Light and Matter

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, a ~reflective~ (keep reading to get the pun) newsletter about creative, artistic, and inventive approaches to meditation. Thanks for being here.

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Over the next few weeks, we’ll be speaking with friends and collaborators about mindful movement practices, dream yoga, sound design for meditation, and quite a bit more. This week’s newsletter is a fun little introduction to some visual and conceptual explorations happening behind the scenes.

Scroll to the bottom for a guided meditation. This time, it’s a video. 👀 

Several months ago I started paying attention to how light interacts with material in the world. Through reflection, refraction, and shadows, light itself makes interesting patterns, and it also highlights features of the objects it’s illuminating. The resulting patterns have an aliveness to them that really catches my eye.

In my own meditation journey, a recurring theme is my relationship to the world – does it feel vibrant and alive, or static, meaningless, dead? These aesthetic explorations have accompanied a development in how I see the world, in which it’s coming to life.

At AND THE SUN, we’re developing interactive art installations that draw on these ideas. We are experimenting with ways to connect the experience of our own bodies with the light and matter around us. Below, I’ve collected some of the inspiration material – “found art”, the patterns of light and matter.

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House in Portland, Maine. Sunlight streams through dirty door-top window. Passing through gap in a curtain, it illuminates a spider web, the wall, and the floor. Middle photo uses flash.

Suggestion: Muse about which details of the light pattern are formed by the spider web, and which are formed by the dirt on the window.

Brick wall at restaurant in Portland, Maine. Pink LEGO, pink light.

Suggestion: Take in the different configurations of pink light as you scan through the images. Notice how the configurations elicit subtly different feelings. As investigations of the body sensations that emerge as responses to the images, try flipping through the images quickly vs. slowly, and linearly vs. back-and-forth.

Guided Meditation

This week’s guided meditation is a guided video meditation, collaged together from iPhone videos I’ve taken when a light and matter scene catches my eye. (I.e., low-budget videos. 👍)

To do the meditation, just settle in and watch the video.

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