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Sarah’s Eyes
Apr. 1st, 2011 12:09 pm Why didn’t they leave us to wander
Through buttercup summers?
Why didn’t they leave us to wander
When there was no other?
When the light shone from the Master
When the light shone, from the Master’s eyes.
(The Master’s Eyes by Van Morrison, Sense of Wonder album – 1985)
If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve been taking photographs of my granddaughter Sarah Kathleen since November 12, 2010. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs showing her sleeping, eating, playing, smiling, exercising, and growing. If you named an infant behavior I could probably show you 10 pictures of Sarah performing it. But it did not occur to me until recently that one image was always popping up – Sarah’s eyes. I would be trying to photograph a scene or a tableau that told a story about her, but Sarah would ruin the shot by gazing off in another direction or staring straight into the lens. My camera was inexplicably drawn to those unfathomably deep, electric blue orbs that always puzzled me when I reviewed the photos. There was something riveting in those starburst, blue eyes that made me feel I was looking down into a bottomless well. What was she looking at, I wondered? What was she seeing? What was she thinking of the object of her attention? Could she connect the shapes and colors she saw to any other frame of reference? I finally gave up speculating over questions only she could answer. I assumed she was simply collecting sensory data, and that with time and learning she would make sense of it. In fact, my job as babysitter was to help her exercise her muscles and senses. So, I concluded that her piercing looks were simply a developmental phenomenon and dismissed them, but I didn’t delete those photos from my picture files. It wasn’t until I attended the Religious Education Congress in Anaheim last month and heard a talk by Paula D’Arcy that I resumed my questions about Sarah’s eyes and what she was seeing.
I first heard Paula D’Arcy speak at the Religious Education Congress in 2007. The experience resulted in a blog I wrote called Beacons of Light, in which I elaborated on her premise that there are special people who act as sources of insight and illumination to help us on our journey through life. D’Arcy is a writer, retreat leader and speaker, and her workshops are always interlaced with fascinating stories about her, the people she has met, and the books she has read. Personally she survived a traumatic car accident that took the lives of her husband and oldest daughter. Working through this personal loss, she was able to comprehend the marvelous paradox of life that allows seemingly “bad things” to happen to “good people”, and founded the Red Bird Foundation, which supports healing for those in need, and sponsors Womenspeak, a series of international conferences dedicated to worldwide change. Her presentation this year wasn’t as organized and structured as the one I heard four years ago, but I found it equally engaging. The title was, The Choices We Make, and the conference program read:
“The choices we make become the story of our lives, yet so many of our choices are made from fear or anger – not awareness. We seldom challenge or question the very things that must be questioned. It’s difficult to live life’s questions. Yet one act of inquiry has the power to effect great change. How can I dig deep for the courage to ask the real questions and make more empowering choices?”
For the last year I've been working as a volunteer with prisoners who were serving time in the county jail. Despite their differences in ages, ethnicity, or crimes, they all shared one thing in common; they were all in prison as a consequence for the choices they made. I was struck by the coincidence and thought the workshop might be of value to the men I visited in jail, or to me.
As I mentioned, Paula is a prominent speaker and a writer, but she is primarily a storyteller who highlights her narrative by citing the authors she values, their relevant quotations, and many of their personal tales. This penchant for tossing out names and quotes can be a little unnerving at first, especially if one hasn’t practiced taking comprehensive lecture notes in many years, but they are worth writing down. In my first encounter with her, D’Arcy mentioned Natalie Goldberg, an author whose book, Writing Down The Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, ended up providing me with a lot of very useful advice about writing and life. So this time I didn’t panic when she again started mentioning a plethora of writers I had never heard of before. I simply wrote as fast as I could, phonetically scribbling the names of the people she cited, and trusted my memory. I figured I could look up the names later on the Internet, correct my spelling, and get a fuller idea of who they were. She began her talk by quoting Mark Nepo, a poet and philosopher who wrote:
Having loved enough and lost enough,
I am no longer searching,
Just opening.
No longer trying to make sense of pain,
But trying to be a soft and sturdy home
In which real things can land.
These are the irritations that rub into a pearl.
So we can talk awhile
But then we must listen,
The way rocks listen to the sea.
It was D’Arcy’s belief that we spend too much of this precious life WAITING and AVOIDING this precious life. We live, she said, with very little reality, because we depend on what happens in our heads to explain, define, and categorize what we see and feel. We are barely open to reality because we tend to see things as WE ARE, and not as THEY ARE. With that premise, she began her presentation with a story about Gregory Roberts, a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from an Australian prison and fled to India for 10 years. When he was recaptured, he served a further six years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement. Later he wrote the novel Shantaram, a fictionalized account of his experiences, in which he said:
“The first wall of any prison is the one that surrounds the heart… when you escape, when you break out, it’s the wall within yourself that you must scale first… It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was free – free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”
Paula believed that our own lives are filled with moments like these, moments with powerful alternatives - to fear or love, to hate or forgive - and that the choices we make forms the story of our life and how we see reality.
“There were choices about rushing past things, rather than living deliberately and consciously,” she said of her own experiences after the death of her husband and child. “The choice to slow down and meet my life: to stand before everything that matters; to stand before my suffering – in every instance; to stand, and not turn away.” Instead, she believed, we find ourselves living in stories we created for ourselves, while missing the wonders of that “ single force forever moving in secret rhythm through our lives, like a river flowing through everything and making us who we are.”
Life itself can become our greatest teacher, D’Arcy expanded. “I saw how I usually approached life with my conclusions already firm. I didn’t take enough time with things. I didn’t grant life to others, quite the opposite; I often clung to my own version of someone else’s life. I saw how strong opinions frequently rushed to cloud vision. It took great resolve to slow down the speed of my conditioned responses, but being aware of them was my first hurdle.”
“Listen to your life,” she quoted Frederick Buechner. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell, your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis ALL MOMENTS ARE KEY MOMENTS, and LIFE ITSELF IS GRACE.”
It was at that instant that I made an associative leap, and two images came into my mind: a Beginner’s Mind and my granddaughter, Sarah Kathleen. What D’Arcy was describing reminded me of the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness,” the practice of sitting in silent meditation, or prayer, while not engaging the ideas, feelings, and opinions that constantly intruded one’s thoughts. One of the goals of this contemplative practice was the development of a “Beginner’s mind”, or the ability to observe and see things as they truly are, and not how we have been taught to judge them. This was true seeing, without the conditioning and prejudices of family, society, or education. It would be akin to how infants first perceived the sights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch of the world around them; the way 4-month old Sarah probably saw her family, home, and neighborhood. How did Sarah perceive reality, I wondered anew, and what effect were my weekly interactions having on her? Was I imposing my perceptions on her, or was she somehow pushing me out of my story, and re-introducing me to reality?
Refocusing my attention on D’Arcy’s talk, she spoke of her belief in a special force that was independent of the stories we created for ourselves. Connecting with that power, she said, can plug us back into reality. Everything that occurs to us can open a door to this reality, if we choose to see it as an opportunity and turn the knob. On the day of the accident, D’Arcy’s husband purchased a book for her before the trip; it was On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. It was only later that she recalled that moment, and marveled at its significance. She then quoted Annie Dillard who said, “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment when I was lifted and struck”. Even inexplicable catastrophes and tragedies may lead us to that source of mystery and reality. One day we will all leave this earth, D’Arcy added, but people don’t live in that reality. Instead they choose to live within their own stories and act as if life never ends.
Then she quoted Dillard’s book, For The Time Being, in which the Pulitzer Prize winning author reflected on the existence of evil and human misery in the world. D’Arcy focused on Dillard’s observations in a maternity ward where newborn babies seemed incredibly alert and vigilant to everyone and everything around them. She noticed the intensity of their gaze, and how they seemed to study people and objects. She imagined that newborns saw the world the way mystics saw life, through unconditioned eyes with no preconceptions. Yet, she concluded sadly, as nurses ignored the clear-eyed gaze of the babies and put them into their cribs, the more the babies looked, the less the babies would see. From the minute they were born, the people around them, especially the people who loved them, were conditioning the infants. Soon the infants would see only what the adults saw. Infants possessed the clear eyes of the soul, D’Arcy concluded. We are a sea of humanity, lost in our stories, failing to see that our choices are self-centered actions keeping us from connecting to reality.
I sat back in my seat to ponder these powerful images, as D’Arcy continued with another illustrative story. Looking down at my notes I jotted down a quick equation: Infant’s eyes = Sarah’s eyes = Beginner’s mind = reality. I had assumed that Sarah saw incoherent fragments of reality when she first opened her eyes. I imagined color, light, shade, shadow, and darkness flooding her vision and making no sense, just like St. Paul looking through a glass darkly. I also thought it was my job as grandfather, babysitter, and teacher to bring order to that chaos by introducing language, words, and labels. The sooner Sarah could talk and read, I reasoned, the quicker she would make sense of this crazy world and be safer and happier. Surely this was a good thing, I thought. Teaching a child to define and label things was knowledge, wisdom, and power - it couldn’t be the stunting conditioning that D’Arcy and Dillard were talking about? I took a moment to inspect my motivation. What was behind my imperative to educate Sarah and teach her to describe the world around her? The answer did not take long in surfacing because it was obvious – Fear. I wanted Sarah to be safe from the vagaries and uncertainties of life and people. I wanted her to be careful, to take precautions, and to be wary of people and things. I wanted her to organize the people and things around her and not be threatened or controlled by them. Yet D’Arcy was very clear in her belief that fear was not a good reason for the choices we make and the actions we take. My fear was pushing me to impose my views and descriptions on a mind that needed to see and experience the wonders of life, nature, and reality. Sarah had to see for herself – not through my eyes. I needed to stop and reconsider what I was doing with Sarah and why. I remembered another quote by Annie Dillard.
“I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
That’s what I wanted Sarah to see - a sea of light, color, sparkle, and wonder. A poetic field of mystery and amazement, balanced on the edge of a razor. For as both authors pointed out, this world can be a dangerous place, full of misery, hardship, and suffering, but that doesn’t stop the love, wonder, and mystery from bleeding through. I needed to step back and recalibrate my time and efforts with Sarah. I needed to be part of the exhibition of this world and help Sarah become her own artist and poet in seeing it and illustrating it. I could make her a palette, and buy her the paints, but she would have to mix them herself and paint what she saw.
So many thoughts and images were shooting through my head that I had to stop. I needed to write about these feelings and ideas later, when I could make sense of them. My eyes slowly refocused to my surroundings, and my attention returned to the petite, auburn-haired lady standing behind the music stand podium. She was talking about a documentary called Dalai Lama Renaissance, a film about a group of innovative thinkers who gathered with the Dalai Lama in hopes of solving the world’s problems. Their well-meaning efforts ended in a confused debacle for everyone except the monk, who was amused by the frustration of the analysts. He counseled them to work on themselves first, before tackling the problems of the world. “Everybody thinks of changing humanity,” he said, “and nobody thinks of changing himself.” I thought this was good advice for me too. Instead of educating Sarah to be fearful, cautious, and controlling, I needed to try seeing things through her eyes, and taking the time to listen – the way rocks listen to the sea.
If you are interested in seeing my “gallery” of Sarah’s Eyes, and photos from this year’s Religious Ed Congress, click on the links below:
2011-03-18 Religious Ed Congress
