"Often the call sounds first in childhood, through nature and the senses, when the world is new, shining with the glory and the freshness of a dream...
First memories are frequently of light and color, or darkness and light, shadows, moving on the wall, or of pastel silks swaying in the breeze. The world seems luminous... Experience is unified...there is already a sense of a numinous other, though the ineffability is only intuited, not yet known.
Beauty lies at the edge of consciousness, in the warm, dark, mothering embrace of a world in which we are one with all there is. Only later, when we have fallen into separateness, does beauty begin to draw us consciously from our isolation into the light...
The call of beauty is always intimate, one on one. She is our mother; she raises us to our feet, so that we may see her face to face. She gives us language and thought, whose first form is imagination, so that we may praise her in our hearts and proclaim what we have found."
Is that the nature of the call -- to proclaim what we have found? And if that's true, then how we are called -- whether to sing or play, write or paint -- may well be less important than the proclamation itself; the goal is simply to communicate in whatever way best expresses the magnitude of our response. And that is something we can only know if we are fully present, awake to the pull without and the drive within to give voice to that pull.
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