From My Journal: Seeing and Being Seen

March 2, 2012: “The universe wants to be noticed.” (The Fault in Our Stars)
The lessons of seeing keep being in the forefront these past few weeks. I decide to check out new frames before my eye appointment this coming Monday morning. I park at my usual spot near the Bijou Theater and walk to Rainbow Optics. I hear the echo of John Green's words about seeing the universe as I stroll the sidewalks. The air is clean, the sun is desperately trying to break through the cloud cover, young college students are striding more swiftly than I to their classes or sitting with that last minute cup of coffee. But then, there at the corner up ahead is a short in statue, older, silver haired woman in this luscious purple jacket. I am not the only senior citizen who loves coming to the university area. I pass her by and head into Rainbow Optics.

I have the whole place to myself and this super young gal, Brittany, ingratiates herself by offering to assist me. She is overly eager in her helping and she finally leaves while I try on pair after pair of glasses. She has steered me to the value section after she mentions the $200 and above cost of the designer frames. While I'm trying on frames, I see once again how much I have aged. I never feel as old as I look until I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror. It seems that every mirror outside my own home makes me look twice as old.

I know how petty, how meaningless it is to spend so much time trying to find a pair of glasses that will “make me appear” a certain way. I think I want to recreate myself. This time it's into “the intellectual” who for years I have tried to spurn. But since participating in the University's Insight Seminars and since creating a “culture club” with a few women I have met there, I know that being intelligent has been part of my make-up my whole life. I had to veer away from it after graduate school because I needed to balance the rational, the mind, with the emotional and the passionate. It took the raising of dear daughter Aspen to bring me that balance. And with the return to the empty nest, I am returning to my deep love of learning and seeing the universe!

I spend nearly an hour trying to choose three frames that Brittany says I can take home before making my final decision. How vain I am when I consider I rarely wear my glasses in the public world, though now that I think about it, I do carry my glasses everywhere. I can't read fine print anymore without them and so perhaps I need to revise the above statement. I do wear my glasses to read menus, to attend lectures, to read handouts, to teach, etc. But really why do I continue to worry about what I look like? John Green says, “We also want the universe to notice us.” And so I do. But I want to be noticed for my writing, my teaching, my compassion, my conversation, my ideas. I suppose our outer appearance is our first window to the world. People don't see our insides until later and some people never see our insides, the whole of who we are. Seeing takes on many forms.

I'm striding back down the sidewalk towards my car and the sun is brighter and I wish I had another errand to do. I could stop for coffee but lately I've been drinking way too much coffee. I continue walking, wondering why I allow so many gaps of time in my life when time is fast running out. Maybe the gaps aren't gaps but open spaces where deeper vision is possible. The mind clutters our seeing. I know this because I can be outside walking and not remember the scenery I have barely passed by. I shake my head and discover I have been walking around inside my brain instead. So having no goal, not necessarily being productive, can be a good thing if the eyes are wide and taking in the surrounding natural landscape and its inhabitants.

I realize another reason for “remaking” myself is because I am tired of the lonely me, the missing my daughter me. I have this whole other life even if I do get up every morning and make breakfast for one. There are more women in my life than ever before and I have recently come to acknowledge that I don't have to accept every woman who comes into my life as a friend. I can pick the ones who bring me joy, who acknowledge me as a valuable person to know, who get me and see me. The creation of the culture group has given me this resolve. Already I feel more excited and inspired by these stimulating, well-rounded, aging-gracefully women than many of my previous relationships.

How I wish I could erase my self-conscious nature. This directly connects to viewing myself in mirrors, worrying about how others see me on the outside and being nervous about the words that flow from my inside. I am socially adept with strangers, less so with the people I care or want to care about. I reach my car and climb into the driver's seat. It is a quick trip home. Lacey our dog is waiting for me and is ready to go out into the backyard. I know in my heart that for all my social nervousness, I can only be myself. And whether this self gets me into trouble or not is simply part of the process of living my life. I admit I do want the universe to see me. But first I have to see me. I have to see I am who I am and that I am a continual work in progress. I don't want to stagnate, but I don't want to make myself over into something I am not. My passionate heart beats steadily, my over alert mind thinks profusely, my written words continue to strive for a clear and renewable vision.

© 2012

Insight

I am in a restaurant, dining with friends, prior to us all attending the ballet. My eyes become mesmerized by, then squint and flicker with the table's overly bright hanging light. Suddenly there appears a spider like web of black strands in my left eye. Wearing mascara for the first time in years, I think I have gotten some of it in this eye. I brush and rub it lightly. The web remains. I eat and try to ignore my discomfort. Later sitting in our seats, awaiting the ballet performance to begin, I tell my husband about my eye. He encourages me to relax.

When I get home, I pour water in my eye and try to rinse the blackness out. Nothing works, and my anxiety-prone brain kicks in. I treasure my sight...doesn't everyone? But I mean I truly treasure my vision because I love seeing the tallness and greenness of trees, the expanse and blueness of the ocean, the faces of my family and friends, the shoots of flowers peeping through the earth telling me winter will pass. And I love words: both reading them and writing them. How can I describe where I would be without my sight?

I get through the night. My husband goes onto the Internet (our portable encyclopedia and general wonk machine) and we decide what is happening is a phenomenon called “Floaters.” Supposedly, the eye gets dry behind the lens and small fragments of matter can break loose and wander around in the eye. I don't want to be like my mother who in her later years did nothing but talk about her ailments and so I stuff my complaints and concerns. Will this thing last forever? I try to ignore what can't be ignored and decide I'll make an appointment with my optometrist first thing in the morning. Simultaneously, my mind starts going to: what can I learn from this experience?

My optometrist thinks I have been in a fairy world, because I have never heard of “floaters” before. I tell him this makes me feel old, for it is said floaters can be connected to the “aging” of the eyes. But he assures me that every month people in their thirties and forties come in with these concerns, and this benign artistic eye patch usually works itself out in a matter of weeks.

After my exam, I begin to breathe again, and walk down the street wearing sunglasses to temper my blurry, dilated vision. Even with shades on, the world is clearer and brighter and more colorful. With each step, I mumble a repetitive mantra, reminding myself to give thanks for my daily living and seeing. I am in a fog as I teach my students and focus/listen more to what they say. Especially as we humans age, there is always a tendency to become self-absorbed with the “problems” or “obstacles” given and though I only mention my floaters to one student and her grandmother, I intuitively know there are a thousand lessons of “insight” coming my way.

The grandmother tells me about her macular degeneration and my student, whose mother translates books into braille for the blind, tells me about a young elementary kid who is losing his ability to see colors. We nod and acknowledge how difficult it would be to live in a colorless world.

Over the next few weeks I shy away from my usual voracious reading and writing. Am I being encouraged to turn my vision from the outer to the inner realms? To rest my eyes from their narrow outward viewing?

What I have been noticing with my blocked vision is this: everyone appears to be here with a passion or a reason...to draw, to write, to dance, to sing, to mother, to teach, to repair, to create, to be of service. Of course, many of us have a number of these reasons for being. But sometimes we forget these passions/reasons, or at least we think we forget: we stumble, we fall and we scrape ourselves trying to scramble back up to the mountain top where the panorama encompasses our whole world and we finally know what we are supposed be doing.

I have been stumbling. I tend to stumble a lot, of late. I have been allowing the past to pull me backwards for far too long. Once upon a time I was a mother, and my mothering seemed like enough of a reason for being. But it's finally becoming clear to me that this was only a stepping stone. If I have this tendency to melodramatically (for I am a Leo after all) look into a sad, daughterless future, then I must remind myself how the future is only my imaginings and hasn't happened and needed happen so.

I find that when I focus my eyes in a certain way, the floaters disappear. And then I can see clearly what's in front of me. This present, this near vision is all I have to worry about. Each pearl of clarity brings me closer to the object I am trying to see and allows me to understand what my world is all about. These pearls are all that matter...not the past, not the future. Sometimes it is best not to see too much all at once. Sometimes it's best to close and rest one's eyes, to cuddle under the covers of darkness and to simply be with one self and to understand as Virginia Woolf did, that these given insights, “moments of being” are enough.

© 2012

Hummingbird

It's morning. I awake and find myself wishing for an uplifting experience. Everywhere I turn lately there is sad or tragic news. America's politics is sorely and scarily lacking in reason; a Black man, who I signed a petition for, is executed in Georgia and might have been innocent; several new movies out are about people finding romance while they are dying...I could go on but writing it all down is making me depressed. I need to find some joy, I tell myself; I need to have a sign of hope.

As I am doing last night's dishes, there it is, my hopeful emblem. I watch intently as a flitting hummingbird rises above my plum red perennials. She perfectly balances herself mid-air and then flies off. How beautiful and wondrous, I think. Then the deepest azure, blue jay appears on the chrysanthemums. He seems to be searching the garden for someone. Another bluest jay sits camouflaged on a finger-thin branch up in our flowering cherry tree quietly scanning the horizon. The eyes of the two birds meet. Their songs float between them and then in a finger snap they both fly together towards a fir tree across the street.

In gratitude I bow to the simple, yet magical scene of daily living outside my window. It is enough to momentarily lift my spirits. Dear Mother Earth, dear majestic realms of the natural world, I want to remember you are always here whenever I open my eyes and heart. I get so caught up in my small, small world and forget there is the constant companionship of myriad trees nearby or the sweet melodious sounds of frogs, crickets and fowl on the Amazon canal, or the frolicking teasing of squirrels in my own back, cedar enclosed, garden.

My heart has been heavy lately and my voice has been stuffed with the pain of my own creating. I've been spending too much time alone, waiting for my school year as a home instruction teacher to begin, waiting for the days of summer to blend into the days of autumn, waiting for new dreams and purpose to enter my line of vision. We are our thoughts, I am told; we are what we can imagine; we are our own self-creators. I've been stuck and struck dumb and numb, telling myself being stuck is fine because that's where I am.

Time is leaving me behind and I figure because time runs away so quickly that my sour mood will runaway quickly too. Why is it, though, that the events, feelings, experiences we want to pass us by linger on and on, while the positive ones are over in a lightening flash? Like the hummingbird moment...I want to capture this raising of the soul's essence and put it in a treasure box. Then whenever I want I can open this box and observe my hummingbird one more time. But life doesn't work like this. Life's precious moments pass and cannot be recaptured.

I want my good memories more accessible and my bad ones buried beneath a pile of debris. But I have this tendency to remember the words wrongly spoken or the needed words not spoken at all. The creative optimist becomes unseen under a stack of wishes and regrets. Like Alice's white rabbit, I tell myself there is no time and I run away faster from all I want to be and do. I am becoming lost in metaphor and lost from my own blue jay intuitive communication. I want to come out the other side...an other side I imagine as a kind of heaven to my self-imposed hell. Wasn't it in Paradise Lost where Milton reminds us we can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell?

The answers are blindingly simple to any question I pose. The up to the down, the forward from the back, the turn around is there before me...there right outside my window. If only I'd remember to look and see.

© 2011