Seeing

Some­times it is enough to just notice, to stop for a moment and let what­ever is in your view become clear and present. It does not have to lead to a good idea, be pub­lish­able, or fit a the­ory or phi­los­o­phy. It may not mat­ter whether the earth orbits the sun, or what the veloc­ity of light is, or the value for the Planck con­stant. The scene might not even be photograph-​able nor paint-​able. Besides, you might lose it if you stopped to record it in some way.

Instead, you let go of all that and allow your mind to blend with what you see. We have these sorts of peak aware­ness from time to time when we sud­denly see rain­bow, or a saguaro flower at eye level. But it could be any­thing that wakes us up from out thoughts, like a sim­ple shout of a cac­tus wren.

Usu­ally, when this sort of expe­ri­ence hap­pens, it is because we are caught by sur­prise by a sight we were not expect­ing. So we are brought into a more wake­ful state. But it could be any­thing. Fur­ther­more, we can save the image in our mem­ory for when we need it.

Last week I was sick in bed for a few days. There was noth­ing to do, but I needed the rest. I read Henry Thoreau’s essay Walk­ing on my iphone. All Thoreau’s writ­ings are free in iBooks, by the way. I had prob­a­bly not read this essay this since high school, when I used to go for long urban walks with a bent up copy of Walden in my back pocket.

I was struck by Thoreau’s descrip­tion of one of his daily walks. He inter­changes “I” and “we”, but he usu­ally walked with an unnamed com­pan­ion. It started a whole new train of thought for me. I’ll just share the quote here just because I was able to copy it as text and send it to myself.

We had a remark­able sun­set one day last Novem­ber. I was walk­ing in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before set­ting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stra­tum in the hori­zon, and the soft­est, bright­est morn­ing sun­light fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the oppo­site hori­zon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the hill­side, while our shad­ows stretched long over the meadow east-​ward, as if we were the only motes in its beams.

It was such a light as we could not have imag­ined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that noth­ing was want­ing to make a par­adise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a soli­tary phe­nom­e­non, never to hap­pen again, but that it would hap­pen for­ever and ever, an infi­nite num­ber of evenings, and cheer and reas­sure the lat­est child that walked there, it was more glo­ri­ous still.

…We walked in so pure and bright a light, gild­ing the with­ered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, with­out a rip­ple or a mur­mur to it. The west side of every wood and ris­ing ground gleamed like the bound­ary of Ely­sium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gen­tle herds­man dri­ving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall per­chance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awak­en­ing light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank­side in autumn.