The moment you realize you are facing with beauty is the moment where you feel like a new born into a different reality. Like a baby with instincts to breathe or reach out for mother, we open up ourselves to a momentary grasp of eternity.
It is like to have a slight and curious look into a train rapidly passing by - seeing inside but not having the means to understand what it's really like inside. The beauty is a window opening to eternity remaining open for just a tantalizing moment. But even that little dose of eternity you capture through it, makes you a little richer.
Pain - in this sense - can be beautiful, because the true beauty of a thing lies in the way it is capable to wound our souls. Like titches on faces or scars on hands, a soul with its new wounds obtains new meanings or depths. Every wound uncovers a new unknown to discover. The beauty of a thing lies in its capacity to make us feel lost but at home - at the same time.
A beautiful thing infects our beings and that infection never leaves us again. It circulates - in words we utter, in thoughts we create; traces of that infection will be evident.
When living the beautiful day, there is a point you realize you're being infected. You look around with a humble awe. There is no yearning, there is no missing; you are one with who are missing.
From behind the camera, the beautiful day is something to be documented sometimes at the expense of not experiencing it. Its rarity inflicts an unsuppressable inspiration to capture it. The desire is to imprison the feeling on a piece of paper in such a way that it radiates a feeling of completeness, to make the eye the witness of a state of unity. Unity through the empathy with the one who experienced it but also in the sense it makes the viewer feel the unity with life.
It is like taking the picture of that tantalizing short moment where window into eternity stays open and perhaps because of this very ambition, the photographer is doomed to fail when it comes to share it with others.
But sometimes the picture of the beautiful day becomes a personal beauty for the one who is taking it; a personal description that is inspired by the tension between the beauty and his alienated machine is born.
The beautiful thing is a like star in otherwise dark skies. So no matter how you look for it, the question maybe is this:
How bright will our skies be when we watch it in our last breath?
"...A true philosopher, Spinoza believed, would cultivate what he called intuitive knowledge, a flash of insight that fused all the information he had acquired discursively and which was an experience of what Spinoza believed to be God. He called this experience "beatitude"..."
from "The Battle for God" / Karen Armstrong
