Suspended Moments: A True Story

 

Last Sunday, I entered the gallery about 10:45 AM finding only Bernie present; it was the only time I have ever nearly been alone in the gallery, and the experience was like no other visit there, since no distractions were present…

Just as the gallery opened this pre-spring morning, of all the times that I’ve been to it, with the exception of a single attendant, this was the first time that I had been alone in it.  As if truly alone, I wandered through the rooms in the ecstasy of color that was splashed across the walls in a myriad of inconceivable – beyond mental conception or grasp – forms.  Alone and completely undistracted, the artistic expressions throughout the gallery had their way with me.

What is this nectar, this intoxication, I wondered, that nova-like, explodes across the canvas, sweeping over and through me, caressing me, enrapturing me, moving me with it…what else but the creative life impulse that swept through the artist, himself, emblazoning his love of the divine on the canvas, and it was being recognized by “me” on some profound interior level.

Just as the artist was danced by the divine into the act of creating these rich expressions, I was being danced, as well, through taking them in…or were they taking me in?!  I was most drawn to those works which were formless in expression, with no hint of whatever (if any) earthly shape had been their inspiration, for without the anchoring in anything familiar were the infinite possibilities of seeing afresh and anew, touched by shapeless color in raw – and divine – inspiring, movement.

In  these suspended moments, there was a feeling of being more profoundly close to knowing who “I” am.  “It is ‘truth’ that is splashed across these canvases and silks, I thought to myself, and caught up or awash in its ecstasy, I did feel washed freer of that which tends to stand in the way of my knowing this on a continuing basis.

I appreciate the divine as being unchangeable permanence…expressed in creation as motion.

These still canvases are to me the closest I’ve ever encountered divine stillness in motion, “recorded” in stationary color.  It is clearly how Jonas has placed the colors on the canvas that captures this mystery, and it speaks through them.  It is indeed as if the paintings, fixed to a wall, were actually alive, in motion, moving me, and speaking to me, entreating and teasing open a sense which could actually see and hear what was behind/within them.  Not buried messages, they were thrust in my face, washing through my body, resonating and echoing in my heart, welling up in my soul, with a clarity of perception that I’ve not known before.

My own experience was that the paintings open an inner sense/eye of this beholder, and the more I let myself “go” into the paintings, the more it felt like the eye of the divine within me was looking into a reflection of itself, magnifying a sense of the divine within me.  It was like the eye of the divine was looking back upon itself and seeing only itself.  I, the beholder of this vision, this interplay, was the beneficiary of this sacred act of the divine reflecting itself within me.

The paintings, I feel so deeply, are mirrors of the divine, inviting a most intimate exchange with them and ushering me toward a deepening appreciation of, capacity for, and remembrance of That which is sacred.  Jonas succeeds, for me, in interpreting the divine in such a way that an inner sense can ‘hear’ it, ‘see’ it, and I am invited to let my self go into these divine portals…   I am deeply grateful for Jonas’ inspired gifts.

– Lee Horsman

About Lee Horsman

Mystically inclined since childhood, my initiation into a meditation on inner light and sound set the course for the unfolding of the rest of my life, which included getting a BA in Religion and Philosophy followed by two degrees in nursing, the latter in Child Psychiatric Nursing.  The early years of my nursing career focused on pediatric hospice work, the later years continuing work in pediatrics as well as in adult HIV nursing.  Iconoclastically, I do some off-the-grid nursing, support meditation practice in a local prison, and continue dancing with the Beloved.

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