The Mystical Tradition Nur
The Light That Is Already There
I must have been five or six years old. It was a summer night. Back then summers were hot, and it was completely normal to move your bedding outside and sleep under a mosquito net in the cooler air. My father and I were sitting outside together. I do not remember exactly how the conversation started, but I remember the shape of it. I kept asking him how things were made. Every answer he gave led to another question. How was that made? And then how was that made? Until we were looking up at the night sky, talking about the stars, and I kept asking who made that, and he kept answering, until at some point he ran out of answers. His last one was God. And I asked him who made God.
I do not remember his exact words. I remember the feeling. The pause before he answered. And then something like: God does not have a name. God does not have a shape. It just is. It is everywhere. Years later I came to understand that in the tradition I grew up in, God does not have a gender either, no she, no he, just this overarching presence. What I have slowly come to call, in more recent years, an energy. A ground. Something that does not have edges.
That conversation has stayed with me my whole life. Not because I understood it then. Because I did not. And somehow the not-understanding was the beginning of something.
Many years later, I came to understand a word that had always been around me, one that felt like it was reaching toward the same thing my father could not quite name that night: Nur. It is usually translated as light, but that loses something. Nur is not the light that comes through a window. It is the light that is the ground of everything, present before there is anything to illuminate. Rumi and Hafez wrote about it not as something that arrives but as something that is already there. Growing up, their words were not literature we studied at a distance. They were in our songs, our school books, our daily conversation. I absorbed this without knowing I was absorbing it.
What has stopped me more recently is finding something that feels related in quantum physics. Physicists describe the quantum vacuum, the ground state of the universe, as not empty at all. They call what fills it zero-point energy, fluctuations of potential that exist even in the absence of matter. I am not a scientist and I am still working to understand what this actually means. But when I read it I find myself wondering: does it mean the universe is not filled with darkness, but that our eyes simply do not have the ability to see the light that is already there? I do not know if that is what physics is saying, and that is probably why I keep seeking. What I do know is that the idea of a luminous ground beneath what we can see, felt like something I had heard before. In a different language. On a summer night, from my father.
I keep finding this same idea in places with no connection to each other. The Lakota speak of Wakan Tanka, a sacred energy that permeates all things. Aboriginal Australians describe the Dreaming, a living reality running underneath ordinary life, always present. I do not know what to make of all this exactly. I am still figuring it out. But I find it worth paying attention to.
In the studio, I build layers slowly, acrylic and oil, translucent over translucent. At a certain point the painting changes. It stops reflecting light from outside and starts seeming to generate it from within. I cannot make this happen. I can only create the conditions and wait. “First Dance of Light” was named for that moment, the first time I felt it in this particular painting. Not a concept I decided to believe. Something I recognized from a long time ago.
What does it mean for something to be lit from within? I am still learning how to ask the question, let alone answer it.
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