…And when he was up, he was up,
And when he was down, he was down,
And when he was only half way up he was neither up nor down.
“The Grand Old Duke of York,” Children’s Nursery Rhyme
One evening, sitting on the dock of Tampa Bay, I watched a perfect sunset reflected in the water. Below the surface I noticed a family of fish. The actions above and below the water had me musing about how we perceive the surface of the water to divide our realities.
Then before I knew it, a dolphin popped up – throwing all the realities I had so carefully considered into disarray.
Consider how often we use duality in other areas of our lives to carefully categorize relationships of one thing to another. On first glance this art may appear to be a simple children’s book illustration, until you try to define what is above and what is below and what is “neither up nor down.”