“Do not say, ‘It is morning,’ and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.”
Rabindranath Tagore
Imagine you are just born, or maybe you just arrived from another planet and you see a flower, except you don’t know what “flower” is. There is no stored image of it in your brain, no associations, no thoughts…just looking, just seeing. What would be the experience? An absolute wonder…. I think.
Everything is full of wonder around us, but we tend to summarize, conceptualize, categorize, therefore limit it’s expression.
We can get glimpses of that by quieting the mind and connecting with the space within, where everything is just an awareness, no thoughts, no expectations. It is only from that place that one can see and feel the true essence of things. This can be achieved by meditation or any other meditative endeavour?
As the Oriental Brush Painting (Sumi-e) is a very reflective process, one gets to experience (no matter for how brief those periods are) that connection. Somehow we use the awareness to really see the object, for that matter, ourselves “for the first time”.