Windows

In a room we naturally move (or at least I do) to see out of a window. Windows almost beg to be looked through, right? Maybe it is because they frame the unusual within the usual around us. An everyday understanding you have of the backyard, suddenly seen through another lens, can become a powerful vision that pierces through the materialistic and the categorized into the realm of pure being. Not only does it reach there; it speaks there as well.

Windows aren't just in buildings. A window is a place from which you can experience a different line of sight, a different vision from what is around you. From a window, you see out of one experience into something other.
A cloud, opened unexpectedly by a ray of pure light, can be understood in this way as a form of window. There is only white around it, but in a certain place you can see something altogether different. That is transporting.

Windows, in this sense, don’t just open into the outside world. They can see into completely different worlds as well. A painting of a tangled fairyland, hung on a plain white wall, can open vistas in the mind far beyond the four walls that surround it. If you lie down and stare at a painting you like for long enough, things inside the painting can be brought alive within your own thoughts. You begin to see in another way.

Places in thought itself can open new visions, new ways of seeing everyday objects. A thought that takes you out of yourself, a fantasy or a revelation, can suddenly open a spillway of forces locked inside the soul, cause someone to weep without reason, or send an unexpected shaft of joy into a commonplace experience—a joy so powerful it is like pain. Experiences like this can reveal other ways to see, not only with the eyes alone.

The habit of gazing through windows, whether made of glass or otherwise shows that these different ways of seeing have in fact their own existence. Imagination, as we call it, is not the disconnected wanderings of an idle mind. Imagination is itself a window, a way of seeing into another world.

I love to find windows, to be drawn outside of myself, transported by an abrupt, wayward perception into a place of wonder, somewhere beyond myself. There are worlds there to explore.