By  Raphael Awen

Beauty beyond compare.

It overloads our senses and we don’t know what to do with it.

Somehow beauty often triggers an impulse to do something.

But there is nothing to do with beauty really, as far as achieving the beauty is concerned, where beauty has already taken care of all of the doing.

Beauty simply wants to enter into being and it wants to do that with you. Beauty wants to experience you as you in turn experience it. Before before beauty, in a face-off kind of show-off.

We’re often stuck to show up for that, and somehow, knowing that we’re not quite getting it, we do the next best thing.

We photograph it.

Somehow, we know that there’s so much more here to feel than we can feel in the moment. Hopefully, we can capture some of that beauty, preserve it for the partaking of later. We take in what we can physically in real time, and the rest, we delay into a recording, an impression upon a light sensor, stored away in pixels of digital memory, for the later time of our choosing.

Strangely then, at that moment of our choosing, the image re-presents the beauty and re-presences the beauty, and the senses that were on overload in the real time experience can now somehow take in the light codes incrementally, and be changed by them nonetheless, …and possibly even more than the less of when the photons actually made their recording that formed the graphic image, …and the original overwhelm now gets to be transmuted into all the time and space needed to fully digest what couldn’t be earlier.

Memory is like that. The image along with the imagination is often all that’s needed to feel what couldn’t be felt while in the presence of such overwhelming beauty. Feeling unlocks the beauty. The beauty is now multiplied in the heart as it is combined with time and presence.

The beauty gets to complete the path it wanted to walk with us. It gets to transmit its message in whatever ways and times that we can receive it, coinciding with our need.

Beauty gets to let go into you and I, again and a-gain, a shared gain of multiplied experience, reverence and bounty.

What images are waiting and wanting to be replayed in your imagination, the imagium of transmutation where light codes complete their trajectory and deliver to you their payload?

Yes, you have lots of imaginating to play with don’t you?

A little back story to this photo:

Here in my sunset hour walks in our village this past week, looking left and right into the tiny lanes that usually get walked right on by, I was struck by a flower pot of gorgeous sunflowers.

But between me and it was a locked gate. I hoped to encounter the owner and be ready to utilize my few words of endearing, but well botched Portuguese to gain access to the courtyard containing the well tended golden flower.

But even at sunset on a couple occasions, there was no one to be found. Lots of people elsewhere, but none here.

I did however find my landlord, Paulo, sitting 2 doors down at the bar along with Jorge, the bar owner, and moments later, I found myself following Jorge, key to the locked gate in hand.

George looked on as I photographed. I told him I’d be ‘cinco minutos’ to which he nodded, smiled, but stayed out watching me. I fumbled with focus lock and exposure adjustments, straight on and angled views, burst mode, macro mode, etc on my new iPhone 13 camera, but surely the essence of the flower itself was muted by all these urgencies at hand.

So I too, am not much further ahead than you in the experience of this flower. I didn’t even touch it, or smell it, or just put the camera away and take it in, I realize now.

Maybe together we can decipher its codes and reveal the mystery of what it still wants to say to us?

Raphael Awen is co-creator, teacher, and facilitator of the SoulFullHeart Way Of Life.  Visit soulfullheart.org for more information about sessions, events, videos, etc. 

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