Simply Seeing

Last night, I tuned out and turned off.  With the exception of the computer--which, admittedly, is a weakness of mine--there wasn't a minute of television or music in this house.  I opened windows and watched my dog run in the backyard, I read, I listened to the night, I watched the sky change.  I felt peaceful.

We forget sometimes that the world exists around us as much as for us.  We set out to find peace but end up with retail therapy, buying self-help books, new lipsticks, just released in paperback novels or other irrelevant piece of detritus that serves only to clutter spaces we want so desperately to clear.  We seek to find so long and so exhaustively that we miss the peace in front of us, the grace of sunset, the perfect truth of starlight.

In section one of A Writer's Journal, Thoreau writes about the virtue of "simply seeing."  It is April 9, 1841, and he is awed.  "How much virtue there is in simply seeing!  We may almost say that the hero has striven in vain for his pre-eminency, if the student oversees him.  The woman who sits in the house and sees is a match for a stirring captain.  Those still, piercing eyes, as faithfully exercised on their talent, will keep her even with Alexander or Shakespeare.  They may go to Asia with parade, or to fairyland, but not beyond her ray.  We are as much as we see.  Faith is sight and knowledge.  The hands only serve the eyes.  The farthest blue streak in the horizon I can see, I may reach before many sunsets.  What I saw alters not; in my night, when I wander, it is still steadfast as the star which the sailor steers by."

It strikes me that his comparison is of the woman at her window to the captain on the sea.  I have a love of the water and of windows and so his connection is certainly not lost on me.  I am trying daily to live this art of seeing simply, to make my hands serve my vision, and to make my heart--which Thoreau forgets to mention--serve itself as truly and, yes, as simply as it can.