bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly afire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time, knocked breathless by a powerful glance…I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. 31
Every day of our lives we are presented with a glorious parade of images which to a greater or lesser measure come and interact with us. Most of the time, and for a variety of reasons, they call out to us, they try to get our attention, and then simply pass us by.
Sometimes we are just too busy to stop and engage the images, or there’s nothing of immediate significance to arrest our awareness. The hurried pace with which we live our lives, generally demands that we don’t linger too long over matters that don’t call for an instantaneous response, or over images that don’t have an obvious application to our business of living. Instead we select what we see and we do so based upon what we want to see. William Blake suggested;
As a man is, so he sees .
Were it not for our terrible addiction to the language and demands of 'practicality' and the subsequent death of imagination we would find it far easier to honor the awesome power of images to address and educate us: sometimes to demand that we reflect, sometimes to open whole new worlds which we barely understand, and sometimes to reach deep inside us with life changing authority, en route to a conversation with the Soul.
Images speak to the heart in a language frequently more powerful than any other, including that of meditation and contemplation, and certainly more powerfully than liturgical or ritual expressions. We have all brushed up against the explosive energy of an image and the transformation of the senses called alive without warning, for the image is the portal through which we journey to many worlds.
I know that the smell of rain on parched earth has the power to return me to my youth and breathes life into the memory of walking on the thirsty veld of central Africa as the rainy season was about to break a long drought and bring dead things alive again. Far greater than the power of any photograph, that scent of those first great rain drops given to a desperate earth draws me back and I remember and I relive.
Then, the people who were a part of my life at that time and in that place come to stand beside me again and there is healing as I share the words I should have spoken years ago.
I know too that the merest whiff of wisteria can carry me back to Rhodes University and a Sunday evening’s stroll down High Street to Commemoration Methodist Church and I am young again and ready to war against injustice and I am filled with optimism and hope is my companion, and I am in love again.
The power of sight and scent and sound is deeply written into my experience and resurfaces in a place called Psyche . The ancients knew this well.
Demeter’s hair was yellow corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle) were her natural worshippers, praying: ‘May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in the rush of wind’, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves. Her ample breasts
Every day of our lives we are presented with a glorious parade of images which to a greater or lesser measure come and interact with us. Most of the time, and for a variety of reasons, they call out to us, they try to get our attention, and then simply pass us by.
Sometimes we are just too busy to stop and engage the images, or there’s nothing of immediate significance to arrest our awareness. The hurried pace with which we live our lives, generally demands that we don’t linger too long over matters that don’t call for an instantaneous response, or over images that don’t have an obvious application to our business of living. Instead we select what we see and we do so based upon what we want to see. William Blake suggested;
As a man is, so he sees .
Were it not for our terrible addiction to the language and demands of 'practicality' and the subsequent death of imagination we would find it far easier to honor the awesome power of images to address and educate us: sometimes to demand that we reflect, sometimes to open whole new worlds which we barely understand, and sometimes to reach deep inside us with life changing authority, en route to a conversation with the Soul.
Images speak to the heart in a language frequently more powerful than any other, including that of meditation and contemplation, and certainly more powerfully than liturgical or ritual expressions. We have all brushed up against the explosive energy of an image and the transformation of the senses called alive without warning, for the image is the portal through which we journey to many worlds.
I know that the smell of rain on parched earth has the power to return me to my youth and breathes life into the memory of walking on the thirsty veld of central Africa as the rainy season was about to break a long drought and bring dead things alive again. Far greater than the power of any photograph, that scent of those first great rain drops given to a desperate earth draws me back and I remember and I relive.
Then, the people who were a part of my life at that time and in that place come to stand beside me again and there is healing as I share the words I should have spoken years ago.
I know too that the merest whiff of wisteria can carry me back to Rhodes University and a Sunday evening’s stroll down High Street to Commemoration Methodist Church and I am young again and ready to war against injustice and I am filled with optimism and hope is my companion, and I am in love again.
The power of sight and scent and sound is deeply written into my experience and resurfaces in a place called Psyche . The ancients knew this well.
Demeter’s hair was yellow corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle) were her natural worshippers, praying: ‘May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in the rush of wind’, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves. Her ample breasts
Similar Books
