I have one or two images from my childhood that are so vivid, so tactile, dressed with such deep sensation, that they are etched into memory as if the brain were a stone inscribed. One of these is a grove of trees in early winter, their trunks extending out of a pool of water where no water should have been. The forest had gathered its days of rain and snow and morning wet that fell from its canopy of leaves – into a basin, where path became puddle. One giant puddle in fact, held delicately in place by a fragile and thin membrane of icy skin that magnified the forest floor beneath. One magnificent air bubble from the breath of everything alive below.
That image of transition; the clear translucent grey/green mirror with lit up flecks of white fairy-light snow, held me in frozen wonder. Resplendent. I will die with that image somewhere in the brain-bank of memories. It was a transition of sorts for me too. My relationship to the earth beneath my feet and any body of water, whether stream or ocean, changed that day. I understood something about our planet that I couldn't talk about, nor satisfactorily write about either.
When something is found that jars you awake like that, your heart is felt in your chest and what it is that you understand, is not understood through words or thinking. More tactile. More sensory.
In later years I discovered that, at will, I could bring a smidgeon of that sensation back into my heart through “forgetting" about what it is I was looking at. What I mean by that is, to find anything interesting and new, I merely had to look at it long enough and let everything I know about it, disappear! It's somewhat similar to that sensation of seeing the word “and" or “the" on the printed page and suddenly not recognizing it as the way that it's always been spelled. Or suddenly paying attention to the ritual of eating – performing this maneuver where I place something into this hole in my face, mash it up with these stony white things that grow there and then let it slip into another deeper hole, into my body. Or that perspective my brother and I had as kids; looking at the room upside down, with ceiling as floor and floor as ceiling.
Do you get my meaning? Everyday things – looked at through the eyes of a child, the eyes of wonder, or the eyes of unknowing. What happens is a little taste of freedom from the norm, a little taste of newness, playfulness. Perhaps a little sense of losing that ego that keeps chattering in my head saying it knows what this is or how this will go, and that my world is under control, understood and packaged in a recognizable fashion. Potentially interesting. Possibly fresh. Perhaps a revelation that helps me understand something I never really did before.
It's about leaning into a sense of uncertainty, being playful and finding wondrous things there – where suddenly the tree is upside down and drinking in the air and the roots are the part we are seeing above ground. The house is a box, with other boxes of varying sizes within the bigger box, and we live in those. Automobiles are just a bunch of moving chairs on wheels, rolling from one place to another; or people are “dressed" in skin, and have put on façades of clothing to give the further illusion that under clothes and skin, we are somehow different.
Sometimes there's great discovery and lessons in looking at the world without the labels we've placed onto everything to make ourselves feel safe. It's only a game after all. Things don't have to be what they seem. They can be waiting in wonder. Worlds we weren't aware of. People becoming stories through conversation. Everything becoming interesting and new. Everything shining. And if we're lucky, we'll lose ourselves for a moment to find ourselves anew, with fresher meaning, a sense of purpose, as an integral part of what we're observing – in a world of wonders so strange, and strangely familiar.
FORGETTING THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
