Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.
—Meister Eckhart
Sunday Morning
I love Sunday mornings for the same reason I am attracted to this painting. It is the absence of activity. Nothing and everything happens. What in art is referred to as negative space. In writing, it is what the words dance around but never say. I read years ago that Hopper had initially painted a female figure in the window above the barbershop pole but later converted the figure to a curtain. I for one am glade he did. The viewer is given the opportunity to see only the natural beauty of the sunlight on the street and buildings leaving much interpretation to the imagination. I believe poetry does the same.
Even before reading the title of the painting I noted that it looked like a Sunday morning. There is little in my past to reflect upon as we had to attend Sunday School most Sundays and it was not a memorable experience. Church was forced by my mother’s desire for me to have that experience of Jesus Christ as a life teacher. After I was baptized at age twelve, the mandatory attendance ended. I only went to church after that to meet girls and in later years to search for God and life's meaning but found neither.
Today, eons later, Sundays are special not for anything it represents in a religious fashion but for what it represents in absence of traditional religious belief. There are no plans on Sundays, no alarm clock starts my day, no “have-tos.” I wake to the sunlight carrying the morning breeze through my window, my kittens dancing playfully on the bed and if I’m lucky, El brings me a cup of coffee and we snuggle between the sheets. I love this life. This day of stillness, Sunday.
Photo Credit: Edward Hopper, " Early Sunday Morning," 1930 Oil on canvas, 35 x 60 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York