On the Peculiar Nature of Being

Photo: The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van Der Weyden, Prado, Madrid.

Widely considered to be one of the world’s greatest paintings, this is also one of the pinnacles of achievement in Northern Renaissance religious art, arguably the most important artistic heritage in Western Art. An inheritor of the esoteric understandings of the Gothic, van der Weyden’s refined forms and extraordinary compositions are without parallel.

On the peculiar nature of Being

I generally find myself painted into various corners by the complications of form.

Yet the night is formless; I awaken in it frequently, discovering my personhood in the midst of nothingness, living into the darkness as a truth of its own.

Last night this phrase came to me: the peculiar nature of Being. And it became clear to me I would write on this subject, this morning on the morning between Good Friday and Easter Sunday – without knowing what I would write or why I would write on this subject. I just knew that was clear to me. I follow these matters instinctively, intuitively, moving through the fluid substance of my life and Being as it presents itself according to the dictates of my molecular composition, and the nature of feeling as it relates to it.