On the Art of Seeing

I just reread the chapter in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek entitled "Seeing."  And "Seeing" has got me "thinking."

I know the way I see, and therefore experience life, is unique to me alone.  The sights that stop me in my tracks might mean nothing to someone else, and knowing that, I am ever grateful for the sense of seeing that I possess.  The ferns I have watched unfurl, an entire being uncoiling from a single spore smaller than the iris of my eye, the complete ecosystems that reside within a two inch square at the heart of a decaying redwood, these thing give me fodder to chew over for hours, no, days to come.  In the vast filing system of my mind there is a single tree clinging to a massive rock at sea, a vibrant purple sunset with perfectly vertical sheets of thunderstorms closing in, one young doe watching me in the Sierra Azul foothills, a deceased seal awaiting the carrion birds with the most stunning striated white markings.  

And the moss.  But you already know about me and the moss.

On a typical rainy day in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, in the midst of chattering throngs, whole smoked ducks, cheap slippers piled three feet high and the stench of the public, I found a bright orange bead stamped with symbols of good fortune in the muddy gutter.  I opened my eyes a little wider and found six more.  Good fortune, laying in the street, free for anyone who took the time to see.  

I am lucky.

"To look at any thing

If you would know that thing,

You must look at it long:

To look at this green and say

"I have seen Spring in these Woods"

Will not do.

You must be the thing you see;

You must be the dark snakes

  of stems and ferny plumes

  of leaves.

You must enter in

To the small silences between

  the leaves,

You must take your time

And touch the very place

  they issue from."

- J. Moffit