Silence and Light
Dear Friends,
The image above is of a James Turrell-designed Quaker meeting in Texas. Turrell is the artist with the astonishing light sculptures, well-known to many of us here in western Massachusetts, where he has fascinating and revelatory work on permanent display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA) in North Adams.
I was just reading an essay by Amherst physicist Arthur Zajonc about Turrell's work (see Zajonc's exciting book, Catching the Light; also his profound and helpful Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry). In the essay, Zajonc mentions the difficulty of making light itself visible -- the light which illuminates all things but cannot show itself under normal circumstances.
It is quite appropriate that Turell, the artist known for putting a spotlight on light, so to speak, would also design the ceiling of a Quaker meeting. Quakers are the ones who have no liturgy, only silent contemplation. And silence, which is the background to all sound but is not itself a sound, could be thought of as audible light. Or: Light is visible silence. In both cases, we have an enabling or fecund emptiness: a vast, perhaps infinite potential.
The election and its aftermath have filled our psyches with dark noise. Today's meditation will focus on silence, on light itself, not anything illuminated or sounded. In this process, waiting and arrival become a single, communal clarity. There is a pause after every out-breath, for instance, in which all pressure, all tension is gone, and peace can arrive so easily.
wishing you joy,
Michael
