Savoring, Republished from 2010

Too often, one can plow through life believing, or not even believing, rather mindlessly thinking that being here, alive on earth, is a matter of fact, not for appreciation or awareness thereof.

That I have titled this blog The Paradigm for Beauty means that I want to write about the experiences that I appreciate in my life. I am also interested in the consciousness required to witness experience and see, hear, touch, smell and feel it.

Just because I write about creative improvised music and make visual art does not preclude the fact that my capacity for enjoying birdsongs is non-existent.

I think that being female contributes a lot to how I think and how I use my senses to invest experience with significance. That the birdbath on my terrace can be viewed from my dining room table offers the opportunity for participating in a natural world, albeit a limited one, one without jaguars and lions, whales, and seals.

In silence, sound is abundant. All winter long, when the windows are shut, the nature of the sound has everything to do with the interior and logically the internal. When winter approaches, I am ready for it. I am ready to focus on my internal spaces. I am ready to batten down the hatches, seal up the cave and seemingly hibernate: infrared photography would reveal this bundle of energy roaming the house, pausing for a while, then roaming again. What the photo would not show is the way my mind is operating, developing ideas for my art, listening to music for the purpose of writing about it. Once it is March, I yawn with anticipation of the changing light, of throwing the windows open and letting the exterior invade the interior.

The spring calls me outside. The smells of the earth beckon me to sink my fingers into the dirt to care for my garden. I want to feel the breezes and the rain on my face. I want to fall asleep without laying a heating pad on my chest. That time eventually comes every year. The temperature of the inside of the house equalizes with the temperature of the outside so I do not have to raise and shut the windows all the time, having become an anthropomorphic thermostat. And when the windows are open, so my longing to be one with the universe pervades my psyche. It is the sounds that take me to that cosmic plane. It is the revivification of the colors that re-sensitize my notions of change. I become healthier because my body is taking in the energy that is more evident, more noticeable than it seems to be in winter, although I know that is not true.

Change is continuous. One tends to compartmentalize instead of embracing the whole. It is the whole that is changing; we are part of the whole. Knowing that we are simply contributors to the change of the whole is a matter of consciousness. We are not controlling it; we are filters. Like every other living entity. Filters for experience.

Too often, we are caught in the web of our imagined function. We are led by our own ideas of who we are, instead of recognizing that the energy we expend physically is irretrievable and we are decaying with every breath we take. However, our spirit is enriching itself, the longer we live, the more we breathe, the more we listen, smell, touch, taste and look. We are blessed and we have to remind ourselves how, every second of every waking moment.

copyright 2010 Lyn Horton