Invisible Forces Inspire

The Sky is Swirling with Magic 

It’s just so hard to see when darkness gets in the way. Or deadlines. Or drama.

Or the efficient driven, productivity-centric practicality that seems to dominate much of our modern-day thinking.

Art allows us to breathe.

Not air, but the oxygen of yes, that…

Yes, that is how I feel, that is what I long for, that is the thing I’ve been missing. That is it.

The thing I could not see until now.  

Artists have a way of elucidating it so clearly– of saying it with such remarkably concise insight it seems implausible that it could have ever been unclear.

Take these lines from Baron Wormser’s period poem set in 1950 describing an un-acted upon passionate attraction between an African American man and a white woman…

“The Present Tense of Jazz: On a Photo by Roy DeCarava”

“It must be past midnight.

Reason has headed home.

Only a few seekers still are up,

Tapping their internal feet”

and later…

“They didn’t know they were so big and small,

So free despite themselves.”

He captures that late night feeling– the abandonment of a more sensible pretense, the palpable pulse of primal longing and feeling.

And later… the vast dichotomy between an expansive limitless sense of possibility and the very lonely space of our human condition and cultural constraints.

Wormser leads us inside the scene.

He opens it up and in so doing opens us up to hear our own internal tapping– the heart-beat that is why we are here, the soul-beat, that if we are not too busy to pay attention to, reminds us we are on a glorious adventure.

There are a few lines from a Joy Williams short story, “The Girls”, that are remarkable for their profound insight into human nature.

“Daddy was smoking and drinking more and surrendering himself to bleak pronouncements. He was sometimes gruff with them as though they were not everything to him!”

She is barebones blunt.

Blazingly exact.

She doesn’t settle for the external observation: Daddy was being a drunk asshole again. She gets inside him, and in so doing lets some trapped piece inside of us, out.

We pay big money to understand the emotional mechanics of behavior.

The psychiatric field, self-help industry and life coaches are bursting at the seams with people trying to see what they cannot.

Like the inner workings of a clock or piano, these are invisible. The face of time, the black and white faced keyboard– the face we put on to meet the day.

The mechanics are all behind the scenes.

The most important parts, the parts that truly matter are behind the scenes. Love, hope, fear, despair– surrendering to the bleak pronouncements, the tapping of our internal feet.

It is the subtext that matters most.

Recognizing the invisible helps us feel seen.