“Mind the Light”

But the ability to see – to be aware and truly open, whether it be to African masks, to the color of pebbles, to sunlight coming through a cellar window, to the shape of dinosaur bones, or to the face of someone hungry – is for anyone and everyone. It is not that there is a RIGHT way of seeing, but there is a connected way.

— Mary Warner McClelland

 

 

From its strategically-placed skylights to the delightful artwork adorning its corridors, Mary Warner McClelland’s sensibility imbues Cambridge Friends School—which she, with other Quakers from Friends Meeting at Cambridge, helped to found in 1961. A curious and open-hearted world traveler, a gifted artist whose paintings and drawings were exhibited in shows all along the East Coast, and CFS’s art teacher for the school’s first ten years; McClelland had this to say about her students: “No matter what they do, no matter what the medium, the result astonishes us — the adults — looking at the crazy products the children have created. The children themselves are entranced. Where do these miraculous outpourings come from? In the variety of expression, in the surprises and unexpected twists of the imagination, one is aware that something beyond our understanding flows through each individual child.”

 

As is true for many Quakers, Light was both a metaphor yet palpable to McClelland; a source, an inspiration, an inward experience, a medium. As she put it, “Reaching out in the silence for the ‘beyond within,’ is the basis, the very stuff out of which art grows.” In a remarkable pamphlet she wrote, she expounded on this multi-purpose word:

 

“As we ‘mind the light,’ as Quakers used to say, we grow in the capacity to see new and subtler shapes and designs and colors.”

 

A key place to truly experience McClelland’s ongoing influence is, of course, CFS’s Art Room. Where, recently, using only recycled materials, the sixth graders created props for their upcoming  “Imagination Extravaganza,” a tribute to favorite childhood stories. And as so often happens in CFS spaces, the chockablock-filled with enticing art supplies room hummed as engaged, open, aware students created. “I have a very strong feeling that there is between Friends’ beliefs and the arts a vital connection which is extremely difficult to put into words.”

 

Perhaps words are not needed. Perhaps simply spending time in a school you’d so dearly loved, we, too, may experience that vital connection? Thank you, Mary Warner McClelland.