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Category: perspective

The Vacation Effect

The Vacation Effect

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One of my favorite scenes in the movie “A Thousand Clowns” happens when Murray Burns is told he must get back to reality. “I’ll only go as a tourist,” he replies.

As I reenter my real life, I replay that scene, re-embrace that motto.

I look at the parking garage in Vienna, see not the cars but the stripes of light that make a pattern on the floor.

It’s not a bad way to live, as a real-life tourist, seeing the world with fresh eyes. It doesn’t last long, this “vacation effect.” But I’ll take it while I can get it.

Epiphany!

Epiphany!

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I was all set to write about Epiphany, one of my favorite holidays. Day of discovery and adoration. The magi at the stable. And also of epiphany, one of my favorite feelings, the sudden revelation, the aha moment, the emergence of the forest from the trees.

I was helped along by a real surprise, a tree of scarves. Farther along, scarves draped over banisters and railings. On each scarf a blue tag: If you’re cold take this scarf. Chase the Chill D.C.

Looked it up, found the page and the mission, saw the skeins of yarn from which some scarves were made. Learned that the “scarf bombing” was long planned for this day, that many fingers flew to bring it about.

A sometime crocheter, I could feel the needles in my grasp, imagine the warm hearts and hands of the knitters. A sudden revelation, an aha moment. All of that and more.

Taking Stock

Taking Stock

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On my last office day for two weeks I revel in the quiet. I have stories to edit and projects to complete but I find myself pruning the fern and peeling a clementine.

I think about the writer’s need for time and space and how little of it I’ve had. I think about a new year coming and what it will bring.

How easy it is to stay put, to walk the same paths and think the same thoughts. How comforting and deadening it can be. It requires great effort to chart a new course, to seek perspective.

I’m hoping my time off will give me a chance to take stock, to search for new routes and trails. It’s not a long time, but it might be enough. I’m hoping that it is.

Retracing My Steps

Retracing My Steps

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My office key is lost. It must have slipped off the new lanyard I picked up yesterday. A lanyard that apparently didn’t fasten properly.

Meanwhile, I have walked up and down hallways and sidewalks and garage corridors, retracing my steps. What a concept — retracing one’s steps. Going back over what was done before. Ultimate inefficiency.

Or is it? Perhaps a mindfulness exercise could consist of just this practice, walking back over what I walked before, looking for what wasn’t seen previously, realizing that instead of being present in the moment of walking, I was actually daydreaming, fretting, letting the scenery pass in a blur.

As it turns out, I did find something. Not my key but a colleague’s identification card. If I found her card, maybe she — or someone else — found my key. And in this sideways, sliding, inefficient way, we will all be rescued somehow.

(This photo from outside Medora, North Dakota, has no relevance to retracing my steps. I’ve just been wanting to use it.)

New Scenery, New Eyes

New Scenery, New Eyes

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How do we perceive the vistas around us? With what eyes do we take in the forests, hills and plains of the natural world? When a new and radical form of scenery presents itself must we change our tastes and proclivities to appreciate it? Wallace Stegner raises these questions in Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (Penguin, 1953) — and from what I can tell, he answers the last one with “yes.”

Stegner chronicles not only the physical exploration of the canyons, buttes and gorges of the “Plateau Province” (mid to southern Utah and northern Arizona), but also the artistic one.

The process that is triumphantly concluded in [Thomas] Moran’s “Yellowstone” was one that had begun forty years before in the water colors of Alfred Jacob Miller, when the painter’s eye first began to adjust to prairies that were not green meadows, mountains whose rocks were other than the Appalachian granite, scrub growth whose shades were those of gray and brown and yellow, earth which showed its oxidized bones, and air without the gray wool of humidity across its distances.

 It’s an interesting thought, that new types of places require new ways of seeing. Makes me ponder Pluto’s recent closeups and the fantastic images that the Hubble space telescope has sent back to earth. The strange beauty of the Grand Canyon must have been just as jarring and awe-inspiring to the mid-19th-century denizen as these cosmic vistas are to us.

Looking Closer

Looking Closer

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Yesterday I met a wee Scotswoman who has lived in the western United States for more than 40 years but still has a lovely brogue’ish lilt to her speech. She lost her husband almost a year ago and since then, she said, has found great comfort in walking. “It’s when I think,” she said.

She lives in Spokane and strolls through neighborhoods, but putting her comment together with the spectacular mountain scenery we hiked through yesterday made me ponder what it would be like to have the Rockies at your disposal as a walking/thinking landscape.

At first it would distract. Hard to ponder anything in the face of such beauty. Hard to do much of anything but marvel. But in time, I suppose, even great beauty becomes ordinary. And then one’s eye would wander from the grand vistas to the small beauties: a swath of fog wrapped around a hillside in the morning chill or a stand of lupine beside a weathered tree stump. In time, these would be the prompts of productive ambling; these little things, small and lovely.

Pain and Perspective

Pain and Perspective

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Today I think of Emily Dickinson’s line, “After great pain a formal feeling comes.” It was “only” a toothache, but for last two days it brought me great pain. And though I have not exactly experienced the formal feeling that Dickinson felt in its wake, I have felt relief at the return of normal sensations.

What little thinking I could do when in its throes, I pondered what it would be like to live always in such misery. Some people do. Can we not all forgive them for ending it?

Great pain brushes small concerns aside. It is both a great equalizer and a great perspective-bringer. None of us asks for it. But it’s a part of life, and from time to time, we are forced to remember that.

Altered Eyes

Altered Eyes

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Yesterday, when the late light was slanting and the air was still, I went out for a quick stroll. We passed the steep driveway, the signpost Copper always has to sniff.  We turned left, toward Fox Mill Road. I had barely reached the corner when the differences overwhelmed me.

The roads are wide, the cars have too few passengers. All around me is space, order. There is no trash, no fine red dust between my toes. No woodsmoke, no hazy sun low on the horizon.

Instead there is this world I know. At once the same and different — because I see with altered eyes.

White World Shining

White World Shining

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Yesterday’s walk took me past evergreens with fondant-icing snow caps and bent
trees aching with ice but still lovely in their brokenness. In the sky was a
wan half moon with V’s of blackbirds flying.
Nature consoles even as it wounds. The forest so deep and
white, the trees glimmering in the sun that appeared late enough in the day that I had already resigned myself to snow, fog and cloud cover.
But shine it did, and I had no choice but to pause in my shoveling and writing and editing and  telephoning  — pause to see the white world shining.
Almost Morning

Almost Morning

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Though waking up in the wee hours has its deficits, it also has its benefits. And one of them is watching the sky lighten, the trees gradually emerge from the dusk, each individual branch making a pact with the light. Yes, we are here.

Today it was after 6 a.m. when this happened. And even now, as we edge toward 7, the morning is still uncertain, unknowable.

Soon the sun will glance through the front oaks and sparkle on the dew. I’ll walk out the door with music in my ears, lace up my shoes, trot down the street and put a stamp on the day.

But until then it is still almost morning. A time of infinite possibility.