ANAM:

Exhibition at the Enda ‘O Brien Gallery – Scariff , Co. Clare.

Exhibition opening Thursday 4th December at 6pm with live music*

You are Welcome **

Nothing would exist on this planet without the light that filters through our atmosphere such that all that sustains us can flourish – from plants to plankton ; our relationship with the biological fundamentals of Life itself is mediated through Light.

When I first set out to orientate awareness through the Irish language I began signing letters or emails to friends with ‘Le Solas’ meaning ‘with light’.

Light is also a metaphor for awareness. When we are ‘in the dark’ about something it means that we lack knowledge, experience or understanding. Today, in a world of ‘data’, our human relationship to knowledge seems to have become more transactional and less personal or meaningful through the impact of technology.

When we approach the other facets of ‘awareness’ in the realm of ‘conscious awareness’ – this also pertains to a capacity to perceive Truth.

Far from the duality of apparently conflicting and competing narratives and ‘bodies of knowledge’, each of which are necessarily victim to and limited by their own prescribed and sometimes dogmatic – yet always unquestioned – foundations : there is an enduring rhythm to our experience of days and nights through the play of light and shadow.

In the Irish language “teanga na Gaeilge”, there is a physicality suggested even by the word for language : teanga “tongue”. It is difficult to get more visceral and intimate than that. Apart from questions of identity that may appear to have been wrapped up in many ways through the Irish language, there are other more exciting approaches that can be alive with vitality. In a broad context of global centralisation and technological mediation, experience and human lives may appear to be reducible to data and algorithms. An all pervading relativism imagines human beings as free floating consumers untethered to any interiority or broader field of reciprocity or independent meaning making. Sadly, in the transfer of focus from the earth that sustains us into the meta-world of mediated reality and now artificially generated perceptions of reality – this has an impact on rooted ways of life of multiple cultures around the world, including our own. A fundamental frontier is that of our perception and thus our creative visioning capacity.

To reclaim a way of seeing is to inhabit the capacity to choose how one relates to one’s own eyes, the organs of perception. It is also to acknowledge that we also have a capacity that is perhaps ever more precious – our ‘inner seeing’ – or insight : which is a cultivated function of our higher glands, our pineal and pituitary which also relate to the light. We can develop a personal relationship with and experience of Light as a presence that has multiple qualities – from the first tender yet mighty rays of morning sunrise, the low light of winter to a zenith expression in high summer.

As more and more of us are indoor workers and less time is spend in the company of the natural world, we loose that physiological experience of “natural light”. Every sunrise is an opportunity to attune to the awareness and perception that living light offers, inviting us to experience our presence as part of a vast cosmos – one that is not mediated by the constricting narratives and compulsive habits of the mediated data realm.

The Irish language can also be a part of cultivating one’s inner technology of awareness and perception, to become versed in the power of imagination and allow ourselves the permission to navigate reality through creativity.

One role of what has become a global colonising machine has been to erase an experience of intimate and tender relationship to the earth; it has been a process through which alienated frightened narrow world in which all the wonder seems to have been stripped away. To reclaim the power of Light is to learn to inhabit a world of all pervading wonder and endless possibility , where there can be enough for all our needs through careful use and wise stewardship of our world’s resources. To step into the truth of a nuanced world that is animated through fundamental relationships to the seasons, to the land, to our own dán our individual soul’s gifts, how we may relate to ourselves and to one another.

Our relationship to the specificities of place, of the land upon which we dwell has faded through the change from farming, increased commuting and our children collectively and statistically do appear to be spending less time out of doors. We have enjoyed an ease of travel and “free-floating” knowledge at our finger tips such that our ancestors never knew. Yet, it is still possible to truly get to know the land on which we live, and to reclaim that perception and relationship to place that has been known to past generations.

Aware of the importance of experiencing natural light, the light of awareness – we can begin making a space for the depth of wonder and imagination in our relationship to the living earth. Otherwise we risk a hollowed out inner world and we witness the consequences of this in the suffering of our young people and the pain that surrounds the word ‘home’ for so many.

The word and concept of “Subjectivity” refers to our individual perception of reality and experience rather than the “Objective” overarching claims to all encompassing knowledge or fact. The English language in Ireland remains part of the realm of assumed objectivity and implied authority. Yet the Irish language is one of the oldest surviving languages in Europe, as the late Manchán Magan often pointed out to us.

Our conclusion must be that a nuanced appreciation of “what is” in the felt sense of an invitation to build a relationship to the land on which we stand – can be mediated through the living light of nature and our own personal, unique and subjective experience.

When we speak of a ‘field’ we can refer to many things – there is the field in which I build my house, the field the cows dwell in but there can also be a field of knowledge, or the subtle and energetic kind of “field” that may be generated by consciousness of many people working together ( consciously or unconsciously ).

In the darkness of winter, I invite you to plant a seed of this awareness and of what kind of world we may choose to inhabit.

I choose the world where there are, as Manchán once pointed out, ( at least) “32 words for field”.

Through the Irish language, there can be an experience of coming home to the ancient land of this Atlantic island. I hope that the work in this exhibition can inspire some of your own curiosity and wonder.

NOTE: The word and concept of “Subjectivity” refers to our capacity for an individual perception of reality, and experience rather than “Objective” overarching claims to all encompassing knowledge or fact.

The exhibition runs until January 10th *

PS:

And if you would like to join me on the sunrise and a weekend retreat at winter solstice – send me an email on soulalliancehealing@gmail.com.

Míle buíochas,

Le Solas,

Sharon