Happen To Travel To Istanbul?

I believe this painting was done on the final day of December, 1855.   Strange that I had already decided in my mind that it would be the perfect visual representation of starting off the New Year. It simultaneously displays a yearning for the beckoning call to adventure which always leads to unknown destinations far and wide, as well as illustrating that exotic port of call we may already happen to be in, our destination.

I mean to say our current location--itself the destination of our previous journey which got us here. If you think about it, a date such as the final one tacked onto the final month of the year, well that can be a lonely place if everyone just passes through without seeming to even want to recall the good times that passed before. Sure, every day could be considered to exist in that rarefied state, so why not start at the beginning, on January 1.

It's as good a date as any, and at least in my corner of the globe, better than most considering it's the frozen dead of winter. What better place to begin a new journey than here and now? Or better yet, forget the phantasmic here--where we're each respectively at is a given--and merely think of one thing: the now. After all, it's all there really is.

If Time remains all that matters, and I can reassure you that is quite certainly the case, all that matters will remain in time, as in the babbling of clarified brooks and the sussuration of insects, the flapping of bat wings or the thrumming of hummingbirds, the soft plastic hammering of keypad buttons or the scritching and scratching of pens upon notebooks.

It is marked daily with the rising of the Sun.With the added perspective of distance, the seasons begin to fall into focus as features of a face. I don't mean the painting, I mean what it manages to capture with such lucid clarity, time itself embodied.

Thanks to the painter, Ivan Ivazovsky for having the dedication to realize this wonderful vision, "View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus," whose copyright remains in the public domain both abroad and here in the United States. Let this image serve us as a reminder. The nearest port of call may lie under our feet, and the horizon always lies waiting just beyond the setting Sun, beckoning for us to resolve ourselves to undergo another journey out into the wild blue yonder. Perhaps we'll meet each other in Istanbul.

Shaun Lawton