I could tell you that I always paid close attention to the natural world. My first memory is of the full moon streaming through the high window of my bedroom, a converted walk in closet, back in Milwaukee. My second memory, was standing on a screened back porch, watching dust motes dance in sunlight, riveted by the magic of that slow, glittering dance. But attention is a funny thing. First regard, or second, or third, or tenth or a hundredth might reveal some truth, surprising or not, but not the only truth. To know this is begin to understand the wondrous mystery of this material existence.
It wasn't until my heart attack though, that I began to take a more particular notice. Sometimes I used my camera to capture the individual perfection of a rose, the same bush captured day after day, each rose its perfection, ear similar but none ever exactly the same. Sometimes I just used my eyes. Sometimes I passed by a tree and let my hands explore the marvel of trunk, discovering its valleys and hills, the rough and smooth as personal as a fingerprint. Sometimes, I knelt and observed a bug make its way across the concrete, clamber up a branch, hover and settle. There were times I leaned in, head cocked to one side, given lichen my most intense scrutiny. This was how I pieced my world back together after it was ripped apart, brick by brick, flower by flower, day by day, month by month, season by season.
I'm not sure that I was expecting answers or truths, although I will tell you I got some. Mostly, I think, I needed to rediscover the mysterious, the wonderful in a world that seemed neither. I wasn't dead from my heart attack, but I wasn't alive either. I suppose if I wanted to label what I was, I'd call myself Undead, not vampire but zombie, going through the motions of living, nearly alive, but not quite. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't clamoring for brains, but there was something automatic in much of what I did, it was the semblance of life but not the actuality of it.
And still I walked, observed, took pictures, scrutinized. I regarded the turn of the day, the passage months, the seasons coming and going, one year chasing the other. I paid close attention to blades of grass, the petals of roses, the clouds, reflections in puddles, trees, leaves attached and fallen. I listened to the wind through bare branches and newly leaved ones, through full green glory of summer and brittle rustle of autumn. And somewhere, in the midst of all this, I understood where I was, what I was, and I prayed, the only way I ever prayed, with the fierce yearning of my heart, now new, for a real life and all that entailed, both the joy and the sorrow, the wondrous and the mundane.
I got the real life I prayed for. In the last few months I lived more than I have in years, and I've felt alive, a zombie no more. I have marveled at the world around me, at the places I've been, at the people I've met. I haven't made the detailed observations I did. The world is mysterious and marvelous, but I have come to a place where I'm ready to take a breath and go deeper, to see what more is waiting to be revealed. I've started walking the beach of the place I now call home. I'm beginning to pay close attention to the water, the sand, the wind, the sun, the clouds, the sounds and smells. I don't know what I'll learn or when it will come, the revelations that arrive when we spend time contemplating the mysteries. I can't wait though, to find out.
Einstein said, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Those to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; their eyes are closed." May all of us experience the mystery in a blade of grass, in a grain of sand, in a wave, in anything and everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment