The great alchemists of all times, cultures and civilizations, tried to imitate it, trying, generally in vain, to speed up processes that required the patience of an eternity.
Being, as it is, the most complete and perfect of all artists, it is not surprising that great clear minds, ahead of their time, like Bernardo de Claraval, saw in it and thus consigned it, the best school in which they could learn a human being.
There were even architects, such as Gaudí, who, in the solitude of their shady forests, learned the basic rudiments of an organic, metaphorically alive architecture that combined flashes of immortality.
But, perhaps, of all the philosophies they have warned, even part of their immeasurably complex work, has been Japanese Zen, where the aspirant, far from being influenced by the deception of the apparent, managed to look beyond, coming to perceive the presence of divinity even behind a single leaf.
This inner gaze, this metaphorical 'being a sailor on land', was possibly the same impulse that encouraged Whitman's shocked poetry, making him feel, in his own skin, belonging to an indivisible whole, including those wonderful worlds to which another poet, Antonio Machado, referred to as soap bubbles.
Surrealism, cubism, abstractionism and even romanticism, just to name a few supposed artistic disciplines, are widely represented in natural models that, far from calling attention to voices, speak the language of the world, to all those who, As Rabindranath Tagore said, they want to learn to listen to their music and song.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.
