Walled Light

This is the corner of a bedroom in our house in Sedona. This is part of the original house, which my wife's father and mother built themselves along with a bricklayer. This is the northwest corner of one of the bedrooms, and the light comes in slightly sideways from the gap between the curtains and the window. So one wall is fully lit, and the other one has this beautiful sidelight and the mysterious line of brightness in the corner.

Is this a beautiful photo? An interesting or uninteresting one? Well, I wouldn't put it on my wall since the subject matter isn't that interesting per se, but my eyes do keep returning to the light coming from the right edge and the textures of the bricks, and that glowing line in the corner.

Maybe this is a good example of how yin and yang interplay with each other, creating beauty out of light and dark. Maybe it's a lesson in learning to look at things that aren't immediately interesting according to the mind's labeling department. "Half-lit bricks? You think people want to look at half-lit bricks? Why don't you post a pretty picture?"

Now I'm noticing what another part of my mind is saying, pointing out to me how we can not only savor the interplay of light and dark, but we can go even further, and see this as a metaphor for our own inner light - some bright, some shadowed, some textured by our sturdiness and rough spots. It's a photograph of the light of the Self in its infinite play of light and dark in this material world.