BEAUTY IN UNEXPECTED PLACES

           

 Everything beckons to us to perceive it,

murmurs at every turn 'Remember me!'

A day we passed, too busy to receive it

will unlock us all its treasury.

Rilke

"Everything Beckons To Us"

"Everything beckons to us to perceive it," says Rilke — EVERYTHING — and I take his counsel seriously.  In my daily journeys, I do my best to observe not only the larger forms that dominate the landscape, but also the smaller fragments that either make up or adorn these forms.  I try to look beyond the obvious, to see the overlooked and forgotten.  I try to "see beyond what is seen," for lack of a better expression, and to become intimate with everything, including the lost, the fallen, and the degraded.  Above all, I resist the temptation to ignore things that are not easily identifiable.  In my experience, true beauty seldom lends itself to names, labels, or classifications.

In this posting, I invite you see some of the things that have crossed my visual path in recent days and to reflect upon the words of various writers, photographers, and painters on the fascinating subject of "seeing."  If you suspend your natural desire to understand what has been photographed, and focus, instead, on the texture, lines, and hues of the compositions, I think you will be reminded that nature itself is our greatest artist.

Seeing, in the finest and boldest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions.  It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being.  It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.

Freeman Patterson

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.

Pierre Bonnard 

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject.  The little, human detail can become a leitmotiv.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Whether he an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Walker Evans

If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe;  if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first times.

C.K. Chesterton 

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

Camille Pissarro

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
Picasso

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.


Edgar Degas 

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of our eyes.


Goethe

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.


Edward Steichen

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Thoreau

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

Dorothea Lange

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual.

Edward Weston 

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.


Mark Twain

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind couldn't detect.

Mark Twain

The bells and stones have voices but, unless they are struck, they will not sound.


Chuang-Tzu 

Notes on Photos:  (1) sailboat rudder and keel; (2) work boat transom; (3) sailboat keel and rudder; (4) work boat transom; (5) underside of a sailboat hull; (6) work boat transom; (7) underside of a sailboat hull; (8) work boat transom; (9) drainage marks below waterline on sailboat hull; (10) work boat transom; (11) barnacles and peeling paint on underside of sailboat hull; (12) underside of bow of sailboat; (13) work boat transom; (14) rusty chain found in boatyard; (15) section of painted window found in airport corridor; (16) dry-rotting industrial hose; (17) rusting bottom of metal chair; (18) patina of tarnished copper weather vane discovered on grounds of an antique store.  

PLAY AS A PATHWAY

"Play is the poetry of the human being."
Jean Paul Sartre

Play has fascinating dynamics; start the process and you never know where it will lead.  In my last posting, for example, I played with the format, design, and color of my blog to illustrate the possibilities of changing the ways in which we both see things and create  things. That posting prompted my friend, Bonnie, over at The Original Art Studio, to create several word games, using an interesting tool named Wordle.  Each word game presents  colorfully scrambled words that can be unscrambled by the reader to discover a wonderful quote of great wisdom.

These little word puzzles have already introduced us to the wisdom of Jung, Nietzsche, Twain, and Buddha.  On top of this, we have been introduced to the creative possibilities of Wordle, which, incidentally, was used to create the header to this posting.

The point that I am making is simply this:  Play can be so much more that just a venue for fun.  It can be a pathway to wisdom, which is critical to our growth as individuals; it can be a pathway to improvisation, which has always been a key to human survival and evolution; it can be a pathway to creativity, which is the wellspring from which all art and innovation emerges; and it can be a pathway to the spiritual realm, where we can discover our place in the great mystery of things.

Listen to what others have said and you will see that play is not only fun and useful in our lives -- it is necessary!

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.  The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."

Carl Jung 

"Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways not one could foresee.  Play has always been the mainstream of culture."

Italo Calvino


"Play is the exultation of the possible."

Martin Buber

"There often seems to be a playfulness to wise people, as if either their equanimity has as its source this playfulness or the playfulness flows from equanimity; and they can persuade other people who are in a state of agitation to calm down and smile."

Edward Hoagland 

"It's a happy talent to know how to play."

Emerson 

"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play."

Abraham Maslow

"What work I have done I have done because it has been play."

Mark Twain 

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."

Plato 

"The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion.  He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."

Buddha

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." 

Heraclitus

"Play is the highest form of research."

"We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential.  Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys."

Albert Einstein

"The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground."

C. K. Chesterton

"I played with an idea, and grew willful;
 tossed it into the air; transformed it;
 let it escape and recaptured it;
 made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox."

Oscar Wilde

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing."

George Bernard Shaw

"Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf."

Rabindranath Tagore

This is a photograph that I took in Obidos, Portugal.
It reminds me of the constant need to play with the colors, shapes, and forms of life.
It reminds me of the need for variety --
diagonals to contrast with verticals and horizontals,
soft forms to contrast with the hard forms,
low intensity to contrast with high intensity,
warm colors to contrast with cool colors --
in life as in art.

TRUTH AND PARADOX

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Persig's memorable philosophical inquiry into values, the narrator is often perplexed by the obstinate refusal of people to see what is right before their eyes: 

The truth knocks on your door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away.  Puzzling.

The problem, I believe, is that the truth itself of often puzzling.  It offers the promise of something we seek -- for example, living in harmony with the universe -- but it then recommends a path that usually makes no sense, at least at first glance, to our logic-oriented brains. Suggest to someone that the greatest among us should be a servant or slave to others, as Jesus recommended, and you will likely encounter a stare of disbelief.

As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, "the words of truth are always paradoxical."  We may be attracted to a noble idea of the truth, but our egos usually reject what the truth calls upon us to do.  Many people, for example, profess to be Christians -- but how many are willing to act in accordance with the paradoxical teachings of Jesus?  Who is willing to lose his or her life in order to find it? Who is willing to love the enemy, pray for those who spitefully use us, turn the other cheek when assaulted, and rejoice when others revile or persecute us?  And what would the elite of our society think if the first really became last and the last became first?

Many profess to be followers of the Tao, but who is willing to act in accordance with the teachings of Lao Tzu (left) in the Tao Te Ching? Who is willing to yield to force, rather than respond in kind?  Is anyone willing to empty himself or herself in order to become full?  Willing to give up everything in order to gain everything?  Willing to allow the death of one's self in order to be born again into a higher consciousness? 

And what about the noble truths of Buddhism?  How many followers or admirers of Buddhism are willing to relinquish the cravings and desires that underpin all suffering?  How many are willing to abstain from harmful conduct, including gossip and other harmful speech?  How many are willing to resist any act, including war, that involves the taking of a life?

My point here is not to take a moral, political, or religious position on what we should or should not be doing with our lives.  It is understood, I hope, that such positions are off limits in this online journal.  What I do want to emphasize, however, is that spiritual truths are seldom comfortable, because they usually call upon us to do something that is counter-intuitive, at least initially.  Indeed, the truth to which we are drawn often seems inherently contradictory, and therein, of course, lies the paradox.

Many withdraw from the truth at the first hint of paradox. For thousands of years, however, the great teachers of wisdom have repeatedly told us that the things we most desire -- love, peace, happiness, and true security -- can only be discovered by actions that, paradoxically, seem inconsistent with those objectives. The question that always remains, however, is whether we have the courage to press through the walls of fear that surround our lives.

My decision to post something on the relationship between truth and paradox was precipitated several days ago by the rediscovery of a passage from T.S. Eliot's great poem, The Four Quartets.  That passage is set forth below, together with some other relevant observations by Anthony De Mello, Lao Tzu, Mother Teresa, Carl Rogers, C.K. Chesterton, Jack London, and Madeleine D'Engle.  Read and enjoy.

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by the way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

                           T.S. Eliot
                           The Four Quartets

All mystics . . . no matter what their theology, no matter what their religion -- are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well.  Though everything is a mess, all is well.  Strange paradox, to be sure.  But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.  They are having a nightmare.

                       Anthony De Mello
                       Awareness




           If you want to become full,
           let yourself be empty.
           If you want to be reborn,
           let yourself die.
           If you want to be given everything,
           give everything up.

                      Lao Tzu
                      Tao Te Ching

I have found the paradox that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
          
                        Mother Teresa


The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
        
                        Carl Rogers


The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
          
                         C.K. Chesterton

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.  And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive . . .

                          Jack London
                          The Call of the Wild

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox.  We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle.  The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle.  Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

          

                          Madeleine D'Engle
                          Two-Part Invention