We see through the lenses of our experience. Had you been with me when I took these photographs, you might have aimed your camera at a different scene. You might not have noticed the moss that was growing on the top of a boulder beside the Black Lake trail (in RMNP). You might have had your eyes on the trail--or on the stream on the other side of the path, or on the mountains ahead. The moss might have seemed unworthy of a photograph. (Moss housed the little people I pretended understood my life as a little girl, but that's for another writing.).
I've brought out colors and closed in on details by enhancing these photographs. It was fun. The water's edges turned blue violet as I brought out the green grasses growing around the boulder. The day I took the picture, I barely noticed the green and the water looked white as it rushed over the rocks.
How and what we see makes such difference in our attitude about each day. I'm skilled at finding the beauty, the good, and letting that be my focus. That has often meant ignoring peril, and not planning for illness or old age. A friend once said that I saw clearly the danger ahead. Then, he said, I walked right into the fire, as if I didn't know the house was burning. My spiritual journey has forced me to see evil as well as good with clarity. I didn't find a photograph to represent evil, but the rocks and pebbles in the bottom of the stream are brought into a much clearer focus (see the same picture in earlier blogs) by cropping and enlarging their images. The fall image, which I couldn't resist putting in, shows the rocks with clarity without enhancement!
Notice that in the photos with bright light, there is also darkness. The darkness looks like a void so the light will stand out. Are there days when the darkness obscures the light? When darkness would color the bright--take away from it? And what about color? Can we enjoy the gold leaves without remembering the cold, dark days that will follow?
Last Saturday, when the fall photograph was taken, we started up Boulder Canyon in light fog and mist. We didn't know what the weather would be when we got to the Hessie Trailhead. We had been told that the aspen leaves had turned beautiful yellows and golds. My positive thoughts were that they always looked brighter against gray clouds. That way of thinking reflects the way I coped in childhood--look for the pink skies that transformed the gray farm buildings, suck on the sweetness from clover "straws." My friend didn't want to back out of her commitment to our hike (as I had expected her to).
As we drove past about 6500 ft. elevation (Boulder is 5430 ft.), the sun blazed down on us. When we got to Nederland, we stopped for my friend to buy sunglasses. She hadn't expected to need hers. The aspens were glorious, the sun warm and the fall light's slant was magical. What a reward for going through the fog and mist--for persevering on the path!
Fr. Thomas Keating says, and I'm paraphrasing, that without evil we could not begin to understand the depths of Divine love. We might also say that darkness enhances the light.
On my journey of spiritual and emotional healing, I have days like this one, when fatigue and dis-ease signal emotional memories. Those new on the path at our meditation group last evening sought to console and make things easier for me. But I've been on this journey long enough to know that for whatever it is that's pushing hard (for more time than it usually takes) to come to the light, that after the encounter with new clarity, I will experience light in a new way. The fall light, yes it's that, for I'm at least in the fall of my life. It can come sooner, but for me it didn't.
Needing to see clearly the evil perpetrated to and around me during childhood has meant letting go of perceptions that comforted me. My whitewashed Daddy has had to fall away. Memories I had secured in a hidden storage place have needed to come clearly into focus. During this journey of healing and spiritual growth, I've also needed clarity about my own shortcomings. I've been given the insight to understand from where my reactivity to certain people, institutions and events come.
Clarity allows for seeing the shapes of the rocks over which the water flows. It allows for understanding the water's depths, its currents, and its power. It calls for noticing where the rocks on the path are solid and sustaining and where they are wet and slippery and could easily cause a fall. Clarity calls for seeing and feeling our buried wounds, letting them rise to the surface for healing and evacuation. It calls for seeing with compassion our shortcomings, our own tendencies to cause others pain
Then, with the non-dual thinking that Franciscan monk Richard Rohr proclaims, I must hold the good rocks and the slippery ones in the same focus--understanding they have different surfaces, are planted in different ways, that neither is always good or always bad. With rocks, I find it easy to see. With people, holding their good and evil deeds as part of the whole has been more difficult.
My memory of scripture as contained in the Bible is mostly from the verses that Mother quoted (for various reasons). In the first chapter of John, there's a verse about the light shining in the darkness--and the darkness not blotting it out. That's how I see this journey of seeing clearly--being aware of evil as well as good, but not letting the evil overcome the good. We have no power to change that which we cannot or choose not to see.
(The actual verse for purists who might be reading this: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." John 1:5. NRSV) The King James version, the one with which I grew up, says "the darkness comprehended it not." That translation didn't speak to me with the same clarity.
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