The fruit trees bloom this fine day with a luminosity that defies my humble powers of description. The pink flowers explode against the vivid, blue sky with a vibrancy that calls to mind the pointillist visions of Suerat.
I used to think free self expression the alpha and omega of art, but more and more this cherished self seems to dissolve into nothingness like the scintillating points of light emanating from Spring blossoms in Waterfront Park.
Claude Monet, who considered himself a nuts and bolts color scientist of the Industrial age was, whether acknowledged or not, as spiritual as the Russian icon painters. For all their alleged "realism", the Impressionists are forever beckoning us into the the arcane knowledge of the Brethren of Light. They may have jettisoned the stale claptrap of history and genre in an attempt to present modern Parisian life with unvarnished truthfulness, but in their glorification of light they achieved pure transcendence. Cezanne said of Monet: " He's only an eye, but what an eye!". I wonder at the meaning of Cezanne's ambiguous phrasing: Only an eye, but one that penetrates into the deepest heart of reality, where solid form dissolves into particles of Divine, rainbow light.
I don't pretend to speak for these venerable luminaries of 19th Century art, but even the darkest manifestations of human pathology reflects a call to spiritual release. Though seen as aberrant by the French Academy, the work of the Impressionists was an inspired response to the same impulse that drives the mystic into desert retreat or to reach for the bottle. Marion Woodman, in her work with anorexics, has explored stories and myths that can redirect this desire for liberation to healthier channels and show how these dysfunctional patterns conceal great, transformative energies. Buddhists have long known that all mental and emotional afflictions contain corresponding wisdoms.
The Gnostic's saw birth in human form as imprisonment in the darkness of matter, and the priesthood as prison guards whose task it was to restrain flights beyond our allotted sphere. Such themes of struggle are encountered nightly, when the fetters of the world fall away into the abyss of sleep, and dreams reveal psychic remnants in our collective memory of the first religious urge to seek salvation in light's triumph over darkness.
The great Sufi poet Attar, sang of the light at the end of the soul's journey and how all creation is but shadows cast by the light of God. The act of prayer is imagined as polishing the mirror, or increasing translucency in order to see the Divine radiance behind the play of the world's forms--to apprehend the symbolized behind the symbol.
So this pear tree, with all its opulent splendor, points to something beyond its role as mere stimulant of optic nerves, and becomes angelic presence.
