Video Studies
At six, I stood in our yard transfixed by the sunlight on the roses of a rose bush. Not the roses, the sunlight. Today, my eye will be caught by the sun’s reflection on the water, on the surface of a leaf, the bright glare of a cement sidewalk, or the soft skin of my love’s cheek.
In the beginning, I thought it was the thing itself that drew my eye. Now I know it is the sunlight. The combination of the two, the sun and the object, creates in my mind a thing I recognize as beauty. I could get philosophical and reasonably claim that what I recognize could also be called Suchness, Ultimate Truth, Reality, Mind, and a dozen other names. Call it what you will. If you are a Buddhist, call it Mind—the mind beyond mind.
In truth, the combination of light and object is just that, a combination, and if they seem to create a feeling of beauty in the mind, they do not. It just doesn’t work like that. The body makes contact with the world, the mind perceives it, and from that feeling arises. That is, it is a perception, and all perceptions arise in the mind. Nevertheless, it feels like Beauty or Ultimate Truth. Maybe it is just a longing for the source of our energy, the sun. After all, we can’t contemplate the sun safely. We can contemplate its reflection.
Whatever that thing is, Suchness, Mind, Ultimate Truth, Beauty, or is not, the perception is tangible. Interestingly, the more you look for it, the more it reveals itself. See how easy it is to assign consciousness to something? Now, I have it revealing itself as if it had a will of its own!
No, I am conscious. I perceive what I call Beauty. I feel my body respond to the perception. It’s a good feeling. It’s a comforting thing. Perhaps that’s why I’m the kind of person who prefers a sunny day and thinks that foggy and rainy days are depressing. I just can’t see the Ultimate Truth on a rainy day—or, at least, it’s harder.
My video Studies project seeks to point out this Beauty in ordinary scenes. It’s never in anything flashy or meant to be beautiful. It’s always a random turn of light on a branch, a flicker of sun in the grass, or the shimmering radiance from the petal of a rose. So, in these Studies, nothing much happens, yet everything happens. I have an entire YouTube channel called The Landscape Illuminated, devoted to these Studies. Here’s one…