The Cadence of Congruity
(Arshia Qasim, Artist)
Live poetry. Beauty is what is carelessly spilled over the top of a drunkards wine cup. Not in gluttony or want, but rather appreciation. A sated appreciation of those who can appreciate thirst. Beauty is the mess we leave in our excitement, it is the distraction to a colorless canvas.
In the time of our ripening the Divine Designer saw a pail blue sky before any knew blue, and the invisible wind that tears the eye… He saw the snow before it fell, your art before its conception – Al-Bari, Al Musawwir, Al-Khaliq.
He has made our mouths into windows, our fears into walls. He has turned our gaze into doilies, our love paisley and has lain stepping stones of amethyst polished thin by the soles of our own shuffling feet. With a mere kiss, we create windows to see, with an all seeing kiss, we are shown blinding light. And so, each work of art is a shielding of the eyes, a warm breeze through a cool shadow, a black pepper edged silhouette on a multi-hued horizon of apple, tangerine, pomegranate, saffron, and turmeric.
His design work does not begin before nor after the brush is dragged; He is the steadiness throughout the stroke; can your hands, dear artist, feel the warm cupping of His? You are the mundane canvas painted on the Divine canvas – you are the receiver of your own compassion – there are two layers to every painting, yours in as many colors as you are prepared to discover, His in all colors that have ever existed or shall. Your frame is a frame within His.
Yes, this is live poetry; this is the irretrievable release of a sweet perfume. Our hearts are non-forsaking canvases – they resist none of what we offer, they do not turn-away mistakes. The carpenter is remembrance, the architecture is prayer of forgiveness; not for what is done, but how it’s done.
So many layers, so many strokes of the brush, not one made with malice or envy or lust. You have mixed clay and water and painted walls, then windows, and then stepped through and for every side of a window and wall, there is another apart from you. The “unpainter friend,” the one who uses opaque acrylics to unpaint empty walls into murals and then into these, windows. You have made hearts into portals through which all to see from either side of, or beneath the threshold. You have unpainted away hopelessness.
Through the phosphorous window of a writer I go in, and through the door of the painter I come out… each click, a heaping spoon eased through wanting lips. A thirsting brush, a parched canvas. We nourish ourselves not on desire, but on what desire brings… this is how we know… we do not miss what we cannot have, we miss what we are given.
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