New work: Sunlight Pictures

First, a brief apology: due to an unexpected behavior in the API of my mailing list provider, you may have inadvertently received an email from “Sunlight Papers” last Sunday morning. That was a mistake and it won’t happen again!

In any case, I did want to share a little update about what I’ve been working on lately — namely, a new series of illuminated teachings from nature, which I’m calling Sunlight Pictures. Each pictures is painted by hand and paired with a brief poetic paragraph of text, opening up further dimensions to consider.

They say that nature is the ultimate teacher — and indeed, with an open set of eyes, we start to perceive the natural world as something that’s alive, aware, and constantly communicating with us, pointing out the ways and laws of life. Nature’s teachings are elegant and subtle, and often quite beautiful — like clues in a carefully designed treasure hunt that lasts our whole lives.

For instance, think of that moment at twilight when just a single star can be seen in the sky, awaiting the myriad others that will soon arrive alongside it. When we truly see that solitary star, we understand that everything in life begins in this way.

When I spend time in nature in quiet contemplation, its teachings seem to arrive quite reliably — sometimes right there in front of me, other times through memory and imagination, like that moment every autumn when a mighty Gingko tree drops its bright yellow leaves all at once, surrendering to another season with a carpet of compost.

In creating a new Sunlight Picture almost every week for the past few months, one of the interesting things I’ve been noticing is the way in which certain pictures, during the week they’re published, end up being in poignant conversation with events that unfold not only in my own life, but also in the lives of those around me.

For example, the week I published “Begin” a close collaborator started a new nonprofit. The week I published “Say Hello” I ended up bumping into a former best friend who I hadn’t seen in almost a year. The day I published “Perceive” a close friend emailed me to say he’d been offered octopus for dinner the previous evening, but turned it down out of respect for the intelligence of cephalopods. The day I published “Receive” another close friend texted me to say she’d based her tea ceremony teaching that morning on the very same concept. And it was that specific picture, Receive, which was accidentally received by many subscribers to this newsletter because of the technical bug described at the start of this email.

Perhaps these pictures (and possibly all our creations) are tapping into a shared collective awareness — or perhaps in some small way even shaping the mandala of reality that unfolds around them, reflecting back and forth like two-way mirrors. What if our creations could do that? How would that affect what we choose to create?

This is a growing series to which I’ll be adding new pictures periodically. If you’d like to receive them by email as they're published, please subscribe to Sunlight News.

Wishing you a beautiful solstice.