The Artist's Third Secret
The great majority of people, except for the most ugly and sour, believe that beauty is all around us. And they are right. They also believe that seeing this beauty is a matter of perspective. And they are right again. Lastly, they believe this beauty radiates from all things, as if matter itself had an inner glow, and that if you could see as God does, every thing would have a holy luster: these dirty floors, this cracked mug, that candle's flame would suddenly, all by itself, sparkle with divinity. But in this final belief they are wrong. Beauty does not live within things, but between things.
In things themselves, there is no space for beauty. The color orange is crowded. The flame's contour, although lovely, is cramped. Beauty cannot sprout from here just as a sapling cannot sprout from over-compacted soil. It's too tight. It chokes the good of what it needs. But if you look just past the edge of the flame, in the space just before the black begins, and sink your vision like an anchor into this crevice, you'll find life: a brave flame defying all of Darkness descending, ready to burn itself to nothing, just to give our eyes a floor to dance.
These spaces, these cracks between, are like a magician's hat—of fixed width yet endless depth, places you can put your hand in down to the toes—and from one thin as a hair you can pull the world inside out like a sock. Great vision, Masaru, comes not from filling the universe, but from starting with something small, and finding the universe fills it.