Genius Loci

I was listening to poet and philosopher David Whyte when I painted this, in the On Being podcast, and he said the following, which caught my imagination: "In the ancient world, the word genius was not used about individual people, it was used about places and almost always with the word loci. Genius loci meant the spirit of a place." I thought, ah how perfect, the heron as the spirit of this place (Kommetjie). In his writing, he describes: Genius Loci describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream, or a bridge across a river. It is the conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself. It is the breeze on our skin, the particular freshness and odors of the water or of the mountain or the sky in a given, actual geographical realm. You could go to many other places in the world with a cliff edge, a stream, a bridge, but it would not have the particular spirit or characteristic, the ambiance nor the climate of this particular meeting place. By virtues of its latitudes and longitudes, its prevailing winds, the aroma and color of its vegetation and the way a certain angle of the sun catches it in the cool early morning, it is a unique confluence, existing nowhere else on Earth." It follows then that human genius is not a person but a quality: "To live one’s genius is to dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting." "Genius is both a specific gift and a possibility that has not yet occurred; it is not a fixed internal commodity to be exploited and brought to the surface but a conversation to be followed, deepened, understood, and celebrated. Genius is the meeting between inheritance and horizon, between what has been told, what can be told, and what is yet to be told, between our practical abilities and our relationship to the gravitational mystery that pulls us on. Our genius is to understand and stand beneath the set of stars present at our birth, and from that place, to seek the hidden, single star, over the night horizon, we did not know we were following."

A painting inspired by a beautiful photograph by Ian G Miller of a heron in flight over the Kom, in Kommetjie, Cape Town, painted with free flowing water and acrylic. The heron also bears personal significance as a family emblem of my married name, Aherin, a bird which often visits our home in Kommetjie, and has metaphysical connotations as a guide.