“Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart” Rumi
Steep and narrow Atlas Mountain roads lead to the ruins of Kasbah Telouet in Morocco. This artwork, a central “bloom” that persistently emerges in my minds eye in a palace wall zellige pattern is titled “Cross-section of Creation”
Plato’s Theory of Form asserts that the physical world is not really the 'real' world; instead, Ultimate Reality exists beyond our physical world and that core elements of nature - Earth, Air, Fire, Water - underlay all physical changes in this world, and his student Aristotle proposed a fifth element “aether”
The colors in the petals of this work represent those elements that naturally exist in the world around us:
White - Air, we breathe to live, and the Divine Breath within us all [Quran (15:29)]
Blue - Water, as a life-sustaining element and as pools of knowledge
Green - Nature, all the flora, plants and vegetation and the wood used for Fire
Moroccan Ochre - Earth, the clay with which He created all [Quran(32:7)]
Black - Aether, “space”, the celestial spheres and the essence of the Unseen
The blue around the central pattern representing His Throne on water [Quran (11:7)] Red, representing Fire (Hellfire), limited and enshrouded by enigmatic black, aether and gold, representing His infinite Mercy [Quran (7:156)]
The Kaaba in the center representing Al-Baqi (The Everlasting One) who has always existed and who will never cease to Be
The green at the heart of the work symbolizes the Gardens of Paradise with the yellow and white, the promised lakes of milk and honey [Quran (47:15)]
Everything from the smallest scale to the largest, all the rainbow colors observable by human eyes represents only 0.0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum
The world around us, has worlds within it, at varying wavelengths that exist and are hidden from our sights and are only visible, on all planes of Existence, to Al-Baseer, (The All-Seeing One) and to all in Creation whom He has bestowed varying degrees of sight
“To behold the Universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, (is) to behold the hundred Universes that each of them sees, that each of them is” - Marcel Proust
