The Splendor of
That Auspicious Interior Light
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The Upanishads say:
Where there is no darkness, nor night
nor day, nor being nor non-being, there is the
auspicious. One alone, absolute and eternal. There
is the glorious splendor of that light, from whom
in the beginning sprang the ancient wisdom.
The inner light is the goal. God is the goal. Wisdom is the goal.
What truly lives on? Wisdom. . . . Nothing is going
to last forever. Everything is temporary.
This wisdom is God. This wisdom is light.
Swami Chidvilasananda Resonate with Stillness
Introduction
I began this project in early November, 2021 and now it's early December; during that time a new Covid variant, named Omicron, has flashed onto the International Scene, and at least 19 States in the US have reported cases, including, of course, New York State. I am mentioning the new variant here because for the past nearly two years I have been making "STAY AT HOME" photographs and Pandemic inspired projects; and the project before you now continues in that genre. Most of the photographs you will be seeing have been made inside my house; two of the 17 images were made of the meadow which is just beyond our backyard.
For the past two years I have limited my subject matter to whatever I see inside my house and to whatever I see happening in the meadow. It has been a compelling challenge, seeing photographically familiar subject matter in new, perhaps deeper ways. I have taken comfort in this challenge from the example of my mentor, Giorgio Morandi, who painted the same objects and landscapes throughout his entire life. (See my three Morandi inspired projects: Still Life, The Light of Memory, The Letter Morandi Wrote To Thelonious Monk)
I have, as usual, written commentaries on selected images in this project, and in one of the commentaries I wrote about something that happened this summer which impacted the way I have been thinking about the idea of "interior things," the invisible" and how I relate to our meadow and our house--its interior space and the things inside that space.
Interestingly, the word "photo-graph" means "writing with light," and certainly making photographs and writing about them has helped me stay in touch with That Auspicious Interior Light. My photographic practice, conjoined with my meditation practice, has itself become a means by which I have been contemplating the ancient yogic teachings and my most deeply felt personal experiences.
Art most importantly has been about making visible the invisible, shedding light on the unseen; and in that regard I am more interested in making photographs that function (for me) as True, living Symbols than I am making photographs about the things I photograph.
Symbols are for me about a realm meaning that resides deep within the Heart; symbols are about Truth, That ancient wisdom wisdom which emerges from deep within the divine Self; and the practice of yoga is about "turning within." Making symbolic photographs supports my yogic practices, which of course includes meditation, and my yogic practices enrich my photographic practice by helping me see with the "Eye of the Heart."
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Christmas is just a few weeks away as I write this introduction in early December, and my wife Gloria and I are wondering if, because of Omicron, Jessica and our grandson River will have to cancel their plans to fly from Milwaukee to visit us here in Canandaigua, NY on Christmas Eve. After living the past two years with the ever present Pandemic nothing is for sure, Everything is temporary. The outer world seems to be getting crazier and more dangerous every day; and the very planet itself is struggling to stay alive due. We humans have poisoned the air, water and land by so many toxins that scientists are now saying the planet is beyond repair. All we can do now is try to hold things in check; prevent our situation from getting worse. It is a very dark time in our country, and throughout the world. And yet the yogic sages tell us the Light of Consciousness pervades every created thing even if we don't have the desire or capacity to see it.
Since I began practicing Siddha Yoga Meditation in 1987 I have focused particularly on the yogic teachings that say everything in this Universe is a form, or manifestation of divine light: the Light of God, the Light of the Self, the Light of Grace. When grace inspires my Creative Process, those photographs, which seem to come to me spontaneously--as if gifts from the universe--contain a certain "radiance," a subtle "life," a special kind of ineffable meaning that seems to originate from a place that is beyond my mind, my intellect. I have identified those kinds of photographs with the phrase "True, living symbols," and I believe that symbols originate from within the most interior of all Places: the Heart, the most sacred of places in which the Self dwells.
Merely a brief glint or flash of light reflecting off a surface, or perhaps a certain quality of color, or a magical "glow" of light upon or within a thing will draw my attention to that which I would otherwise never have photographed. It is the light of grace which initiates in me the impulse to make a photograph; and it is grace which gives an image its creative power to function for me as a symbol, an image in which pictorial visual form is made sacred with divine presence, that same presence I feel exists within a landscape, Place, object, animal or person I have seen, felt, and photographed.
Welcome to the project, The Splendor of That Auspicious Interior Light. After the presentation of the photographs, below, I invite you to read my commentaries on selected images and the brief Epilogue which brings the project to a close.
The Photographs
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Image #1 Illuminated Plastic Bucket
Image #2
Image #3
Image #4 The Red Gift Bag
Image #5 Mr. Blue
Image #6
Image #7
Image #8 Garden Hat Shadow
Image #9
Image #11 Mr. Blue "helping" me work on THAT blog project
Image #12 Shelved boxes full of photographs
Image #13 Strings, Dried Plants, Silent Music
Image #14 Suspended Bird Feeder, the North Meadow & Pond, the Warm Light of Fall at Sunset
Image #15 Thistle and fog in the North Meadow
Image #16
Image #17
The Light of Creation
In 2011 my wife Gloria and I traveled throughout Turkey for two weeks during which time I had several remarkable experiences related to different forms of Islamic Sacred Art. The two years that followed were devoted to contemplating those experiences, studying Islamic Sacred Art and making a multi-chaptered photography project "An Imaginary Book."
There are many theories about the Creative Process, and the manifestation of the entire universe. One in particular, the Sufic theory of Recurrent Creation, reminded me of a similar theory from an ancient yogic text, The Pratyabijna-hrdayam, that was the foundation of the the philosophical school known as Kashmir Saivism. In his excellent book, The Splendor of Recognition, Swami Shantananda, a Siddha Yoga Meditation teacher, wrote about a fascinating theory of manifestation which speaks of a "Flashing Forth" of reality via abhasas, "that which flashes, illumines, appears, or manifests." I found his writing about this phenomenon particularly meaningful because I have often experienced that "flashing forth" in varying aspects of my life, and especially in relation to my creative process in photographic picture making.
I have provided an outline of the two theories of manifestation in The Light of Creation, a chapter from "An Imaginary Book." If you find the material interesting, you may want to explore two other related chapters: Ta'wil, and The Green Light of Sufi Travel. Also, I invite you to visit the chapter entitled Prayer Stones which contains several personal stories about my experiences in Turkey. One in particular, a visionary experience of interior light, relates directly to the theme I am exploring in this project.
Commentaries
on selected photographs
Click on the images to enlarge them
In the writings I have provided below, I have included personal stories that are directly associated with the images. The stories may or may not impact how you see or understand the images, and in this regard I must offer a few words of advise: I believe one should never depend on or be satisfied with what an artist says about their work, for they can only speak about their own meaning, their own experiences, or perhaps the intentions they were trying to visualize. Truth be told, images have a life of their own despite what artists say or intend. What's most important is getting in touch with what the work means to you.
My commentaries that follow speak of a very limited kind of meaning regarding the images, and indeed there are limits to what can be said about images that are functioning for me as a True, living symbol, for such images are essentially unknowable because of the limitations of the mind, the intellect and human language. Also, symbols are open-ended in terms of their potential meanings; as one lives and changes, so the images we contemplate will change when we return to them from time to time.
Therefore, when you feel moved enough to engage--enter into--an intimate relationship with any work of art, it is your responsibility to look within yourself for the meaning.
I have outlined in a blog page entitled Contemplation an approach to integrating one's meaningful experiences of a symbolic photograph. The essay also includes an explanation regarding the difference between commenting on a photograph and the process of contemplating symbolic photographs.
Regarding vessels, or containers
I have photographed many things over the past fifty-sixty years that have been filled with light or that radiate light. Photographs can be excellent vessels of light, objects which radiate light. And photographs can be alive with a very subtle form of creative energy--which I refer to as grace--energy that can transform a viewer in unexpected ways if he or she engages the image with real intention and enthusiasm.
The yogic sages tell us that our bodies are "temples" of the Soul, the divine Self, the Light of Consciousness. They say the Heart of every Human Being is the dwelling place of God, the "One alone, absolute and eternal Self" which exists in everyone. Similarly, the entire Universe is a vessel which is simultaneously a manifestation of God and the very embodiment of THAT divine Presence. I feel that presence in this image of a plastic bucket which appears to be full of light, mysterious visual energy, and space which is fascinatingly ambiguous.
Interestingly, the top of the bucket is hidden from view. Perhaps the bucket is open at the top, like the Native American Indian Tipi, which is simultaneously a circular "earthly container" and a "living [sacred] symbol" which provides the indwelling traveler a way to journey into the infinite vastness of that most luminous interior space: one's very own Heart.
(The words in quotes are above from an article: "The Native American Sense of the Sacred: The Tipi
as a Collective Transformational Vessel" by Joan Golden-Alexis.)
How wide is this container? The spatial characteristics of the image are difficult to determine. The hard-edged dark shape on the left side of the bucket (is it a label?) at first made the container appear thinner than it probably really is. When I noticed that the top and lower parts of the container continue beyond the label's hard edges I was then able to see how the left edge of the label dissolves gradually into an undefined, perhaps endless, ever expanding space. The bucket, then, appeared to me to be too wide.
The Yoga Vasishtha, a major Indian scripture, states: The world is as you see it. Swami Muktananda, the founder of the Siddha Yoga Path, elaborates on this teaching, below. He says:
It is your own vision that creates your universe. What you see
is your own thought perception, and your inner experience
of the world is the result of how you see it . . . Eventually
you should be able to see everything as an
expansion of your own Self.
To attain the true reality, you have to turn within and meditate
and attain the inner vision of the Truth. The yogis say that
a human being has three eyes. Two of them are physical,
and the third is subtle. Through the physical eyes
you see the world and through the subtle eye
[the Eye of the Heart] you see God.
Swami Muktananda, From the Finite to the Infinite, Vol. II
"Eye of the Heart" is a term Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
has used often in her talks and writings.
This red bag somehow migrated away from the large collection of gift bags that had accumulated over the years in our basement bedroom closet. I was attracted to this bag when I noticed, in the dark space between two slightly opened closet doors, the glints of light in the bag's shinny red surface. When I opened the closet doors further, to see more clearly inside, the bag insisted that I make this photograph!
It's important to receive gifts respectfully, and I consider this photograph a gift. And I think gifts should be wrapped in colored paper with ribbon and bows rather than placed inside a bag. There is little pleasure for me in pulling an unwrapped gift out of a bag. But this bag certainly did charm me when I saw it in the closet, behind nearly closed doors, with its shinny red color and sparks of light flying off into the surrounding darkness.
Because Christmas is just a few weeks away as I write about this image, it has occurred to me that the color red is emblematic of the Christmas Holidays, as is the color green. I have fond childhood memories of evergreen trees, sparkling with starlights and decorated with red apples. When I was ten years old, the first Christmas that followed my dad's death was haunted by an event involving our Christmas tree. (Click here and read story#7.)
The green color in this image reminds me of Christmas wrapping paper, of which we have many rolls, of all colors (but mostly red) stored in our basement bedroom closet next to the ever growing collection of gift bags which were given to us, and which we have collected and seldom ever re-use.
This image is difficult to get grounded in . . . however, on the right edge, I can see a glint of starlight reflected off of what appears to be a knife blade but more like is a piece of decorative chrome attached to an automobile.
Several layers of horizontal space are suspended vertically between two darker spaces at the top and bottom of the picture's frame. The imagery seems to emerge from the lower dark space and appears to be in a process of dissolving back into the dark space at the top.
The spatial ambiguity of this image, and its hovering on the edge of visual abstraction, fascinates me. Indeed, there continues to be lingering within our culture many of the 19th century assumptions about photographic images: primarily, that photographs are objective, mechanical, scientific records of fact--what was before the lens of the camera at the time of exposure. It has been my frequent experience, however, that the edge between representation and abstraction in photographic imagery is quite fragile. The photographs can merge both the seen and the unseen, fact and manifestations of our imaginative mind, is (for me) a wonderful thing, and should be carefully and consciously recognized and experienced with fascination.
However, remaining open to the potential and deeper hidden meanings that may want to emerge from within an image is very difficult for the ego aspect of the mind; it (the ego) wants to be in control and protect itself from the unknown. Images that function as True, living symbols are in fact about the unknown and yet they offer potentially profoundly moving experiences of meaning when they are engaged with adventurous enthusiasm and deep, concentrated attention.
This image is similar to the one I just wrote about in the way that its visual space is not immediately grounded in the material world, the realm of the recognisably familiar which permits us to "know" what we are perceiving. When we think (assume) we know something we close the door on an opportunity to learn something about our own interior life.
Am I looking deep into space, here, in this image? Am I looking at a flat surface upon which colored light and shadows are being projected? In the far right third of the picture space there appears to be an arching window or doorway, and it seems to be repeated again in the central section of the photograph, though it is lower in the frame and reduced in scale.
The luminous blue and blue-green lights in the the dark space on the left are very attractive to me. Their mysterious presence surprises me. The colors were, I think, what may have inspired me to make this photograph. The blue light reminds me of Swami Muktananda's life-transforming experience of the "sparkling and scintillating . . . light of the inner Self," the "Light of Consciousness" which he often referred to as "the Blue Pearl." (See my project: The Blue Pearl.)
I was drawn to making this image by the way the low, ground-level light from our basement window seemed to be pointing at and isolating the the plastic wind-up chicken timer and the blade of the paper cutter. The "chicken" seems to be looking closely at the blade even as its shadow is being cast upon the blade; and the arrow on the timer is pointing to "0" minutes. In a somewhat humorous way a rather dark narrative is being hinted at in this image which invokes a vivid memory of an experience I had when I was maybe five or six years old during a weekend visit with my cousin, Bucky, who lived on a farm . . . with cows, pigs and chickens.
I like the way the bright highlights or glints of light are suspended within the white plastic surface of the timer. The red form on top of the "chicken's" head, which presumably represents the fleshy growth known as a comb, has contributed to the invocation of that same childhood memory I mentioned above: I associate the red comb with blood.
"Mr. Blue," our sweet, five-year-old stray cat we adopted from Lollypop Farm (Humane Society) just two months ago, is hovering in the dark corner of the daybed in our basement bedroom. Gloria and I think he may have had a difficult time as a stray out in the world during the Pandemic. He is very afraid of noises he hears that are not yet familiar, and he hides from visitors to our house. He is very loving toward me. He loves to play ball especially, and is remarkably poised with great athletic ability.
The daybed is covered with a heavy, blue, quilt-like material. A glint of light in Mr. Blue's right eye has revealed his presence to me as he glanced up to see who walked into the room with a camera. In my previous project, THAT Ineffable, Invisible, Interior Presence I included a picture of the same daybed with the same blue cover on it. The surface of the quilt was covered with lots of little paw prints in that earlier photograph. Mr. Blue has now made the daybed "his own."
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Mr. Blue likes to sit on my lap as I type the text for my blog projects. He often jumps up in front of the computer screen and just stands there until I do something to move him out of my view. I took the photograph below when I was working on the "THAT" blog project. I took the image below.
(Note: just moments after I wrote about the image above, Mr. Blue jumped up in front of the computer and put his paw on my keyboard which made my blog page go spinning out of control on the screen . . . )
*
The green leaves in this image are being turned warm by the setting sun of an earlier, very nice fall day. It is the first week of December as I write this commentary; there are no longer leaves hanging on the trees. Indeed, we had a wind storm a few nights ago (with gusts of 50 mph) that removed the last of the clinging leaves on the tree next to our deck. ~ The tall multi-colored grasses, plants and flowers which filled the meadow behind our house have since been cut down by a man who drove a tractor over the entire meadow space pulling two large flat-bed machines which made chilling sounds of whirling blades.
I have been photographing the Meadow, its two ponds and the tapering woods in the background continually since we moved to our new house in Canandaigua, NY in the summer of 2008. (See my ongoing series: Meadow Photographs.) At first I was infatuated with the privilege of living in this very special location. Then gradually, as my relationship to the meadow grew in depth with the constancy of my watching and photographing it, I began to have the feeling that the space was pervaded by a transcendent presence, a "roundness of being." Over time, the meadow has become, for me, a sacred Place.
This past summer (2021), thirteen years after I first started photographing the meadow, my relationship with the meadow was affected by some surprising new developments which I want to write about, below, before I complete my commentary on the image above.
Regarding invisible drain pipes
Somewhere, buried beneath the meadow--perhaps one or two feet deep--there could be as many as eighty PCV drain pipes, 4 inches in diameter, that extend away from each of the forty houses in our "meadow community" and out into the meadow, "daylighed" possibly, at the edge of one of the two ponds. And, perhaps--we don't know--one or two of those pipes could be ours.
The pipes are called, I believe, storm drain pipes. They are attached to our "perimeter drains" at the back of our house. If there were a very heavy rain storm and the perimeter drains cannot handle all the water from the downfall, the water flows through the perimeter drains to the storm drain pipes which then carry the excess water out into the meadow, perhaps to one of the ponds.
If a blockage occurs anywhere in the drainage system, the water collected by the perimeter drains could back-up and flood over the basement floor, which is a concrete slab about 4-6 inches thick that sits or "floats" on a bed of gravel.
I knew nothing about the drain system and the storm drain pipes before this past summer (2021). And I didn't understand that the meadow itself had a drain system belying its natural beauty. A network of large corrugated metal pipes and grates have been buried underground to protect the meadow itself from flooding. Excess water is taken by the those pipes away from the housing development and down the large hill to Canandaigua Lake.
This summer Canandaigua experienced two record-breaking rain storms, and our next-door-neighbor experienced two major floodings of her basement (four inches of standing water with each flood). Her house was built the same year as ours (2007-08), so it was her flooded basement which awakened us to the real possibility that we too could possibly experience a flood in our basement.
"Why, or how did that happen to our neighbor's house?"
"What can we do to avoid that from happening to our house?"
After talking to our neighbor, and other neighbors, the builders of our meadow development, and several contractors and plumbers about basements, drain systems, pipes in the meadow, floodings, etc. . . . it seems our best option to protect ourselves from a flooded basement is to install a sump pump.
The house we purchased in 2008 it was being used as a "spec" or "model" home by the builders. There were lots in the southern part of the development still available to build houses on. If we had had the time, we could have built a house on a lot of our choosing and we could have considered many options about how the house was configured and where the drains would be placed. But we were in desperate need of immediate occupancy and we were grateful to be able to move into the house we bought right after we sold our house in Milwaukee. I really liked the house and its view of the meadow, and I still do. I felt we were very luck to get this house, and I still do.
However, there was no sump pump in the basement, nor a basin, nor a hole in the concrete slab for a future installation of a sump pump when we bought the house. In 2008 there was no law requiring sump pumps to be included in ever newly built house. (Now there is such a law.) We lived in an old house in Milwaukee for 33 years that had no sump pump, so didn't think anything about it when we bought the house without a sump pump.
The builders of our house, who also sold the house to us, never told us about the drainage system around or under the house, the location of our drain pipes at the back of the house or where they were daylighted out in the meadow, nor the importance of keeping the storm drains clear so the system would not back up and flood the basement.
(The builders told us there were no drawings or maps available, now, that would show where or how these pipes have been situated behind or under our house, in the meadow . . . or if they ever existed to begin with. We asked the Town and the lawyers who closed the deal for us, and again, we were told by both that such information does not exist. ~ Access into the drain pipes seems to be the only way to find where the ends of the pipes have been "daylighted" [where the pipes emerge from underground and are exposed to light] in the meadow. Once you have access into the pipes they can be checked and cleaned if necessary on a regular basis. We have not seen any pipe "clean-out plugs," or other means of getting into our storm drain pipes. Excavation for our drain pipes may be a possible option to consider next summer, though it would be a risky, expensive venture. Installing a sump pump seems the best reasonable option presently available to us for protecting our basement from flooding.)
The urgency we feel to get a sump pump is related to the fact that in 2010, two years after we moved into our house, we had most of the unfinished basement turned into a living space: painted dry walls, rugs, ceiling tiles with lights, etc. were installed. The space was divided into the basement bedroom, a bathroom, my computer and printer studio, Gloria's ceramic studio, the furnace room, and a room that is something like my library in which I have stored my collection of books, CDs, a ping pong table, and many shelves filled with boxes full of my photographs dating back to the 1960's. (See the image below).
I wish we had installed a sump pump at the time we had the basement finished, but we never really considered it. Now everything associated with the build-out, and any thing presently sitting on the basement floor, are of course (and always have been) at risk of becoming damaged if a flood were to occur.
We have signed a contract to have a sump pump installed on December 14 & 15, 2021. It will involve cutting a 4x4 foot piece of carpet in the corner of my "library" and jackhammering a 24 inch circle into the "floating" concrete slab. Then a hole will be dug into the earth for a basin. After the basin and the sump pump have been installed a discharge pipe will be connected to the pump and run outside through a hole that will be drilled through the painted plaster board wall, and then through the basement's concrete block wall.
The Town has given our contractor two options regarding what to do with the discharge pipe after it is passed through the basement walls and outside the house: 1) it can either be tied into a large corrugated metal drain pipe (which is part of the meadow's drainage system) that runs underground along the side of our house and out into the meadow; or 2) the discharge pipe can be connected to a long 4" diameter PVC pipe which will be buried in a two foot deep trench that will run out toward the meadow beyond our back yard. The drain pipe will be day-lighted, near one of the meadow's large drain system grates which is located in the meadow space just beyond our property line.
*
No matter what happens, I will continue to photograph the meadow. It is a sacred space, a sacred Place. I am coming close to that moment of surrendering to our invisible drain pipes situation, that is to say, "Letting Go and Letting God." And I will continue to have hope of sometime finding our drain pipes, then making sure they are always cared for and kept clean. I am certainly aware that our situation is a minor ordeal compared to the state of our entire planet which is suffering horribly from the disrespectful, greedy attitudes we humans have had toward the natural world.
It has been predicted that the future we humans face due to Climate Change will include ever more violent storms, floods, fires, droughts and the melting of glaciers and ice caps--which will cause rising sea levels and unprecedented, devastating flooding for the larger costal cities. And yet, amazingly, there continues to be a lack of political will amongst the most powerful nations in the world. The Covid-19 pandemic is directly tied to the complex environmental issues that belie so many of the problems we are facing today, and will be facing in the future. And all of this could have been avoided. There were many people who saw this situation unfolding thirty years ago (or more); and though they did try to warn us about what was happening, and what we would be facing today . . . in general, those with political power have chosen not to listen, not to see . . .
It is your own vision that creates your universe. What you see
is your own thought perception, and your inner experience
of the world is the result of how you see it . . .
Swami Muktananda, From the Finite to the Infinite, Vol. II
*
I wanted to show in these commentaries that there are personal, and even global stories associated with some of the images I have presented in this project that have also functioned for me as True, living symbols. All of us live our lives in multiple modes of existence, in various degrees of awareness; and similarly, photographs can be meaningful on many levels, depending on how we see them, and how we are thinking and feeling about other things in our lives in any given moment, etc.
Now I am ready, to close this commentary section by returning to the photograph that I started writing about before I entered into this rather long digression about the invisible drain pipes.
Returning to the photograph
This picture is not exactly a "meadow photograph," though the meadow serves as the background to what I consider to be the primary subjects: the suspended illuminated bird feeder, and the "two eyes" that appear to be looking down at the meadow and the feeder from the sky above.
The "left eye" is blue; a clearing that had formed in the clouds has revealed the infinite space which lies just beyond the clouds and which surrounds everything on the surface of our beautiful (and yet suffering) planet. The "right eye," which is partially hidden by the leaves of the tree, is a reddish-gold rounded shape of light that is being projected upon the clouds by the setting sun.
The warm light of the setting sun has tinted everything in sight (except the patch of blue sky) including the grasses in the meadow, the very tops of the trees in the background, the railings on our back deck, and the green leaves of the nearby tree . . . which seem to be reaching out to touch the suspended, illuminated bird feeder. As I studied this photograph I became mesmerized by the bird feeder, the way it was hanging in space with that extraordinary light concentrated upon one of its glass plates. It reminded me of the sacred lamps I had seen in the prayer-niches and mihrabs in the mosques we had visited in Turkey. And that memory reminded me of many other extraordinary experiences I had in Turkey related to Islamic Sacred Art.
The bird feeder then became a "sacred lamp," "illuminated by the Divine sun of the Spirit," suspended against the dark, "cave-like" space in the background where the north pond and the tapering woods have nearly merged into each other in the deepening, expanding shadows of the late fall afternoon. The pond and the woods have begun "turning inward" for the night.
Nicholas Stone tells us in his wonderful book Symbol of Divine Light: The Lamps In Islamic Culture and Other Traditions that in the ancient Islamic tradition the prayer-niche was seen as if a "sacred cave," emblematic of the entire "universe turned inward." The cave is also "the secret world of the heart" . . . which is "illuminated by the Divine sun of the Spirit." The cave and the niche, explains Stone, are also emblematic of ". . . the abode of the Self' [which is] "the secret world of the Heart."
I have already written about the Christmas season, how it has influenced what I was seeing in two other photographs in the project, and just now it has occurred to me that the illuminated bird feeder could also see seen as an extraordinarily bright star, or perhaps an angel. Its effulgence in the darkening sky is an auspicious sign, delivering perhaps a life-transforming message to those who will look and listen. Or perhaps its otherworldly light will guide some lost, weary traveler--or travelers--to that destined Place they have been seeking for such a long time.
In any case, soon the sun will descend below the earth's horizon and everything in the meadow will dissolve into THAT sacred Place of perfect Stillness, THAT deep Silence "where there is no darkness, nor light, nor day, nor being nor non-being . . . only the splendor of the auspicious." (The words in quotes are from the The Upanishads, presented under this project's title photograph.)
*
I have spent so much of my life looking at the things of the outer world, searching for those invisible images hidden deep within my being. With the light of grace supporting my yogic practices and my Creative Process in photography, I have been blessed in certain moments of my life to see with the Eye of the Heart.
When the Imaginal counterparts--the inner and outer corresponding images--meet and conjoin in a flashing moment of synchronistic recognition, and I have been graced with the ability to give that perception an articulate photographic form, my experience of those True symbolic images fill me with overflowing feelings of enthusiasm and gratitude. Such a deeply meaningful experience cannot adequately be expressed in words . . . but if it were possible it might come forth sounding something like this:
"Everything is alive! Everything has eyes!
Everything is looking at me!!"
Epilogue
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God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The symbol of His light is as
a niche wherein is a lamp, (the lamp is a glass, and this glass is at it
were a radiant star) kindled from a blessed olive tree, neither of
the east nor of the west, whose oil would all but glow though
fire touch it not; Light upon light. God guideth to His
light whom He will and God citeth symbols for
men, and God is the Knower of all things.
The "Verse of Light" or ayat al-nur, from the Koran,
chapter (surah) twenty-five, verse (ayah) thirty-five
as cited in Symbol of Divine Light : The Lamp
in Islamic Culture & Other Traditions
authored by Nicholas Stone
(2018, World Wisdom)
Mihrab and Sacred Lamp
This project was announced on my blog's
Welcome Page December 10, 2021
Related Project Links
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape blog, which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating from the most recent to those dating back to the 1960's. You will also find on the Welcome Page my resume, contact information . . . and much more.
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