Rediscovering The Magic of Art - Featuring My Ikea Lamp
Earlier this year I found myself wondering through Ikea on a weekday morning. No, not wandering, I was wondering. As in, I was wondering if I'd be able to find my way up to the cafeteria and back down again without getting lost. Happens every time. Damn those one-way elevators. Fully embracing my transformation into middle-aged suburbanite dad, I found myself excited to browse the bakeware and storage containers, and I was rather looking forward to a nice lunch afterwards of delicious, uh... lightly seasoned and healthy Scandinavian cuisine. Normally I'm a big herbs and spices kind of guy, but sometimes that lighter fare hits just right on a sunny day for lunch. In among the minimalist bedroom furniture and mod desk lights, I found something magical: a lamp.
From Middle Eastern folklore we get the idea of a magic lamp who houses a genie, or djinn, inside who can grant wishes to the one who rubs it. Rubs the lamp, I mean, not the genie. Well, I'm sure some genies... never mind. An ancient Arabian oil lamp and a modern electric mood lamp from Ikea have a few subtle differences, but as soon as I set my eyes on it, I knew they had one thing in common: the ability to hold magic within them.
The white globe was glowing and pulsating through various colors, drawing me in like a moth to a Swedish flame. My mind was filled with ideas for photo shoots, and backdrops, and holiday decor options. Immediately the image of crystal balls and glowing magical wizard devices popped into my imagination. "I'm going to make some magic with this," I thought. And this past week, I was finally able to do just that.
For those of us whose artistic expression and spirituality are often one and the same, sending energy into one will also send energy into the other. Creating my art heals and strengthens my spirit, and healing and strengthening my spirit creates my art. As I've been embarking on a new wholesome chapter of my life and finding deep healing, I can feel the magic reemerging. Just like a lamp is dark and lifeless on its own, I was missing the light inside. But one small spark starts the fire, and the lamp's potential of brilliance, warmth, and color is finally fulfilled. Tinted panes of glass suddenly turn into vivid spectacles that shine their essence across every wall and floorboard where their light falls. Carved designs that were moments ago invisible and muted now reveal themselves in the striking contrast of light and dark.
People are not so different. We all have colors and designs that make up who we are, but sometimes we are missing that light inside that brings us to life. It could be as simple as a kind word from a stranger that lights us up. It could be breaking down emotional walls to let yourself be seen for the first time. Or it could be as simple as a glass orb from a furniture store. The Light is alive, and it's always looking for a way to get inside of us, to turn us into a gorgeous galaxy of Turkish lanterns, and rave laser shows, and twinkling Christmas lights. Sometimes we have to invite it in while it waits patiently for us to realize what we are. Sometimes we have to prepare ourselves, to clean off the grime from the glass bulbs and panes that protect our light. Sometimes it roars in like the sun in the desert, daring you to try and survive its intensity.
Light comes in every color. Every. Single. Color. There is no color that exists that is not light. It's been a strange yet beautiful experience these past couple of months to see all of the different colors of light that have begun shining through me, and through people and places around me.
I was sitting in a shopping center parking lot this morning and fell into a meditative state. There was nothing particularly profound or deep that I was thinking about, I was just lost in thought. It was very early and almost no one was out and about yet, so it had that liminal feeling of emptiness and quiet. I thought, "What a strange place to be thinking about life. I'm in a nondescript, soulless strip mall, with nothing but paved parking lots, concrete, shuttered chain stores, and slightly defrosted cars plopped silently around me." It could have been almost anywhere in America. There was absolutely nothing special about it. It felt sterilized, and bland, and generic.
Somewhat suddenly, I felt a sort of grand cosmic appreciation for the strip mall surrounding me. I realized that this is the only place in the entire universe where a being can experience a concrete strip mall, the barren flats of a parking lot, the feeling of joy from hauling a bag full of cheap plastic crap home because it's shaped like our favorite folklore characters and that's going to make your family smile when they see it. It's so cheap, it's so thoughtless, it's so mundane, and it's so damn extraordinary.
It wasn't some sort of revelation that I had. There was no esoteric knowledge dropped into my mind in that moment, no angel scribbling down heavenly secrets in my brain. It was just experience. Pure, immediate, raw experience. I was living it. Even on our own earth, this experience will only exist for a brief time. No humans for tens of thousands of years have experienced this, and in a while, no human will experience this exact feeling or setting ever again. No matter how mundane, or accidental, or meaningless it seems, just to live in this moment and experience "what is" is a special and divine gift.
Don't get me wrong, these moments do tend to fade as the rat race of everyday life settles back in and pushes away the fragile mists of clarity. I know the beauty of that moment wasn't meant to last forever, and I have to cherish it will the feeling is still fresh. But it brought me such clarity. In the religion I was raised in, this would probably be what many refer to as "the peace that passeth all understanding." Not that most of those people were actually experiencing peace that encompassed understanding, they were simply at peace with not understanding, and those are two very distinctly different things.
In that moment in the Target parking lot, I experienced something that has happened to me several times throughout my life during periods of deep spiritual change or when I am close to what I might call "god". I looked around, and suddenly, the world was not bathed in sunlight, but I perceived that it was bathed in starlight. I felt the giantness of the sun, and of the space between it and earth, and of the universe itself. To clarify, this isn't a spiritual sensation, it's a physical one. It's as if my physical eyes shift, or the way I perceive light shifts, or as if the light itself has changed some quality about it. It can be existentially terrifying, because suddenly you feel the vast size of all that is, and you can see that it's contained within the light itself. Which, if you have the ability to see, you cannot ignore. Everywhere you look the truth is showering over you. It makes me feel so infinitely tiny because I can feel how large the universe it, but it also makes me feel infinitely large because I feel at one with the universe as well.
It may seem silly that an Ikea light fixture or automatic glass doors at the department store could contain the key to unlock moments of clarity and self-knowingness, but that's sort of the point that I think I was being taught. Any random, mundane object or experience can show us the truth, because the biggest and most divine truths exist in every single one of those mundane objects and experiences.
Imagine that you are in a room with a light, but you can't quite tell where the light source is. You could hold up an apple, and an apple-shaped shadow would appear on the wall to your right. You would then realize that the light source is to your left. You could hold up a cup, and a cup-shaped shadow would appear on the wall to your right. That would also let you know that the light source is to your right. You could even hold up your own hand, and an exact shadow copy would appear on the wall, and would also point you to the light source. All of these things are different, and have different uses, and are shaped differently, but due to the nature of light, they all point you to The Source.
Our universe works the same way. The Light shines on everything, every person, every object, every situation. And everything that we do, everything that we create, every emotion we generate, every song we sing, every pain we suffer; these are all like those tinted panes of light in the lanterns, The Light radiates through it all, creating colors, and shapes, and shadows. It reveals to us not only the parts of the lantern, but gives us truth about The Light itself.
So look around today, wherever you are. The light will never fall in that exact same way again. Those exact shadows will never be able to be experienced by any other beings in the entire galaxy. Ask for your eyes to be shifted, just for a moment, so that you can catch a glimpse of the beauty of the world all around you. It's not the kind of beauty that we associate with happiness. It's not the kind of beauty that draws you in and fascinates you. It's the kind of beauty that shunts you outside of time and space for a brief second. It's the kind of beauty that dissipates the illusion of fear. It's the beauty of the peace that passeth all understanding.
It's the beauty of the light that I pray shines on you today.