takes on a whole new meaning when you see some of the antique attention given to what's overhead here.
over and over i realize how much the beauty of these buildings on the inside is in their regal, long, elegant lines which pull your awareness into the entire space at once, and make you feel, and look, up.
it's just part of what i am so grateful to all of my ancestor artisans for, for i feel like they are my spiritual ancestors, although i have no official italian blood. these are the craftspeople who turned everyday objects, living spaces, tiny details up so high no one would ever possibly see and appreciate all the effort and love lavished on them, into art in the true sense of the word: that which gives meaning, makes special, to create beauty in the largest sense of the word.
and that feeling of "special", of set apart from the ordinary and mundane of the everyday, is exactly what these artisans have done-- so that in an ordinary day, you keep contacting the extraordinary and moving beauty they have left behind for generations like ours.
this very perception is the source of art therapist ellen dissanayake's renaming of our species. she proposes that not homo sapiens, a term suggesting our core being is best captured by the emphasis on our thinking, knowing, cogating brains, but rather we should go by the name homo aestheticus: the one who makes, must make, beautiful, meaningful.
to the many earnest, loving hands of the artisans, i am so thankful. i gather up this beauty with reverence and it nourishes me, makes me feel that this moment, in this space, is somehow even more special, because its presence makes me more awake, aware of being.
the presence of this beauty, only rarely lavish, and mostly in the subtle and typical architecture of the past: terra cotta floors, high ceilings, tall windows, grey stone framing doorways, 3 1/2 foot thick wall construction, little carved flourishes unnecessary to the structure of the window frame, a fanciful animal head hammered into the iron ring where horse's reigns were onced lashed to the facade while guests stopped by to visit...
even on the simplest buildings, these things have all been placed there out of the sheer necessity of beauty.
