The Sphere: A Perspective

The circle is a beautiful geometrical figure. No edges. Smooth.

Expand it, give it a volume. One of many things it may become is a sphere.

The planets are sphere, so are the stars that we sing about at nights. Our world is a sphere; a circular figure expanded to include life.

Life is a sphere. We reside inside a sphere. Sometimes its easy to get lost inside of it, other times we’d just walk out of it into the vast vacuum of the universe, filled with matters of all kinds, discovered and undiscovered.

You could be happy inside the sphere. Who says there’s nothing inside of it. From the minute grain of sand to the vast endless blue waters. Your body is a sphere, my body is a sphere. Our boundaries make us a sphere.

If you’d like to stay inside the sphere, like sometimes I do, stay in it. Perhaps, you like the secure feeling of the walls, like I do. If you want to break the walls apart, like I do one piece at a time, cross them over. If you’d be happy, be happy.

It’s all in the eye. While I have come to believe that the eye is one of the most deceiving organs we know that makes us forget about the grey matter inside the cranium, and the beating instrument placed inside the ribs, but aren’t the eyes also a gateway to a person’s soul? Perhaps its deceiving nature has to do with the fact that it should not be easy to break into a person’s soul with so much ease.

It’s all in the eye. The sphere whose shadows I have failed to shade.

I’ve sometimes thought it is in the hands of the artist to be able to draw the fine lines of a person’s face or the shadows of the mighty mountains, breathing life through a perspective, through the wand of a paintbrush or a broken pencil.

Take the sphere I’ve drawn.

I do not know how to draw but I am always awestruck by the magnificence of the ones who portray reality and beyond through sheets of paper, meticulously using their hands. If I were to enter an art class, I’d be that outgrown kid who doesn’t understand shades, but then again who’s not a kid. And finally one fine day, I decided to be that kid, again.

One fine day.

To be a novice, to not know the technicalities, to pester a friend to help you, to stare hungrily at your peers’ work (as if they were a cream doughnut!). To look at an object like never before. I often said, I cannot draw a potato, and turns out I am not wrong. Potato! You’re a challenge.

It’s all in the eye, the magic, the deception or any other adjective you’d like to name it. To be able to see the darker shades, the brighter ones, the shining ones, like a story in progress. To depict reality and how it acts, to fuse imagination. It is all in the eye.

To be somehow able to predict the future by feeling the texture of the paper in front of you, with nothing but sheer practice. That is how I learnt to see an artist, as I tried to be a kid again, through a sphere and its shades.

While some draw its fine shadows, I am lost in the vast perspective of a round object. 

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Thanks to Subina Shrestha for helping me draw The Sphere. 

A Starry-eyed Writer,

Alfa