Easter, April 1st, and my birthday.  The sun rises brilliant, warm, and smooth jazz is playing inside at Starbucks.  Easter is the day by which we all celebrate our good fortune to be alive.  And it’s sheer good fortune, our number came up in the lottery of Nature.  Sometimes things happen which remind us that a state of well-being, awareness of light, and life, and music is not to be taken for granted. Life is a mystery to us, our understanding of matter and energy notwithstanding.  We are lost to explain the line between bare matter, chemistry, and organic chemistry the exchanges descriptive of living beings.  It does not matter whether we are considering a single cell amoeba, or a human being with infinitely networked relationships with other humans and life forms.  We can describe but cannot explain the “emergence” of life.  We use a specialized word like emergence to serve to point to what we do not understand.

Yesterday I visited the Milwaukee Art Museum.  The museum facility itself and the collection which it contains is a finger pointing at what it means to be alive, to be human. The museum containing 25,000 works of art is housed in part in a building designed by Santiago Calatrava.  It appears gull-like with gracefully arched wing on the edge of Lake Michigan.  The structure opens in daytime to afford maximum light for contemplation of the work exhibited inside.  Viewed from the lakeside with the Milwaukee cityscape as background, or from a position inside of the building one feels the spirit of Calatrava.  He lives in this magnificent piece of architecture.

While walking from exhibit to exhibit–thoughts, emotions, evaluations in a range from deep respect for an ancestors way of life, depicted in a work, to revulsion, horror at the cruelty and abject ignorance of our forbears, came and went.  To view and appreciate art is to open oneself to the mystery of life, to the ecstasy and the terror of being alive.  Life is a roll of the dice, and simultaneously an experience of meaning and beauty.

I learned from the Homer Winslow paintings a little of what it must have been like to have lived in the 1870s, to have earned one’s living from the sea, or from the fields and pastures of that day.  That bit of insight was Winslow’s gift to me.  He and the sea still speak, telling the story of us.  I felt linked to the fisher-women in a small English coastal village of Cullercoats that Homer painted.

I marveled at the studio glass collection.  I could spend a lifetime with glass artists watching them work the hot molten silica into forms that are conjured by the maker’s imagination.  What is comparable to glass in utility, and malleability?  This simple vessel by Mary Ann “Toots” Zynsky is formed of slumped glass threads.  It shimmers with a mystical energy.  Pieces like this from her exotic bird series are held in the Smithsonian’s collection.

The sculpture of “The Last Spartan” on exhibit in the European display room always moves me.  It is a life sized male figure, lying full length on the ground fallen, with his sword and shield at hand.  The marble statue was executed (ca 1852) with life-like realism by Caetano Trentanove an American sculptor born in Italy.  When entering the room it is difficult to leave the side of the fallen figure.  The realization dawns that this symbolizes the last of a way of life, the dying of ancient Sparta, and her contribution to Greece, and by extension to democracy and freedom which has survived thus far in our country.  If you look closely you can clearly see the blade wound in the man’s side, from which he is dying.

And today is Easter.