Do you know the exhaustion where you can no longer see clearly? You run through the world, and you don’t see. The eyes have become numb, blurred as if their light could no longer connect with the world’s light. A dullness has come upon them and the soul.
This is an unpleasant condition and quite worrying. On the other hand, alert senses are perceptive, nimble like a weasel, and register colors, sounds, and heartbeats. In most cases, they compare the perceptions with ideas and sort them into well-known drawers in the mind. This gives security and ground under your feet.
But what happens in the moments when we say: «That’s beautiful!»? There is more than the pure perception of red, green, harmony, or sun on the skin. Something sad can also be beautiful. The beauty of it lies above the thing itself because the beautiful thing remains in its objectivity. I believe we experience beauty when we have a real moment of feeling, when our senses are expanded in such a way that they can really feel, touch, smell, taste, and thus also perceive in their spiritual substance; and in it, the spheres of light of me and the perceived entity touch. I feel the connection and come back to myself. So we actually say: «It’s nice that I feel it» – the harmony between me and the wind that atomizes the pollen, between me and the line in the stone, the pattern of the dragonfly wings, the play of light on the wall, and the gold speckles in the screed. Harmony between inside and outside. It’s beautiful when things start talking, and I hear them.
Picture Pressed mallow flowers and top cornflower pigment from the workshop of Nina Gautier. – Translation: Monika Werner
