The Quiet Magic of Ordinary Things
Why a sunset holds you and a wall doesn't.
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” — Meister Eckhart
The Quiet Magic of Ordinary Things
There is a strange thing about a sunset. You can look at it for ten minutes and not be bored. You can look at a wall for the same ten minutes and lose your mind.
Why.
It is the same act. Eyes open. Light coming in. A person looking. And yet one of them holds you and the other empties you out completely. Something is going on in a sunset that is not going on in a wall. The question is what.
The physical answer is one we all know. The Earth is turning away from the sun. The light is travelling through more atmosphere than usual. The longer wavelengths are surviving the journey and the shorter ones are being scattered. That is the explanation, in one sense, and it is perfectly true.
But it is not the whole answer. Because the colours you are seeing are not actually in the light.
Stay with that for a moment. The light has wavelengths. A wavelength is not a colour. The red, the orange, the soft gold at the edge of the day — these are not properties of the light itself. They are what happens when something in you meets the light. The colour is not out there. It is in the seeing of it.
Which means a sunset is not really a thing at all. It is an event. A meeting. The world is doing something, you are doing something, and the sunset is what happens between you. The sky on its own is not a sunset. You on your own are not a sunset. The sunset is the place where the two come together.
And once you notice that, the question opens further. Where does any of this come from. The Earth. The light. The observer. The observing itself.
Maybe consciousness is not something the brain is producing. Maybe it is the underlying layer. The ground out of which the whole show, including the physical world, is arising.
This is not a new idea. People have known it in different languages for thousands of years. It is the view that quietly keeps returning when you sit with the question long enough.
And if it is true, then a sunset is not something happening in front of consciousness. It is something consciousness is doing. The sky is an expression of the ground. The observer is the ground itself, aware. What you feel in that quiet moment of looking is consciousness recognising its own movement.
Which is also why the wall does nothing for you. The wall is finished. It has stopped moving. A sunset is consciousness in the act of expressing itself, and something in you knows it.
A sunset, then, is not pointing at anything else. It is not a symbol. It is not preparing you for some greater meaning. It simply means itself. The day ends, the light changes, and the world is completely what it is for a few minutes.
And what that means for us, I think, is recognition. We are made of the same ground as the sky we are watching. The stillness we feel is not really a feeling about the sunset at all. It is consciousness recognising itself in another form.
The observer and the observed are not nearly as separate as they appear.
That is what is actually going on. That is the magic.
And this is not only true of sunsets. It is true of all of it. The light coming through the kitchen window in the morning. The face of someone you love sitting across the table. None of it is just sitting there waiting to be seen. All of it is the same meeting. All of it is consciousness expressing itself and quietly recognising itself in the form it has taken.
The sunset is only easier to notice. The rest of the day is doing the same thing.
Which means the magic is not somewhere else. It is not on holiday or in the special moments. It is in the ordinary day, doing what it has always been doing, waiting for us to look properly.
This Week
Since writing this, I have been noticing the difference between looking at something and seeing it. Most of the day is looking. The seeings are rarer than I thought.
What might you see this week that you have been looking at for years?
Until next week, Craig
The Perennial — conscious living for a thoughtful life.