Blurred Vision

Falling Through Twilight

I’m sitting before my cabin window looking out, thinking of what it would take to paint what I see. I started close in, realizing I see my glasses. My thumb was beneath my chin and my curled fingers in view of my eyes too. Then I looked out and thought how to paint it, you’d have to start at the freeway fence and work your way back in layers: The sky would be the first layer, then the fence, then the trees that are growing toward the morning light so that they literally hang over the fence, as if they’re drunk and need support. Then back up ten feet or so to the two tall, straight trees. One has a buffalo skull on it. The other a hanging copper owl. Below one is a bushel basket. Below the other the leaning frame of a birdhouse. Then the path. Then the half moon of chairs I can see gathered around the fire pit, along with the edge of the rocks and branches. Then the few greens in the window box. Then the window, the table with its lamp, the computer, my coffee mug. Then me.

I got started thinking of it because it struck me funny how I was seeing parts of myself as I looked out. “I” was part of the picture. How seldom that happens.

I paint a self-portrait once a year. That’s different. The portraits are always a little weird. Last year’s was called Falling through Twilight. This year’s After the Storm (haven’t taken a picture of it yet). They’re abstract because I have no idea how to do realism. Which reminds me of another memory I had when I was remembering the clarity of my vision after my first pair of contact lenses a few posts back. Because I thought, even while I was writing about it, that there’s something to be said for blurred vision too.

My first “vision” if you want to call it that, occurred in church on Holy Thursday. There’s this tradition where you keep vigil with the Blessed Sacrament on the evening of Holy Thursday, generally after the reenactment of the washing of the feet. I always think of it as sitting outside the jail cell where Jesus is held before he goes to that day’s version of trial and punishment. I discovered this tradition about the time my spiritual journey was heating up, and it floored me to get to sit in a quiet dark church and just “be” with Jesus. Some emotion came over me that first time, and I had tears streaming down my face. I took my glasses off. Half a church away were the votive candle rows that sit on the side altars. While I was looking at them through the blur of the tears, a face formed. I felt that the face was telling me I was not alone. It was the first of many such small occurrences that told me, basically, the same thing. They often came out of blurry times if not always blurred vision.

I got bad news today. “Bad news days” might as well be called blurry vision days. It was moderately bad news when I started writing this, which is one reason why I was pensive. You get moderately bad news and you go into a pause mode. There’s a certain “looking out the window” time you spend when you get the “warnings.” It’s like you know something’s on the horizon but it hasn’t come into view yet. It’s not even blurry. You know so little that you can still escape into other lines of thought or memory. I often feel, in such times, that if I can get into my creative zone, it’ll be the best thing for me. I don’t want to sit and wait for the other shoe to drop. Sometimes I rake or wash dishes. “Warnings” often bring on a restless energy that doesn’t allow you to sit. But today, I sat.

Then the second part of the news came.

When it comes, you feel like you’ve got a bigger picture, and in some ways you do, but in another, you’re more shocked or startled in that way that doesn’t allow you to think of anything else. The news fills your mind and heart; takes up every bit of room. Being unable to think of anything else, being in that churning, anxious place, is like a signal that you’ve got all the information now, but not the whole picture. The main fog is an internal fog. You’re just beginning to discover how you feel about the news you just got.

No, I don’t have cancer. My kids are fine. It's news about someone I love but not my immediate family.

Yet it's something that concerns me and that I must give attention to. This is just the way it is. The actuality of the thing. In my day of not doing anything, I’ll be open to all the guidance that I can get – the internal flow – the kind that takes all these feelings I’ve got going and does something with them. It works somewhat under the same guidelines I have about writing. If you write long enough, you might discover what you have to say.

So I can’t help but notice how funny it is that I started the morning with the idea of writing about blurred vision and in remembering how the idea was birthed alongside the clear vision of a beautiful fall day less than a week ago. As if something was saying to me…don’t get too enamored by clear vision. Remember…blurred vision has something to tell you too.

Moon Yet

It’s that time of the year again—time to adjust around the cold. A huge wind blew in late in the day yesterday and kept up all night. I good sized tree limb, although not large enough to have done any real damage had it hit the cabin, and that looks a fine and hardy fellow except for being rather pale, landed between the fire pit and the cabin. As I look out the window, it sits as if pointing to St. Francis, who sits beneath my window, part of an idea (like so many I have that don’t come with a plan), of creating a shrine.

It’s almost October and the 50 degree weather in and out of the cabin is normal, perfectly appropriate for a Minnesota Fall, and I wonder if it was working half the summer, precisely half if you think of summer as June through August, that makes the change more unexpected than usual. It was, for all it’s shortness, a perfect July and August. I was so appreciative of being “out” (as if I’d escaped prison).

I had a vision three years ago. The shrine “idea” came from that. I speak of “vision” and “idea” newly since listening to the stories of Sandy White Hawk (with appreciation and also some envy). My friend Sandy was adopted away from her family and put in the “better” home of a white, Christian family. Her work now, her sacred activism, is in welcoming adoptees back to the tribe. It started with what she called an idea – the idea of having a song to welcome them back. She told her spiritual leader about this idea and he said, “That’s not an idea, that’s a vision.” Sandy told me how things unfolded after that. She was responsible for the vision – the resources of her small tribal community were there to support her. She’s brought this vision to fruition.

My vision, like all else in my life, was not so specific. It was about joining lands of peace, creating sacred space, and creating sacred friendships. It’s written in Creation of the New (which I’m only now adding to my website, so if you’d like to see it, check it out in a week or a month – I started this blog partially because website updates take time and money).

Although the word “shrine” came to me within the vision, I didn’t make much of it until my dad was dying. In one of those awful nursing home days when I was trying to get him a new bed after his quit adjusting for sitting and laying positions, and he was a little less than fully himself, and there were three of us “Perron” women in the room and in a bit of an uproar, he said, “Make a _______.” I must have asked him three times what the final word was and I thought at first it was “stink.” “Make a stink.” But it turned out it was “Make a shrine.”

Back track a year or so to when Donny was finishing up work on the cabin and my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway. A bunch of dirt was being dug up and he asked us if we’d like any of it. Donny decided it would be a great idea to make a little more of a yard around the cabin and had it dumped along the edge that joins our two yards. I was going to shovel it – distributing it evenly over the weedy growth between where it landed and the cabin. I did shovel some, but what was left was a mound about the size of a grave. After my dad died it became “Dad’s mound,” and his shrine.

St. Francis and other notables were going to dot its edges and flowers were going to grow like a blanket of snow across it. I got about as far with that as I did with the shoveling. St. Francis still sits in front of the cabin because I always thought I was going to do more with the mound – more planting, or more work around it. I didn’t, although my husband, just this year, planted moon flowers. Again this was about as good as it gets as my dad was enamored by the moon and would call me a few times a year to ask, “Did you see the moon yet?” After Henry was born, I’d take him out at night to see the moon and one of his first words was “moon” which got morphed into “moon-yet,” as we’d go out so often before full dark and I’d say, “No moon yet.”

You might say these cool outcomes came of a habit of allowing things to come, and it feels great, absolutely perfect, even divine, especially over time and with time’s ability to bring that “just right” feeling that tells you it turned out perfectly without your interference…until it begins to knock up against a feeling that you need to do a thing or two to help a vision along. Then “needing to do something” and “letting things happen as they will” begin to duke it out.

That feeling is always hovering in the background and it’s come to the forefront now for a lot of reasons: a new book coming out (and so things that need to be done), a desire stronger than ever before (since working, briefly, in the corporate world) to have a real vocation, and the way Andrew Harvey’s vision reminded me of my own.

Yet, if I know anything, anything at all, I know that this is the time to resist defining anything too specifically, to resist like hell the organizing/institutionalizing principal that has fueled the way we all once got things done. My constant question is “How do you do things newly?”

I suspect it’s like waiting for the moon. When there’s no moon yet, there’s no moon yet and, when there is a moon, you might need someone to ask you, “Have you seen the moon yet?”