Rising Sun, Setting Moon ~ The Beauty in the Mundane
January’s here, a new year and yet the same as every one that came before it. Of course, in many ways, a very many things have changed, but I can’t shake the feeling that as much as things change, they don’t. Another day, another week, another month, another year. The sun still rises in the morning and sets in the evening. The wheel, as buckled as it may be beneath, still turns if off kilter, thrown dangerously off balance by climate change and pollution and all the other ills wrought by man and his machine of capitalism. And yet…
There is still beauty to behold in this world. Not the fake beauty of photo-shopped pictures, whether of people or places, nor the beauty of expensive possessions and luxurious homes, but instead a beauty that inspires a quiet joyousness within the heart, within the very soul, perhaps.
They come unbidden, these moments of beauty and joy, when you least expect them, in the most unexpected or most ordinary of places. Perhaps that’s why they affect us as they do, striking as a muse might for a great artist, fleeting and yet so big, containing that grain of truth, the essence of pure and distilled beauty. It makes your heart swell in your chest.
I bet you’ve experienced something similar. Even tried to capture the moment on your phone, a fools errand, I know from experience (how many of us pagans have tried to capture the vibrant beauty of a full moon only for it to appear as a blurred dot on a black background). I suppose it’s that feeling of not wanting it to end, or rather knowing that it will. The knowledge we can, for the most part, only spare a moment to enjoy it before we have to get on with the routines of the day.
As you may well have copped on, this whole post is inspired by such an occurrence. I wasn’t going to write about it, but you know, muses and all that, and so here we are. And besides, why not? There’s enough doom and gloom going on in the world, why not snatch a moment for ourselves, give our minds a break from the monotony of it all?
So far in the UK, the winter has been mild, not necessarily unseasonably so, it is normal for the worst weather to strike in January and February, but mild enough to perhaps question the normalcy of it. The town where I live is snuggled in a valley, so we often miss the worst of the weather anyway, the most I’ve had to contend with so far is frosty mornings. Not all beauty and light if it’s a deep frost, and you have to get to work by way of the back roads, neglected and potholed anyway, made worse by icy conditions, but still, nothing careful driving can’t handle.
Those frosty mornings are the best, one of my favourite things about the season. There’s nothing better than getting up and going out as the sun rises on such a morning, but those days are now relegated to weekends and holidays in the winter months at least, when the sunrise coincides with my journey into work. This past week though, I’ve been going into work slightly later.
It was on one of these mornings that I was struck by that fleeting sense of beauty. The sun was rising all red and hazy, filtered and dispersed by frosty clouds, setting the horizon ablaze with a fire that burned cold. Beautiful in and of itself, no doubt, but the beauty of the moment was transformed into something else when contrasted with the paleness of the waning moon as it set, this part of the sky a faded lavender colour, wispy clouds stretched out and thinning. In this moment of transformation, as the darkness of the night met the red light of the growing day, the street was drenched in a strange yet beautiful light that made the shadows pool and stretch. The street transformed, no longer a council estate slowly waking but instead a magical space, not so much a place but instead one of those snatched moments where everything seems to exist outside of the normal realms of being.
And then, of course, the moment ended, was really no more than a brief lapse of seconds, a seemingly insignificant pause in the grand scheme of the day ahead. But it was more than that. It was a reminder that there is still beauty in the world, beauty that is all too easily missed in the grind of the everyday, made small by the growing pressures of just surviving.
And so this is a reminder, a call if you will, to see and recognise the beauty that exists in the world despite, or perhaps in spite of everything else. I think we have a weird collective defence mechanism or some other coping strategy whereby we feel we cannot enjoy those small moments when there’s so much shit going on in the world, but we have to. Whatever those moments of joy and beauty look like to you, enjoy them, devour them, savour every feeling they inspire within you. They are a balm for the soul, soothing for the spirit, like a drink of cold water on a hot day.
Let us find the beauty in the mundane, wherever we find ourselves in the world.
EMMA KATHRYN
Emma Kathryn, practises traditional British witchcraft, Vodou and Obeah, a mixture representing her heritage. She lives in the sticks with her family where she reads tarot, practises witchcraft and drink copious amounts of coffee.
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