Dear All,
If you haven’t seen it already seen it I do recommend the biographical film outlining all the enterprises that King Charles has been involved in over the years and with it the philosophy underlying it. It goes by the same name as the book he published some years back: ‘Harmony’. The King has often been derided for his views, but the sense that we are somehow out of tune, as Wordsworth puts it:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The King’s intent in all that he has done is to bring our thinking back into harmony with nature of which we are a product and being a product of nature, we must in the process cut ourselves off from ourselves. The first step in tuning ourselves back in is to follow the lead of the artists and appreciate nature’s evident beauty.
Best wishes, William
If you would like to like to connect with the Wisdom Works presentations that explore many of the ideas found in these emails this is the the link
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THE PRESENCE OF LIGHT AND LOVE
This is what Cezanne saus about lif'e inherent beauty:
Personally I’d like to lose myself in nature, grow again with nature, like nature have the stubborn shades of the rocks, the rational obstinacy of the mountain, the fluidity of the air, and the warmth of the sun. In a green my whole brain would flow with the sap rising through a tree’s veins. Out in front of us there is a great presence of light and love, the hovering universe, the tentativeness of things.
Such a clear expression of intent indicates the depth of his vision. From the physical, his mind penetrates and connects with the subtle qualities: stubborn obstinacy, fluidity, warmth; vitality is recognised in the green of organic life and the flow of sap rising, but even then he goes beyond to the great presence of light and love, the hovering universe, the tentativeness of things. Here, so obviously speaking from his own experience, Cezanne gives us a vision of the artist connecting with the soul of nature, approaching the quantum world of potentiality from whence everything arises.
As has been repeated often in these emails, one of the most important and immediate ways for most of us to recognise these underlying principles comes through our appreciation of beauty. Constable, whose calm evocation of the beauty of English landscape has made him one of the best loved of painters, writes this to his wife of his own appreciation:
Nothing can exceed the beauty of the country at this time. its freshness - its amenity - the very breeze that passes the window is delightful. It has the voice of nature.
I believe we can do nothing worse than indulge in useless sensibility - but I can hardly tell you what I feel at the sight from the window where I am now writing of the fields in which I have so often walked. A beautiful, calm, Autumnal setting sun glowing upon the garden of the Rectory and adjacent fields.
There is room enough for natural painting. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt at something beyond truth....Fashion always had, and will have its day - but Truth [in all things] only will last and can have just claims on posterity.
In these words from the soul, he expresses his deep devotion to the beauty of the natural world that lies before him, a beauty that he so perfectly captures in his own paintings, but not only that, for his feelings naturally take him on to express his devotion to Truth. Truth as he rightly says is not subject to passing fashion. Truth by its very nature is always true. When the artist becomes devoted to truth he searches for its presence in all that he sees and then seeks to express it in his work. This kind of devotion is no different than that shown by the great scientists, many of whom desire the same thing. They wish to approach in Max Plank’s words: ‘the ultimate mystery of being’, the truth itself.
Inspired by this desire, the philosophers, artists and poets are led to explore this landscape of the soul and bring back the record of their explorations so that all may recognise that such a place exists.
PRACTICE:
The vision of geniuses may seem far from our own experience, but why dismiss the possibility? Take Cezanne’s approach and look for the inner qualities of things. We all recognise them, sharply responding when we are barely aware of their presence. Bring them into view. Consciously come to recognise what those qualities are in the people and situations we meet. Begin to see life as the play of these qualities, and then go on to recognise the underlying ‘presence of light and love’ in which they manifest.
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