Divine Aspirations

I love sunshine. Who does not? Sun gives us joy, plus we have had divine aspirations under its powerful rule. Beyond mere observation, just feel it, modern science proved that the less natural light (sun) we get, the lower our mood sinks. The seasonal mood disorder troubles the sensitive minds of Nordic natives, hence their compensatory high consumption of alcohol particularly during the winter months, fancily marketed as hygge. Here, in Central Europe as well as in Northern America we are not immune to the lack of daylight and so therapeutic lamps and Vitamin D drops come to aid our low altitude sinking down further.

I am beyond needy for sunlight, I thrive on it, I seek it. I am more addicted on its sublime touch on my skin in late spring and early autumn, nakedly caressing my body than anything else on our wonderful lively planet. Nature cannot subsist without the sun’s proportionate giving, and I am nature, you are Her too. I have divine aspirations. These offer me not just hope, they fill me with joy. A book I read recently The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram cannot more eloquently express my own intuitive experience of engaging with the natural world.

Him and her, the Sun and Nature, the most wonderful couple on and beyond the Earth. I envy their liberal yet reciprocal love. Either gives so much pleasure to us.

Our ancestors appreciated those mundane, ever available gifts, with more gratitude than our tech-savvy society does. Urban distractions and the smog hinder the sun, other stars and nature. The artificial parks are not enough, the wilderness offers more. Just read Walden by Henry David Thoreau and other sublime hymns to wilderness to feel that magic pull. I am an animal and you are too, just slightly different species from the wolves. Yet we share so much with them. It is just our ego that alienates us from the wild as something primitive.

But how comes that our “developed” society is less happy than people in those natural lands like Bhutan, as those further from the wild tend to suffer more. It is not just about longevity, quantity, but about the quality of joy, not just life overabundant materially. For all we need is safety, shelter, clean water and food to subsist and genuine relationships. Doesn’t power, influence, money hinder exactly that truth, that genuine expression of camaraderie, no class boundaries, no racial profiling, just pure connection. Alright, enough wine for now.

Back to rationality. Perhaps only those wary of its dangerous rays and age creasing marks on the skin shy away from his reach. Sun is masculine for some reason, perhaps because the moon, luna was symbolically viewed as feminine, not the source of light and heat, a mere reflection in the paternalist society’s parade of order, we created gender even of that which is genderless.

Enough politics and feminism, below is my sun-charged poem on Divine Aspirations.

A glaring faraway fire

A ball thrust high and falling

Below the horizon at winter’s five

Running further on the leash of summer

Ruled by a divine routine of life’s calling

The hauty clock guarding time

Order for the mind’s wild vast fields 

The artists roam so free, but in strife

Like van Gogh’s Arlesien life

Lucky, never lonely, always

In the company of other stars

So one feels a ravenous desire

Burning the wanting soul alive

Ripped apart flesh into hopeless ash

The heart is a thorn, you fool

Imprisoned by your own gloom

But I swoon to climb high

reaching beyond the clouds

through pains, sorrows, feeling nigh

Flapping my wounded wings

Towards the sun with the birds

~Joy

There are countless songs on burning (Ludovico Einaudi In a Time Lapse, in Georgia Cecile’s sensuous voice or Elvis, the greatest of greats in music) for some reason or no reason, we associate passion, desire, love’s initial fire even with that of incineration of a firm substance into the finite ashes. The speeding up of decay, closer to death or nothingness. As dark this may seem, it is beautiful, which a dimmed light is more than a bright sharp day, isn’t it visually? Like a poem by Beaudelaire, the angst of Rimbaud’s unrequited love, there is beauty in this necessity of life and death cycles going on and on.