Encounters with the Sublime

It’s pouring rain in the mountains. This morning, the sun rose from a grey sky to make way to light gray heavens at noon and is now, slowly, but steadily returning to its charcoal resting place.

I’m feeling melancholy in the best way, listening to Mahler and getting on with work things.

There’s something about certain pieces of classical music like Mahler’s famous Adagietto (you might not know it by name, but very likely have heard it on a movie’s soundtrack) that are so beautiful, so clear they transcend to another category of feeling for me.

They’re sublime.

Do you have moments when you feel this? The sublimity of a thing, person, a piece of music or a ray of light?

This summer, watching nature, I felt it a lot.

It was in the way light danced on water.

I felt it in how sunlight broke through the leaves of maple trees.

I spent sunsets in awe, when the last light of the day caressed clouds and turned the hardness of sharp rock walls into peach colored pillars. [I’m sure the people around me rolled their eyes a little when I told them, time and again, to look at the liiiiiighttttt!!]

This summer I made time to cultivate and cherish these moments in a way I had never before.

I let myself be touched, suspended in time, returning to childlike awe at being alive.

You cannot watch light dance on water and not marvel at it.

I suppose this is why I called the newsletter Seeing., after all. It’s for the moment when you allow yourself to see, truly. When the grime is cleared from the windshield of your perception and for the first time, you’re taking it all in.

More than their images looking pretty, my favorite artists have always helped me see in a new way.

There’s the light in a Turner painting:

Robert Irwin’s work on light and space:

Or even the astounding experience of peeking deep into the universe through one of NASA’s telescopes:

The sublime to me is music, art, poetry, light.

What is it for you? Do you ever stop for a moment and watch the light move across the surface of a building? Marvel at golden clouds at sunset?