a passing day. Just watch, as I snapped the above video from a mindful snippet of time passing at my home — metaphorically enlightening.
Wonder and wander, this is how great it feels.
Take you time and do it slowly, that is the trick. Bathe in this changing beauty and accept its visual ending with the sunlight’s moving way (or someone disrupting your indulgent solitude). This is the continuity of change we cannot stop, unless we close our eyes and minds to it unveiling in front of us or we die. Blindness of the mind equals death to me. Remember you can keep the beauty in your mind well after it actually ceases to manifest.
TRUST WOULD TAKE ME & YOU TO LIGHT
I wrote about light a lot here on La Muse Blue. I conceived countless poems on its enchanting powers, still I cannot let it pass between my fingers as it comes back, over and over. Insistent, waiting in the pocket of my mind, hungry to include more wholesome joy in the lustrous pearl necklace of my life. Each pearl, a year, round and finite, yet weaving around my neck on a string like the span of my life. Even at night natural light does not sleep. The sun whispers ballads through its reflection on the moon. An eternal cycle of renewal and death. Sun appears and hides, the moon follows, infinitely.
Find the path
Art is open, in it imagination has no limits, therefore art can expand our horizons of consciousness. Truth sparkles in front of us. Just pay attention to its passing signs floating around our senses, like a barge on a lake — from dusk to twilight.
Nature offers countless of mundane truths. That is set in stone, although Nature teaches us that nothing is permanent. Light travels over its surface, painting this canvas with its own cast of colors, shades, and thus shapes the natural form with its creative hand of continuous change.
Pixelwald Turicum is a light and music installation in the permanent collection of Kunsthaus Zürich in the 2021 inaugurated Chipperfield Wing. The 15 minute loop was conceived by a creative group lead by Swiss visual artist Pipilotti Rist. Her experimental installation art fills your heart with colors and opens the soul to an open feeling of enchanted bliss. I recommend visiting for a full immersion in the beauty of this collaborative magic light forest. A garden of joy to some minds open to experience fully what it means. The musical scores in synchrony with the changing lights – calming blues, purple sparks, warming golden hues in yellows, in loops of mesmerizing beauty of change sensually captivated me and many wandering through its enlightening path.
Trust in patience and the distracting force of travelling across incompatible time zones took me to another installation of her immersive collective soul work in Downtown Los Angeles. Purely by chance, a poem in the hall, and later having some spare time after a classical performance at Frank Gehry’s marvelous Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were directed by a MOCA employee to the art institution’s other building still having tickets left for the day. There, I witnessed the global reach of art and was reminded of the powerful message I received earlier before traveling. The Pipilotti Rist Collective exhibited a smaller piece of the very same light installation there.
Humanity has invented many passtime tools to realize and savour the beauty of change. Forest bathing in Japan, the swirling dance of the sufis, flower arranging, gardening, meditation on loving kindness, a great story (a fairytale, myth or novel), there is so much we could do to enhance our perception of wonder in life. I tried many of them, yet light turned to be my greatest, brightest teacher of beauty’s fragile vulnerability. This effortless messenger delivers the assured, yet shifting reality through highlighting change.
We seek connection
Contradictions puzzle us, yet it is all about their woven interaction. Not isolated in the sun’s own shine, but related in connection with the varied surfaces on and beyond the Earth, light plays in tandem with what it encounters.
Music also reflects the beauty of change as does nature with its seasonal blush. Light tunes take turns with dim, sombre keys. A piano can move slow or fast, but any instrument played by a human hand has a pattern of rhythm conducted by sensibility instilled perhaps by nature in us if we trust its guidance. Sensibly, the wind whirls, the trees rustle and so does the grass, water ripples, an echo vibrates through a gorge. We are part of nature’s vibrations.
The freedom to choose our attitude is our most precious gift
Sometimes the stark difference, some see in it a flaw while others charm, moves us. Yet, as in art, no limits can be imposed on human imagination. Perhaps, this is our most precious gift. The freedom to choose our attitude. Liberating our minds from uncontrollable fate, why being attached to unpredictable outcomes?
A painter’s brush, like the Chinese-French Zao Wou-ki can transcend East-West concepts in mesmerizing gusts of energy whirling through and over his calligraphic murals. Or like Georgia O’Keefe, later in her transformative career, enlightens us through her pure captures of simple beauty in nature. Even in noisy cities, her brush caught the silent whispers of transcendence. Her Curvy Winter Road I. (photo bellow) mesmerizes me to an almost ecstatic sensation of void. Not loneliness, but expansive joy. Perfection looking simple, but it is not. Only a genius with clear perception skills could conceive and interpret the harmony between the black road on the snow white canvas. Like life’s journey, the thick line narrows nearing the end of the canvas at the far upper edge of the canvas.
Nature’s manifold forms point at symbols of life and death on every turn. An aware mind open to gaze and inter-relate when it is not limited an inexhaustible variety manifests through our creativity.
Timelessness of art decoding universal messages
Monet knew all about the power of light. In his London paintings (such as on the photo below), the calm light contrasts the active reality inside the Parliament. Shifting our gaze to the so called contemporary art (I would keep in mind Picasso’s take: “To me, there is no past or future in art. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past: perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.”) of Tadao Ando, his architecture always considers the available and changing light and its affective beauty. As I mentioned earlier, Georgia O’Keefe penetrated the depths of light over time. After battling her own depression, she healed on a sunny island and later moved into the desert where she created her most profound works. One does not experience more sunlight than in the desert.
Ignorance was never a remedy to suffering, it is a shadow of refusal to put an effort into opening the book of one’s heart and mind. The changing nature of light is available to all of us to savor, to inhale beauty of impermanence. Just trust it. I DID NOT NOW WHERE TRUST WOULD TAKE ME, but it feels right to follow the well-lit path rather than darkness in the mind. My gratitude goes to patience, to not hitting publish anxiously to end this essay. About two weeks passed, a huge time zone shift, jet lagged zombie days, blossoming California hills, some mind widening art, with wine intoxified Malibu sunsets, all the way to the Yucatan jungle where I am sending off this piece to inspire your joy.
And I had to finish a book meanwhile. Quan Barry’s When I am Gone Look For Me In The East, will certainly illuminate a happy way to anyone accepting and open to joyful life.
Such bright minds opened to light share/d its magic with us willing to appreciate it through art. We can apply this to real life. Seeing the world like a painter or a poet unveils beauty right in front of us that we might otherwise pass, overlook or just in a mindless rush snap in out digital memory, only to never reflect on the snapshot again. We are distracted by the sheer quantity, but we have the power of choice to control what we let in and how experience can affect our feeling of happiness.