Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - The Present

We spend so much of our lives getting ready to live.  Years ago I heard a mantra from Randy Harris that I think is terrific.  It has four parts.  I will be incompetent.  That is not a goal, but a confession before the fact.  The standards I am pursuing are idealistic and important.  I will not abandon the ideal.  I will be incompetent.  I will be fully present.  I will see Christ in the face of every person I encounter.  I will be Christ in every situation I encounter. 

 

When Annie Dillard speaks of The Present, she is living in the now.  I wonder how long we can pay attention to one thing.  How long does an experience last?  I wonder if we could pay more attention.  Consciousness is an interesting concept.  When the lights flicker on behind the eyes, when the neural network opens for reactive input, do we have any control?  Consciousness is vital, but self-consciousness is (or can be) a hindrance to being fully present.

 

Have you had those moments that you wish would at least pause?  We want to soak in it, or soak it in.  It is too much to think it could last forever, but it could slow, couldn’t it?  I am sure that is why we love photographs, or paintings.  We will even call it ‘a capture.’  But that is not really true.  The ‘capture’ is in our memory, and the ‘capture’ is nothing more than an aide for remembering.

 

Dillard writes:

 

• This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain.  And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy.  (80)
• Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. (82)
• There are a few live seasons.  Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. (83)
• Michael Goldman wrote in a poem, ‘When the Muse comes She doesn’t tell you to write; / She says get up for a minute, I’ve something to show you, stand here.’ (85)
• I want to come at the subject of the present by showing how consciousness dashes and ambles around the labyrinthine tracks of the mind, returning again and again, however briefly, to the senses. (88)
• Dorothy Dunnett: There is no reply, in clear terrain, to an archer in cover. Invisibility is the all-time great cover; and the one infinite power deals so extravagantly and unfathomably in death ... makes that power an archer, there is no getting around it. (91)
• The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child. (91)
• Arthur Koestler wrote, “In his review of the literature on the psychological present, Woodrow found that its maximum span is estimated to lie between 2.3 and 12 seconds.” (93-4)
• In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found ‘an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 spring tails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various members of 12 other forms ... Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae – in a mere teaspoon of soil.’ (95)
• The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. (98)
• Like water flow: Ease is the way of perfection, letting fall. (102)
• You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You’ll have fish left over. (104)

Seeing - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Via Positiva

 Chapter Two

 Seeing

 ·         “I have been thinking about seeing.  There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises.” (17)

·         “What you see is what you get.” (17)

Her point is that it may seem mundane, the things you can see.  It is like finding pennies.  Are you delighted to find a penny, or is that beneath you?  So much of our world passes us by without our thinking that it is remarkable.  It is like reading Scripture.  We think we know, so we are kept from hearing.  How often to you gaze at the stars and think about what you see?  How often do you look at an ant bed and think about what you see?

 

When it comes to nature, the sights are fleeting.  Nature is pervasive, but it also is fleeting.  Life is on the move.  One has to pay attention in order to take it in.  If you will take it in, there is wonder.

·         “If I can’t see the minutia, I still try to keep my eyes open.” (19)

·         “After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests. … An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue there, gave great suggestion to lurking beings.  Things were going on.” (22)

·         “At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face.  I orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour.” (23)

·         “If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light.”  (24)  One example is a meteor shower in the middle of the day.

·         “We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree.  Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful, taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.” (25)

·         “This looking business is risky.” (25)

 When your eyes are open, you can look millions of light years into space.  When your eyes are open you can see the abundance of life in a glass or bowl of pond water.  It is extravagant!

Dillard tells of people who are newly sighted.  They have been blind from birth.  They have learned to navigate the world in a particular way.  When they receive sight, they may refuse to use it.  It is disorienting.  It is overwhelming.  One girl, aged 21, would close her eyes whenever she went out of the house. 

• “She is never happier than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.” (30)
  
• “Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world.” (31)
• “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization.  Unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” (33)
• “When I see this way I analyze and pry, I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head.” (33)
• “But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.  When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied.  The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera.  When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.  When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut.” (33)

How can you do it?  How can you see?  She says that the challenge of her life is to quiet the interior conversation in her head.  The secret, she says, is the pearl of great price.  It can be found, but probably not by pursuit.  The discipline is to practice openness, to be ready to see.  I think this is true all over God’s world.  I need to practice being non-self-absorbed.  Then I can see in the dark and in the light.  I can see, so to say, with a camera, or even in the ecstasy of being the camera, taking it all in with wonder and awe.

• “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.”

I cannot tell you how that resonates with me.  Oh, for the openness to position ourselves to see, to perceive, to be in the place where the moment of realization of who you are and where you are is understood.