The Veil as Threshold

Not a Wall, But a Passage On becoming transparent enough to pass

Have you ever come across someone who carries a quality you cannot quite name? A stillness. A kind of light around them that has nothing to do with the room they are standing in. I have met this twice in my life, once directly and once through my sister's telling, and both times left me with the same feeling: that some people have become, somehow, less of a barrier to something larger than themselves.

I must have been very young. I was walking with my grandmother and her sister, one of them holding my hand, returning I believe from a shrine. At some point they decided they wanted to go see the Darvish. As a child I did not fully understand what that meant. What I remember is standing in front of a tall iron gate with walls that seemed, at that age, to reach thirty feet into the sky. My grand aunt announced that we were there to see the Darvish and we walked in. There was a long walkway leading into a room. And sitting there was an old man, long white beard, long white hair, white tunic and pants, completely still. Even as a young child I could feel it. There was a quality of calm around him that I had no words for. A sense of light that had nothing to do with the light in the room.

I never found out who he was. After my grandmother and grand aunt passed, nobody remembered. But I never forgot that feeling.

Years later my sister told me about a professor she had encountered who carried the same quality. She described it the same way I would have described the Darvish. A stillness. A light. Something that was not coming from outside him but from within. She could not explain it either. She just knew it when she felt it.

As I kept thinking about these experiences, trying to understand what I had witnessed, I came across a concept in Sufi thought that stopped me: fana. It is usually translated as annihilation, but that word is misleading. Fana is not destruction. It is the gradual dissolving of what is opaque in you, so that light can move through. In simpler terms, it is what happens when the ego steps aside. Not disappears. Steps aside. The self is still there but it is no longer the main event, no longer blocking what wants to come through. When I read that I thought immediately of the Darvish sitting in that room. That is what I had felt as a child without having language for it. Someone who had spent a lifetime learning to get out of their own way.

Most of us know this experience in smaller doses. The artist or musician who describes their best work as something that came through them rather than from them. The moment in conversation when you stop thinking about what to say next and simply listen. The feeling, in any creative practice, when something shifts and the work starts making itself. That is the same territory, the ego quieting long enough for something. 

Crossing the Veils

36X24” I Acrylic and oil on canvas

Crossing The Veils is a painting about translucency, about how many layers of paint can hold color and light simultaneously without losing the depth of what came before. Each layer is a veil. Each one is also a world. When I am working on this kind of painting I think about that old man sitting in the room behind the iron gate. I do not know if I am any closer to understanding what I felt that day. But I think the painting is asking the same question. Not how do you get through. But how do you become transparent enough to let the light pass.

What would it mean to become more transparent? Not invisible. Transparent. Still present, but no longer blocking the light.

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