It’s always “perspective.” Life can be filtered down into various viewpoints, numerous perspectives on any given situation. One person’s emotional response can be completely opposite from someone else’s experiencing the same event, depending on their personal mindset, social landscape, memories, upbringing, and beliefs.

And that’s all it is ~ perspective. The chiaroscuro, the foreshadowing of shadow and light, colors the moments in our lives with joy and sadness, happiness and disappointments, casting luminous or ominous clouds onto our canvas. It’s our choice, our decision, to reject or embrace, accommodate or to abandon. Bottom line, it’s either fear or love, judgement or grace. {It’d be tremendous if we could paint “and” onto our canvas, instead of “or” holding the counterparts of “all” within our hearts. That is literally what creates true neutrality and shifts perspective on any given situation, event or experience; knowing you’ve done it, been it, lived it, brought home the T-shirt.}

We are the architects, the artists of our dreams. Once we have the vantage of horizon, our personal paintings become filled with light and goodness, vibrancy and color and the ability to neutralize emotional pain and/or at least the ability to appreciate their lessons and truths.

Case in point. Robin Williams. We see his suicide as a tragedy, a great loss for the planet. We become “judgmental of his choice. We make assumptions that are not necessarily truth. From the vantage of the heavens, it was a choice, an experience created by decades of all his thoughts and emotions culminating in one event. Period. It’s an experience. For those who believe in the multiverse, we as souls experience multitudes of “aspects-in-form” over eons of time which are occurring simultaneously: “parallel” lives, commonly know as “past” lives. My sense is each of us has at one time or another made the same ultimate decision to leave the body through our own hand. Suicide, a cardinal sin, a major offense. But in whose eyes? The light of heaven? I don’t think so. Only from an earth’s mindset do we judge the event as monumentally criminal, the worst of the follies, instead of from the horizon as an experience ~ one we hope never to repeat ~ but one event on the vast, immense timeline. It’s really that simple and/or complex depending on “perspective.”

The more adept we are at seeing life from the skyline, allowing people to be, to love them no-matter-what, neutralizing the tonal contrasts of opinion and judgement, the “lighter” we become, the brighter our energies illuminate the shadows. And fears.

It really is about perspective.

Cosmic sunshine to you.

Johannes Vermeer, a Flemish artist in the 17th century, was an adept with chirosacuro, illuminating the canvas through the use of shadow and shade, what I see as a brilliant analogy to the world of contrasts we live in ~ life as art. The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665, is a wonderful example of this expressive styling and his most famous.