24 Jul Gregory Colbert: Ashes and Snow
What a gift to see – to hear – to be a part of life unfolding.
That is what I remembered when I stumbled upon this image from so many years ago. Years ago I had been in New York wandering with a friend and came upon the museum showing Gregory Colbert’s extraordinary Ashes and Snow show at the Nomadic Museum . Someone had told me about it one of my clients who had been moved by the exhibit, so I was delighted to have come across it wandering through New York.
The exhibit was housed in a nondescript building on the West Side piers. From the outside the building gave not a peep away. On the inside, it’s like a minimalist cathedral. Sublime photos of people and animals lined the aisle while a video beckoned you to the front.
The photos were entrancing. The juxtaposition of animal and human and the sensitive interplay between them was beguiling. Most of the humans in the photos have their eyes closed inviting those witnessing into a shared meditation. Their stillness reminds me to surrender.
Even as I see the images now, I remember and re-experience the contentment swelling inside me seeing and feeling human beings nestled against the elephants or the whales.
During the exhibit a video installation played while Colbert read from his letters.
At one point his words wrapped around my heart and opened it.
“My heart is like a book that hasn’t been opened in a very long time.”
How important it is to move from the hurley burly of life into a grander inquiry. Yet how to do that on a daily basis? How to shift from a heart shut down or wedged tightly closed into a heart open, responsive to life.
How do we survive with our hearts open to such a little degree?
The journey of life is an exploration of coming from an open heart regardless of the situation. As I make that the focus of my inquiry I see how often, and how easily, the door to my heart narrows. Without tending, it closes like those pneumatic hinges you see in banks, hinges that ease softly shut behind me, closing me out.
I feel such gratitude for people like Gregory Colbert who that take their time to explore the edges of our hearts and invite me into a tender embrace of life.