The Bigger Picture

It's not the whole image. I can see the dog balancing the ball on his nose and the teenagers fighting over the magazine in the background, and the car running the stop sign. In high color I observe the flower vendor on the corner and the crab apples that have spilled from his basket and the toddler scurrying after one into the cobbled street.

I can savor each intricate detail. The broken thread in the pin-stripe on the elderly gentleman's lapel. He appears forlorn; I can see the tear collecting at the corner of his eye. I can even see the torn binding of the book he is reading, which obscures its title. As I get closer, I can make out the name on the cat's collar - "Hermione." I can almost pick out the texture of her tongue as she grooms her downy breast. I notice the broken spoke in the adult-sized tricycle as it narrowly misses the toddler in the street. I can practically smell the popcorn popping in the wagon on the paved path along the top of the bridge.

Every detail, every brush stroke.

And yet, in the back of it all lurks a menacing alleyway, incongruous to my impression of the scene. It's purple-green walls surely conceal evils secreted from this innocent urban event. Despite all the gaiety of the day lit square, my eyes are repeatedly drawn to its depths.

Upon closer inspection, I notice this grotesque emptiness blots out a great deal of the canvas, a netherworld where unimagined and unsavory elements pace, menacing and patient.

With respect to the antics of the sunlit crowd, I conjure that what is ominous in the darkness is treacherous, to be avoided at all costs, the brightly-lit scenario a safe haven from its questioning shadow.

What's down the dark alley?

As I now juxtapose the two visual impressions, the known chaos against the unformed, darkling way, I notice just how bright and lively are the images of light. As I penetrate even more closely the images become almost garish in their literality - their precision. A crumb stuck to a cheek. A skinned knee. A drop of saliva hanging from the lip of the expectant and obese hound. It all becomes a little too much. The unknown becomes almost a welcome flavor, bland, subtle, the delicacy of a lavendered salt, more scent than taste.

As I teeter on this precipice of known vs unknown I feel a battle for an unclaimed part of myself. At the pivot is the assumption of contrast, dissonance, and all moments have coalesced into this one. The conflux of utterly known, utterly described and experienced, and the pregnancy of what will be, what may be, what is not yet. The realized vs the potent.

To then unfocus my eyes, and gasping, take a further step backward, prepared to drink all in as one whole, and then, having breathed deeply, with purpose, to notice...

...My God! Not one image but a vast argument in triptych ever expanding, ever describing and ever questioning. The darkness and detail now but texture on a far greater landscape, stretching into infinity, or so I must conceive from the point in space and time where I reside.

And so how may I presume to guess what lurks in shadows, or the meanings of crumbs and crab apples? I reel and teeter and brace to topple. I remain barely balanced, then am poised, with nothing available to me but surrender to the Mystery. And I do not fall.

But I see, I breathe, and I wonder.

And finally I am borne up, soaring, to a position unprecarious, cradled.

Peace,
Darcy Molloy
Namaha Healing Arts