Thursday, September 19, 2013

Awareness of the obvious things in life - the weather!



After the Rain (Tempera),  Ma Anand Leandra 1985
I was back in my house in Pennington last month and fortunate to experience some the warmest days this spring right up to 30 degrees! Then I returned to a Cape Town burdened with immense rain, wind and a heavy cold front. What polarities!

The photo I chose for this a post is of a painting I did many years ago called "After The Rain". The inspiration for this painting was a trip to a retreat venue outside of Hamburg, Germany (where I lived at the time). It was a Friday evening and the road was very busy. In the pouring rain, the street lights reflected in the wet tar of the road, and the car lights created interesting effects distorting everything. My husband was driving and I had time to take in the reflections. Once the retreat started (it was a creative art retreat in which we were participating), we were asked to create a painting of our impressions of our journey to the retreat venue with simple wall (tempera) paints.

I still love this painting, when I look at it, it brings up a vivid memory of that road journey that Friday night.


After being back in South Africa for quite some years, I notice that, although entirely different to the weather of Germany, we have a wonderful diversity of weather and vegetation here at home!
I experience the different shades of weather that our vibrant Geographic's offer us quite intensely; on the one hand it is physically tangible through the senses, on the other hand our impression of it is emotionally induced atmospherically. What is more, I enjoy all of it alike - hot and dry, cold and wet, bleak and colourful, still and windy, quiet and thundery. I love the changes evoked within me, how I am taken to different parts of my soul, to differences experiences within my spirit.


I have always loved nature and felt a particularly close affinity with the wind and the early evenings as the day recedes. Experiencing all that the colours of the sky, the quality of the seasons, the heat and the storms, always brings me back to my spiritual nature.

In Tantra we use the senses for meditation purposes, to learn and experience absolute presence in the now, using the physical as a gateway to the spiritual.

Inner depth is not about collecting knowledge of spiritual things, it is not accessing a certain vocabulary, reading particular books or aligning one's self with a modern-day guru. It is about the individual experience of many now's. It is about being fully in your life as you live it day by day, hour by hour and even minute by minute, elevating so called mundane things to higher and higher levels of perception.

Weather, being something central to our lives that we experience on a daily basis, is a beautiful way to tune into and connect with our senses. However, so often, we take weather for granted...or more frequently, we are irritated by it, complaining in summer that it's too hot, or in winter that it's too cold... or when it rains, wishing it would stop.

The question is: are we able to use these obvious things in life as sensory experiences that bring us into the now? I believe that if we cultivate using our senses, with regards to all of our repetitive every day life events, we learn to be authentic. The physical senses do not know how to lie, our mind so often does.


What a pity it would be, to let all this pass by unnoticed of the chance it offers us. Amidst all the problems facing our country we should never forget just how blessed we are with the vast canvas of nature and weather surrounding us at all times, throughout the year.

With love,
Leandra