Seeing

An essay inspired by Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury (p. 79-80)

Then I took a long look...

I'm reminded of a long drive home from a softball game in Milton one suffocating weekend in late July two years ago (or so). It was late in the afternoon and the shadows were falling earlier each day. While half dozing I was infused with the total green-ness of my surroundings--everywhere I looked it was green. I looked to my right and saw green grass and followed that green grass with my eyes until I saw green trees and I followed those green trees with my eyes as they stretched to the sky and bent over slightly at the top to cover the road and kiss the leaves of trees on the other side also bending over slightly to cover the road. I followed those kissed leaves down to my left until they blended into the green grass on the left side of the car. Together, all this green created a carpet of softness to tread upon and a canopy overhead to shade and protect us. It occurred to me then that I never, ever look up.

I am always looking at what is right in front of my face or I look down or I look inside. By only looking at what is right in front of my face, I miss the wholeness of things--the bigger meanings (such as trees into canopies)--and I lose my perspective of where I fit into my surroundings. By only looking down I can never see where I'm going only how I'm getting there. And, by only looking inside, I dwell far too much on feelings and thoughts--the abstractness of my life--instead of things concrete and tangible, things with density and mass.

Two years ago in late July I was determined to start looking up and outward. I did, for a while, but I've forgotten how to do that. Bradbury is talking about consciously doing that every single day while writing whatever comes to mind. He revisits places in his mind and writes about what he sees in those places; he revisits people in his mind and writes about what those people look like; he writes about the concrete and by doing that he is able to explain the abstract. I'm vowing again, today--right here in this blog, to start looking up and outward.

To my left is a pile of laundry, unsorted, providing an interesting collection of colors and shapes. If I squint my eyes just a little, the pile blurs and looks just like an impressionistic painting with no specific form and shape but endless possibilities. The wall in front of me contains six tiny nail holes where things used to hang (and here Bradbury would probably try to recall what used to hang there and then describe them). There is also a heart shape with swatches of red and blue fabric tied around the metal frame with a bright red ribbon at the top which serves as a way to hang the heart on the small brass cuphook screwed into the wall. Above the cloth heart is a cross-stitched sampler, a gift to me from a friend. The sampler is on a cream colored fabric with blue threads forming the shapes of four houses, red thread for the alphabet surrounding the houses on all four sides and red thread creating the outermost border in the shape of a checkerboard. The sampler is doublematted (red and blue) in a walnut frame with each side of the frame extending below or beyond the side it is framing, forming and "x" in each corner of the frame. The entire piece is covered with glass. To the left of the sampler and the cross heart is another piece of work, a light blue square of card stock with two holes punched in the uppermost right hand corners to support a dark blue ribbon used to hang the piece on a nail much to large for this wall or this piece. The card has red handprints, one right hand and one left hand, and white paint surrounding the handprints like cumulous clouds on the first day of summer. At the bottom and slightly to the left of center is printed: K a t i e. Standing, I turn this piece over, looking for a date and realize I have not dated this work and am not certain when it was made. Kindergarten (1985)? First grade (1986)? I make a note to ask Katie as she remembers everything.

Ah, Bradbury has forced me to look and to see and to describe the results of this visual feast I have fed on this morning. It occurs to me that my interest in narrative and stories will benefit from this kind of exercise. If I want to write stories based on the narratives of people's lives and experiences, then I must be able to describe, not tell, so that my readers can stand where I am standing and see what I am seeing.