A State of Grace: From Kinning Park to Glasgow Green

Every day casts forth something of the sublime. The spontaneity of walking (with no particular agenda other than a vague outline) continues to throw open the door to beauty. I am constantly suprised at how things I've seen a thousand times seem so fresh and alive. Granted, that crystal December sunshine helps, but even on a grey day there are moments of ecstasy.

Later, whilst relaxing in my bath, I read this in Ananda K. Cooraswamy's short essay That Beauty is a State:

The vision of beauty is spontaneous... It is a state of grace that cannot be achieved by deliberate effort, though perhaps we can remove hindrances to its manifestation, for there are many witnesses that the secret of all art is to be found in self-forgetfulness. And we know that this state of grace is not achieved in the pursuit of pleasure; the hedonists have their reward, but they are in bondage to loveliness, while the artist is free in beauty.

Whenever I see such golden light (it's a lot more obvious in winter when the light rakes across this part the planet's surface), I am reminded that it has travelled some 93 million miles to get here, just to attach itself to a wall, or a face, or a wing. This vast pilgrimage does not pass without recognition. In summer I paint; in winter I walk the streets and prostrate myself before it.

'Freedom on Custom House Quay'

'Dusk Gulls'  (Someone's got the right idea!)

Whilst those who ride the tiger will only come to grief when eventually they must fall off...

'Dragon Whips its Tail!'

From Glasgow Green, looking across to the Chivas distillery smokestack.

'Being in beauty' is following a process of metaphysical undress - to the point where the soul stands naked, unadorned by concepts and constructs so that everything shines through, again and again, as if for the first time. It is learning to be a child once more, yet now with the added knowledge that we are not separate from what is 'out there'. Beauty awaits our recollection of her not as some nostalgic past, but as an emergent incandescent present.

The crystal palace, if you haven't figured it out already, is a metaphor for the splendid vastness of the uncontained Mind -

light, airy... curvilinear...