Learning to See

It’s not wise to think that there’s only one way to see things. Occasionally it’s a good idea to look at the world from a different perspective, to turn things topsy-turvy. Today the outdoors tugged at me like wind at a kite string so I pulled on my coat and boots and set off across the fields. In the center of one is a great heap of rocks piled up when the field was plowed under for corn. I climb to the top and sit in the hollow of the largest boulder. From there my view of the meadow alters.

Over the tops of the willows that line the creek bank I can see a third field with rows upon rows of old corn stubble converging to a point at one corner of the woods. I spy a small brown bird clinging to the tattered spike of a cattail. It sways slightly in the wind and I hear it singing, “Here I am, here I am, oh mine, this one’s mine.”

Over my head two geese wing their way through the too-blue sky, their harsh cries echoing down to me like falling leaves. Farther on, a red-tailed hawk sits on a branch high above me and watches me watching it. I climb into the lower branches of a sturdy tree and look down as the hawk does. My view of the earth changes again and so do my thoughts. With my feet ground-anchored and my eyes looking up I contemplated flight. Standing shakily on a tree limb looking down, I think of falling.

A dusting of snow on fallen leaves forms a patterned carpet and the sky is bracketed by tree branches sketched in sepia. Safely back on the ground I search for a soft dry place to lie down and discover a hollow. I snuggle in and the whole world becomes suddenly smaller to my eyes, encompassed by leaf covered banks and tree trunks and thick branches that allow only tiny glimpses of the sky. Here where my view is limited, I can let my imagination soar. When I was a child, this came easier. I was less reluctant to let go of my rational mind, more able to move unrestricted through the worlds inside my head. I could be the hawk soaring above and the girl on the ground and know them both from my protected place.

I have learned to acknowledge that while all things change, they stay the same. The wind still blows, even if I cannot feel it in the hollow. The sky changes from blue to smoke to dusk. At the end of today tomorrow waits, and tomorrow I will see everything differently.

A Different Point of View

You’d think, looking out across the vast expanse of snowy meadow that snow would be the great concealer, covering every sin of autumn. You would be wrong. Snow is, instead the great revealer, carrying on its surface the calligraphy of bird feet, the black dot trail of infinitesimal seed dispersal, the tracks of leaf travel refrozen in small puddles of melt. On its surface are scrawled the death stories of bloom and blossom, the life stories of mole and mouse, the travel journals of fox and coyote.

Snow reveals man’s impatience with weather where it is heaped, gravel-stained, along the roadsides and pushed impatiently back against the banks of pond ice. It recounts, in rounded belly and stony eyes, the story of a child at play and bears traces of snowshoe and ski with grace.

Nothing under the snow is unknown, only seen in another form. Boulders sleep under blankets, bushes huddle in imitation of sheet-draped parlor furniture, fence posts and tree branches become confections, frosted and glittering. You could speak of snow as the great concealer but you would be wrong. It merely puts the familiar in an unfamiliar light and reveals the minutiae of the normally unobserved.

 Thanks, Hilary!