DeepDish: "That Is Not A Sunset": Reverence

Dream fragment (circa early to mid 2000s): I am standing in the doorway to the patio of my top floor apartment, facing west, a panaromic view of NW to SW. A colleague and friend is standing near the banister, facing me, his right hand on the banister he gestures behind him with his left. "That is not a sunset," he stated simply in an authoritative tone, prompting me to take in the orange glow of the atmosphere from what appeared to be the setting sun. I gazed into the light and realized it was not a setting sun, indeed, but a trinity of brilliant mandalas hovering in the sky, each depicting a different scene..."

I've spent a good bit of time over the years analyzing this dream (fan of Jungian analysis), particularly the trinity of mandala's and what it meant then as well as whenever it came to mind. The begining of the dream seems particularly important as I become aware of dreaming at precisely the point when the familiar figure states matter-of-factly, "that is not a sunset," compelling me to pay attention and look closer. Another significant factor was that the setting was exactly where I inhabited, on my patio where I had observed many times the pendulum like swerve of the earth's axis as the sunset tracked from left to right and right to left as the year and the seasons went by.

Tree top life.
See this and other bio-pics at SpiritVision(c) on Flickr.

For a child of the sun (Caribbean) sunsets are almost ritual, a childhood signal to head home from play, a transition from work to evening with a swim at Trunk Bay for a young graduate,

Image via natezeman.com

and a vital connection to the natural world for a young woman in the city.

Image via SpiritVision(c)

In the manner of the dream figure, sunsets are a beckoning to be present as the sun's glow deepens to a warm orange glow and turns the sky into a spectacular tableau.

Naturally, I am drawn to sunsets real and in imagery, even before the dream, so when our friends at Pics Of The World tweeted this pic, I had to look.

Image via Pics of the World

A riveting scene, otherworldly. Perhaps a Mars sunset some day in the future of our Space travel. Yet, I was sidetracked by the caption which described the sun setting on a lonely tree. Lonely tree... At first mystified by the label, then acknowledging that we each see through our own perceptions, I quoted the tweet with my own impression: "Meditative solitude. Sun worship." Just look at the symmetry and balance of lines and curves in the image with the sun poised at the center of the spreadeagle branches atop the trunk. A solificato.

A process was started as I kept going back to the picture on the Twitter timeline, then downloaded a copy. Some flowers along my daily walk reminded me of the purple, wine, pink atmospheric colors which led to creating a triptyich.

Each progression in the self-generative process seemed to expand the scene in my consciousness. Another dream came to mind, of me, walking up the hill overlooking Cruz Bay to my mother's home at sunset. I retrieved an original painting by a resident artist to see how closely the painting matched that dream. Somewhat but not quite.

By then, the picture had become a meditation, organic, which, to me, approximates the Gayatri mantra. An Internet search yielded several versions, each resonating with its own meaning, forming a beautiful meditation of several stanzas. Here are each interpretation of the Gayatri mantra, take them in part or as a whole.