rainy day bliss
Everyday I open my curtains to see if it is raining. And if it is, I know that today will be a great day. Perhaps the rain reminds me of the absolute perfect bliss, the kind that is at the deepest part of all of our souls, the kind that has carried us since we were kids. Don’t you remember going crazy in the rain, running out there in your swim suit and your little umbrella, spinning and laughing and splashing, and just feeling like you could explode because you were so happy, you were so full, you were so in love with the rain? It is such a wild experience, so sensual and so perfect. And even now, when it rains, all I really want to do is run around like crazy in it and just eat the rain really.
Sometimes, there is no reasonable way to possibly articulate what you are going to do with that perfect moment that is staring you in the face. It is impossible to think that you will take those perfect moments calmly as they come. But then again, I do not know much about taking things calmly, as I have never been able to do this. When that bliss finds me, I want to run in circles or roll around on the ground or smash all the plates in my house or rip paper up into teeny bits of confetti—anything to get what I am feeling to be justified by what I am expressing.
I love art history because I get to understand the stories behind the passion, the stories of how people got from here to there, how they have come to express all that is exploding inside of them everyday, making them come alive. Art is about falling in love over and over again, with life, with passion, with the thoughts and emotions that are too big to dissect. I love that people like Kandinsky and Gauguin and Picasso and some classmates of mine fall in love every time they see the perfection of something so extraordinarily ordinary as fantastic colors spilling out of their paint tubes. I love that so many artists understand how to fall in love with the world on a daily basis.
Life is crazy and upsetting and hard, but everyday we are given at least a thousand glimpses of perfection. And we get to decide what we do with these glimpses. Bliss is all around us, we just have to look up from where we are running to and we might see that perfect tree, the perfect cinematic moment, or the perfect way that the lighting highlights that perfect person that you love so imperfectly. Or maybe, you will see that perfect smile that found its way to you from across the room or that perfect bit of inspiration, or that perfectly-prepared and gorgeous omelet. Whatever makes us happy.
Poet Mary Oliver understands that life is meant to take our breath away. And like she once said,
"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement…
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."
posted by Mary @ 10:29 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home