Everything Is Vibrating On frequency
Resonance of what we cannot hear
A sound you cannot hear is still a sound. Below a certain frequency the human ear stops registering, but the vibration continues. Above a certain frequency, the same. The world is full of frequencies we are simply not built to receive. I find this endlessly interesting, and I think about it a lot while I paint.
Quantum physics tells us that at the most fundamental level, matter is not solid. It vibrates. Everything has a frequency. The difference between a rock and a beam of light is, in some precise sense, a difference in how fast something oscillates. I am still working to understand the full implications of this. But the basic idea, that the universe is not a collection of solid things but something closer to a field of vibrations, resonates with something I have felt for a long time without being able to name it.
Rumi’s Masnavi opens with the reed flute crying for the reed bed it was cut from. The sound is music and longing at the same time, physical and metaphysical, inseparable. Growing up, these kinds of images were everywhere, the idea that sound, feeling, and meaning were not separate categories but different expressions of the same thing.
The Navajo concept of hozho precisely expresses this idea. Harmony, beauty, and balance as a single idea, a universe held together by resonance rather than force. Something I had sensed but never heard expressed quite that way. The ancient Hindu concept of nada brahma describes the entire cosmos as sound, with music as the most direct path back to the source. My mind spins a little when I sit with the fact that these traditions had no connection to each other. There has to be something beyond what we can see that explains how cultures with no contact kept arriving at the same basic understanding. They were listening to the same thing. I am still listening, trying to figure out what I am hearing.
36X24” I Acrylic and oil on canvas
Soaring Harmonics came from thinking about what happens when two frequencies find each other. In music this is called consonance, a word I only recently came across, and in physics, constructive interference. In painting I was looking for the color equivalent, two hues building something across the canvas that neither could make alone. I do not always know when I have found it. Sometimes I only know after I step back and the painting suddenly feels like it is breathing.
What are you in resonance with right now? And what are you slightly out of tune with?
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