Is the Sun Woven?
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The sun’s children watch, treading in the damp air. The birds chirp and call, cry and below. In skies, the distant howl of the winds call, as tired mothers and flustered fathers gather slowly, the windows to their hearts. A storm lives on in the distance. Howling, judging, dodging. Soon, rains will cry. The sun will hide from the sight of the rivers, and the choking sigh of thunder will preach sermons of desire. Clouds wrap slowly, the deer, sheep, birds, and foxes to the hills. Days pass, and the sun’s children call again.
Why do we wish to know the conditions for beauty? If I have an idea of beauty, there is no more beauty. An idea of beauty is not free. What about good music? Why do we wish to have an idea of good music? Perhaps I must have an idea to feel valid in my pursuit of something. If I say what good music is, then at least I have something to stand for. The entire reason for doing what I am doing is justified. I feel secure. To valiantly stand for something which is ‘good,’ in pursuit of some idea, some phantom. But an idea is always an image, a projection. And so, my idea of beauty cannot be so. There is no freedom. And why must I defend the pursuit of ‘good’ music? Must a mother defend her love of a child? Perhaps she must defend her child, but never her love, lest it be superficial.
We defend if there is a threat. Why then, do we feel threatened? This insecurity, this justifying. Must love justify itself? Must beauty justify itself? When we see a family of birds whispering to the sky, skating through the heavens as angels, pinned to a backdrop of the hills and the forest, must we justify the beauty of it? “Beauty is the harvest of presence.” There is no justification in presence because there is no other. Justification requires other, or division. If there is justification, there must be something we are justifying to. David Whyte articulates that beauty is “the self-forgetting… that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other.” What is this other?
What are we afraid of, what are we averse to, what do we repress? We cannot be afraid of thought, as thought is just symbol. Thought has no potency unless it is linked with sensation. Are we afraid of sensation, of emotion? What is emotion which is not felt now? Is it memory? What is good music? Is music independent of us? Of our desires, insecurities, envies, flaws? Can we ever hear music outside of us? Why do we hold on tightly, to an idea of something? If someone has a different idea of ‘good’ music, does it threaten us? Scare us? Have we ever been disappointed because we believe in ‘good’ music? Because we have held so tightly onto an idea of life. When we feel beauty, when we see rows of coloured rooftops below a mountains crest, do we wish for it to be any different? Do we measure up our experience with an expectation of this experience, of how it ought to be?
