Why Seeing Things?

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

- Jesus

Seeing is not just believing. For me, seeing is loving. I firmly believe that if I could watch someone every moment of his life, from conception to death, I would come to care deeply about that person, no matter how deplorably he lived, no matter how dull or unpleasant his personality. The simple act of seeing a person's life unfolding would kindle caring in my heart: seeing a little embryonic heart gather strength and begin to beat in the darkness of the womb, seeing that same heart flutter with the excitements of childhood, ache with the first pangs of love, break under the weight of grief, grow cold, grow warm again, and, finally, beat its last... if I could see all that, merely watch a person's journey from beginning to end, the beauty would overwhelm me. Vision is the pathway to love.

Deeper vision is an art, and it is one that I long to master. After all, there is so much beauty in this universe. I seek not only the long-range vision that takes in the panorama of all existence, but that gift of noticing the little things: pebbles on the footpath, wildflowers growing in the gutter, the first frost of winter, the last star of morning. I don't want to stumble through life with my head down and my eyes veiled, ignoring everything except the necessities for survival. I want to experience all that exists to be experienced - not only in the realm of rocks and rivers and rain, but in the emotional realm as well.

Let me not hide from feelings. Wherever they are, send them to me. If life sends me grief, let me grieve. If life sends me joy, let me rejoice. If a feeling comes to me, it must have a work to do in my heart. Please, let the doors to my soul fly open to the winds of grace, and let me trust that every good and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights.

Lord, let me see what you see. Don't let me close my eyes to the pain of the world and become hardened to the suffering around me. Don't let me hide my face from the sun of happiness, either, from the beauty and wonder of creation. I don't want to spend my days in denial. I want to spend my life seeing things.

My Unplugged Life

I sometimes take for granted what an unplugged life I live, compared to many of the people I know. I grew up without television or the internet in my home - and, amazingly, I still have managed to keep both out of my house, with the exception of the internet access I do have on my smartphone. During my college years, of course, I was on the internet daily at school, but my summers became much more technology free, as I would spend many of my days at home or with friends, often enjoying the big outdoors and seldom looking down at my phone for updates from the technological world.

These days, having recently graduated from college, I find myself faced with the prospect of "eternal summer," you could say, in the sense that I am no longer required to spend the bulk of my time in front of the computers in the school library. Therefore, I find myself online much less than ever before. This may be bad news for my blogs, unfortunately... although I do have high-minded goals about writing posts on Word documents at home and then bringing them in town to upload them once a week or something like that. I am really hoping I will not completely neglect my blogging, as it's been a great creative and reflective outlet for me this past semester.

But if you hear less from me, it's probably because I am busy seeing things in "the real world." Let me encourage you to do the same this summer. It's a perfect season to live life unplugged.

Ciao.

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

By Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

Society says, get out there and make a name for yourself. Dress to impress, to stand out, and that includes your personal website. Post your best selfie and wait for the likes to roll in. Make sure you tweet at least three times a day, so people don't forget you exist. Because they will. You know they will.

They will anyway. Within thirty seconds, they'll scroll down, and your face will be history. Which is why Emily Dickinson stands in the shadows in her long white dress and says, I'm Nobody! Who are you?

You don't have to be somebody, she says. That's boring; banal. Hide with me, says Emily, the ghost, the recluse. Work by moonlight in your own dark garden. You know who you are. Don't ask them to tell you; they'll just get it wrong.

God's Grandeur

God's Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings. 

The other day I took the long way home, my little car winding through rolling hills, budding woodlands, fields of dewy green. I looked up and saw a deer springing off through the grasses, full of energy and of life, and it came over me:

In the realm of nature, little has changed since time began. To the deer, this could be any century. Only human beings have bent time into a thing of fashion, mapping out the hours, the weeks, the towns and cities, the toll roads plowing through the forests, the togas in that millennium, the business-casual khaki slacks in this one.

And sometimes nature suffers from our brusque ownership, but more often, nature astonishes us by conquering our temporal constructions with its eternal anonymity. And the grandeur of God shines.

A Dream Within A Dream

 A Dream Within A Dream

By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

I, too, have said goodbye and wondered: was any of this real? I can't feel you anymore. Where are you? Have I lost you forever? Were you ever mine?

The lover bids farewell to his beloved, calm, composed; a kiss on the forehead and he is gone, his words laden with quiet grief. In a flash, he is standing by the sea. There is nothing for him now but wind and waves, and in his fingers, the remnants of the unkeepable.

The Day We Walked Around With A Banjo And Everyone Stared At Us

Angsty hipster band, a.k.a. Ray Secondo and me on a normal Monday afternoon.

Springtime is for walks, yes? Ideally, aimless walks on the back streets of a small town.... with a banjo.

If you and your heavily bearded, banjo-playing pal also happen to have dressed like trashy hipsters that day, well, so much the better. That way you can take an angsty selfie with some old office buildings and street signs in the background, and everyone you pass will stare at you and think, What? Also you can make an artsy blog post about it later, because that's what we do here in the counterculture.


My friend Ray Secondo has a beard. Like, a real beard. And I have long, messily braided hair. And I was wearing black skinny jeans and a Michael Jackson Thriller T-shirt and Chuck Taylor shoes and off-red lipstick, and he was wearing a shirt with a football and the words STILL UNDEFEATED on it and a weird throwback '90s five-panel hat with a funky pattern and blue shorts and gray shoes.

Ray plays multiple instruments, so many that I've lost track. Today he kinda wanted to play his banjo, and I kinda wanted to go for a walk, which is how we ended up going for a walk while Ray played his banjo.

We set out from the university and walked several blocks south, wading in among the quiet, sun-beaten town houses with their cute little flowerbeds and lawn ornaments. Along the path, Ray was twanging away at banjo licks, switching back and forth between Scruggs and clawhammer styles. The quiet, happy music filled the air. I never thought of myself as a banjo person in the past, but hearing it played in person has converted me. The sound! It evokes a complete atmosphere, the essence of folk America.


Despite the beautiful sunny weather, at first we saw almost no one out in their yards or traversing the sidewalks. But then the encounters started happening.

Our first human (and canine) audience came in the form of a young couple out walking their dog. The dude had a beard, although not quite as epic as Ray's. I could feel his eyes on the banjo as we approached. In no time, his face broke into a brilliant grin. "Yeah, man!" he said, and I grinned back.

A few houses down, an elderly couple was out on their porch, and at the sound of the banjo, the gentleman got up and walked a few paces out onto his front lawn in our direction. "All right! Got a little country gospel," he exclaimed. We laughed and nodded. "There's a bluegrass festival over to Kendalville in a couple weeks," he added.

"Have a nice day!" his wife called from the porch as we continued down the street. We wished her the same happy fate.

And the faces kept staring. In car windows. Over garden walls. Everyone wanted to see the crazy college kids with the banjo. And we obliged them. No matter how awkward it got, Ray kept playing, and I kept enjoying it.


As our epic (and odd) journey neared its end, and campus was almost visible through the rows of trees and clapboard estates, I looked up and noticed a purple house with a lovely garden.

"Hey, I bet this is my creative writing teacher's house," I said suddenly.

Then I saw the little library box chock full of books and I knew I was right.

Ray stopped playing. "Any good books?"

We opened the box. Pride and Prejudice. A Boxcar Kids book. A biography of Rosa Parks. I picked that one up and leafed through it. Definitely a lot of good books. But I left them for another day.

Another day when the spirit moves me to stroll out into the sunshine and wander off the beaten path. Another day when I get the urge to take the ordinary world in front of me, and do something out of the ordinary with it. Because you have to take these opportunities where you can get them. Next time you have the chance to do something weird and wonderful, do it.

Although, admittedly, you may not have a weird and wonderful friend with a banjo to make things that much more bizarre and amazing.

Eternal Light

Lux aeterna, by György Ligeti

The first time I heard this music, I was in my junior year of college. Junior year was difficult for me. I remember the constant knot of suspense in my chest, twisting tighter and tighter, then loosening, then tightening again. I don't know why, but my stress levels were high, and every day felt like a possible prelude to a breakdown. In my heart there was an ever-present, piercing desire; I just wanted to get away from it all, to run and run and run until I couldn't run anymore, to lie down in the middle of an open field where there was nothing but sweet cold and healing silence.

I'm a music major, and one of the required courses for my degree is called music literature. For me, that class consisted of reading background information related to music history and music theory, then listening critically to the important masterpieces of art music throughout the centuries, and afterward being prepared to comment on what I had heard. One day in my junior year I sat down in class, my bones still buzzing with anxiety and fatigue, and the instructor turned on "Lux aeterna" by György Ligeti. 

And time froze.

From somewhere beyond the furthest reaches of reality, light breathes a cool eternal fragrance into the waking soul.

That is what I later wrote to describe what I had heard. Music came over me gently, like a delicate spray of mist; then it flooded the room, fog. I closed my eyes so I could see the voices. In my mind's eye, they moved like stars, an almost imperceptible drift across echoless chasms of space. I was transfixed, electrified. And, for nearly a sixth of an hour, I could feel the first filaments of healing beginning to whisper and to stir within my soul.

This music is strange, eerie, even somewhat troubling. For some people, it might only provide a headache, or might even create a knot of stress in the chest. But for me in those moments, it truly was healing... a haunting call from some altar across the universe: come forward and be saved. Come away, away, to the other side of the cosmos, and lie down in the open field. Let it soak through your body, seep into all the pinched twinges of pain and soften them into floating silken dreams.

Lie here forever for a moment, inside this silver song where there is nothing but sweet cold and healing silence.