I’ve always been, and at one point realised, that I am a person who loves watching at the clouds in a sky, early autumn afternoon seems to be a sweet spot. Something about how the clouds can give scale and perspective in an otherwise plain blue sky, how they can reveal the scale and the vastness of what lies above the line of our horizon. This third dimension that clouds can introduce to a rather plain sky is something that seems i haven’t managed to ever wrap my head around – the beauty and the awe i feel from it.
An afternoon drive this Friday, coming back home from the beach house, with a perfect sky full of clouds, of movement and structures, made me feel like a little kid in a toy store, feeling the urge to make everything mine by taking pictures, risking how I drive for an opportunity to capture this beauty, the contrasting colours, the vastness of the clouds, the perfect light. It was so stimulating and at the same time so overwhelming and made me think ‘have I ever experienced this before?’, ‘can I stop trying to find ways to limit this experience and how I am feeling by taking a photo but rather just to experience it?’. After a few seconds of managing to quench that thirst and calm down from all the visual stimulation I thought, oh this is a topic I could write about in my blog, surely this experience being so intense albeit not new in some ways will be able to inspire me to express myself, to draw insights, to present and eventually conclude on something. But the more I am thinking about it, including reflecting on it with the help of chatgpt’s superior processing power the more I realise that an insight or conclusion is not something I have at this moment and would be something forced, something fake even.
What I can say however, is that I have caught myself in the last few months, maybe even long before that (imperfect memory skewing the data here), being able or in a position in appreciating the calmness, the peacefulness and the beauty of things, of how the light and the wind can transform or elevate the visual experience I was getting from looking at a palm tree, at the lemon tree in our back yard. Can I say that this has to be due to more mental space that I can notice smaller, simpler things? Am I becoming wiser and more open to what’s happening around me and somehow manage to nourish myself and ‘brighten’ my day? I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that I’ve been consciously aware of experiencing such beauty more and more lately, a beauty that my brain reflexively wants to assign a meaning to, to create a lesson learned from, and to use this stimulation to alchemically turn into kinetic energy, into creative productivity to record a guitar piece, write in my blog. It definitely often feels, by the way, that posting a photo on instagram is not enough of a direction to release this energy.
So what I’m left is with the experience itself, not being able to turn the stimulation and dopamine into more stimulation and maybe that’s a lesson in itself. To be present enough and courageous enough to experience things in that moment as they are, through eyes, not through screens, and let my body to be nourished from it.
Awenesty. 