This painting is about welcoming a new soul. It imagines what an infant might see, opening his eyes to find his universe transformed, a hazy new landscape beckoning, sparks of potentiality floating here and there with little regard for the boundaries we adults impose between land and sky, night and day, self and other.
Nobody has explained to him what is and isn’t possible. With such unfiltered perception, there is little difference between real and imagined. His brain waves are still primarily of the kind called Theta, a state that adults achieve only in dreams, in creativity, and in deepest meditation. How must this shape his experience of the world? As David Whyte says in his poem, What to Remember When Waking,
To become human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.
Whyte’s poem struck me deeply the first time I read it but took on an entirely new meaning when I became a mother. So much about birth is akin to waking from a great sleep and all the visions and wonders and truths it might hold. We see glimpses of this, sometimes, in the presence of children or in the depths of a dream state. But babies surely represent the purest form of experience, in which all perceptions are equal, all impossibilities possible, all magic a reality.
David Whyte, “What to Remember When Waking” from House of Belonging. Copyright © 1997 David Whyte. Reprinted with permission from Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA. www.davidwhyte.com