Hidden
I know someone who is going blind. All of us who care about her are praying, and hoping, that her wonderful doctors can save some of her vision, but the path seems very difficult. She is walking it, however, with grace and humor and we had an interesting conversation the other day. She jokingly told me that she wished that the government would pass a law to standardize public restrooms because it turns out that every one of them is different. The soap, water faucet, paper towels—everything is in a different layout in every public restroom, and most of the time you are alone. The person who can’t see, therefore, is lost from the get-go. She laughed about squirting far too much soap and zero water into her hands and my heart went out to her. We take so very much for granted, those of us who see. A lot more than we realize.
When you first enter a course of study to learn to draw or paint, the instructor spends a lot of time trying to teach you how to really see because our brains tend to make things up. We see what we want to see, what we expect to see. True observation is a difficult challenge. To see that the green leaf is really shades of dusky purple because its in the shade. To see an apple as the irregular rectangle that it often is rather than round like a ball. To see how dark our shadows need to be- often many shades darker than you would think. Artists are encouraged to step away from their work every thirty minutes because we literally don’t see our errors. Yesterday I stayed at the easel for two hours, came back later, and suddenly saw that there was no way that a particular object was correctly rendered in its reflection. Patch time.
If you want to live a creative life, there may be nothing more important than accurate observation. And we see with more than our eyes. If we move through our days mindful of the people, things, and opportunities around us, all kinds of small treasures suddenly become visible. Just like the hidden flowers in Sandro Botticelli’s painting Printemps. Did you know that there are 500 hundred different species of plants accurately placed in this painting? A botanical expert with some time could identify every one. So maybe wake up tomorrow resolved to see the hidden beauty in your life and it will translate into every creative thing that you do. May your eyes be seduced, as poet John O’Donahue once wrote, by some unintended glimpse that cuts right through the surface to a source.