Seeing with Fresh Eyes
- At August 03, 2026
- By Write in Community
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6
“The real voyage of discovery consists not seeing new sights, but with seeing with new eyes.” – Pico Iyer
Great Heron at Rest
Photography by Linda Wilson
Miracles Happen
Many years ago, one of my beloved daughters was acting somewhat furtive, maintaining little eye contact, repeatedly touching her turned down face. Standing slope-shouldered behind her partner she stared at the floor. Then looked up. Light in her eyes changed deepening to a brilliant dark green like moss in the early morning. Rosiness of a pink sunset sky spread across her face. Suddenly a shift in my awareness and Joseph Pearce’s words hit home “insight is always complete and perfect in its single instant’s appearance.” In that “A-ha” moment I was seeing with fresh eyes. My daughter was carrying a special light, a heartbeat of its own swimming in her inner world.
Composer Vinteuil said, “The only true voyage is discovery…not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others….” When we “possess other eyes”, we allow ourselves to be transported to a wonderful and sometimes, surprising new land.
Read More»Instructions for Life
- At May 25, 2026
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- 6
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the family of things. – Mary Oliver in “Wild Geese”
Family of Things
Mary Oliver saw herself in the family of things. She recognized that by opening to what was happening around her, she was already part of the natural world. Imagine Mary as a young child walking alone in the woods away from her difficult home life when she first heard the raw honking of Canadian geese break silence.
She saw the kindness of the lead bird float on air currents allowing trailing birds to fly faster with less effort. The tired goose dropping back, graciously letting others take the lead. Oliver watches the flock head to the same wetlands where food and safety were plentiful. A beautiful rhythm year after year. Mary Oliver took this wisdom of what she encountered in nature and wrote many poems. In “Wild Geese”, she penned these words “you do not have to be good” nor “walk on your knees,” but let the “soft animal of your body love what it loves.” In my reflection of these words, I think Mary suggests that experiencing the natural world helps us begin to shift from whatever we’re experiencing—anger, frustration, sadness—and realize there is a place for us. That we can accept ourselves—belong.
Oliver’s instructions for life are simple: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” She said one of the wonderful things about being immersed in life is the joy of surprise. Feeling joy is a redemption for our life, no matter our struggles she insisted “the world goes on…”
Read More»Finding Love: “Theirs and Ours”
- At March 23, 2026
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- 12
Have you ever believed you didn’t count?
Abandoned by people you love? Nora and Agnes, daughters of Gustav Borg in the movie Sentimental Value, felt as children do when a treasured balloon suddenly is sucked away into the world. Sad, mad—vulnerable. When their father came to their mother’s memorial, they bottled up all their deep emotions blaming him for leaving the family and the hurt that followed. But what saved them, said Manohla Dargis, New York Times film critic, was “finding love: ‘theirs and ours,” the sustaining holy work that healed the hearts of the father and his daughters.
Challenging Relationships
Dargis describes the entangled father and daughters’ relationships as “…greedily self-involved and irresistibly charismatic, the kind who are easy to fall for and tough to let go.” Sentimental Value resonates with unwavering themes of resiliency, self-reflection and a conflicted love with intense highs and lows. Slow moving and layered with ambiguities and symbolism, the film is a tender, complex and poetic film that leaves much for the audience to absorb. . . and aspire to.
The Experience of Light
- At January 12, 2026
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- 10
Sunrise Photograph by Mary Kay Roth
In Emily Dickinson’s poem “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” she artfully expresses the way winter light transforms the snow-filled world: “When it comes, the Landscape listens—Shadows —hold their breath.”
Experience of Light
Writers have chosen to write about the variants of light for a long time. For many, it’s not so much the color, but the experience of light. Poet Jane Richardson wrote “…light loves searching out/what is hidden/what is lost/what is forgotten…” Consider Shakespeare’s famous lines, “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?” Washington Irving in Old Christmas said, “Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven… .” Or lines from “Meditation in Sunlight,” May Sarton wrote “The sky looks down and meets the mountain range where time is light not shadow.”
A Light Show
To experience winter light, as Thoreau suggested, one must walk. All year long, Thoreau loved walking, strolling long distances by himself, often fifteen to twenty miles a day. In “A Winter Walk,” he wrote “At length we awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the windowsill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light.”
Kinder, More Gentler Beautiful World
- At July 21, 2025
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- 14
There are always flowers for those who want to see them. – Henri Matisse
Several years ago during a challenging time in my life, a wise friend suggested I learn how to “drink from a deeper well.” She said slowing down and paying attention guides an individual to a deeper place within, and a kinder, more gentler beautiful world is revealed. Today, with the daily news filled with one horror story after another, seeking those moments of grace reminds me how much the world has to offer.
Read More»Experience of Creating
- At May 12, 2025
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- 12
“There’s too much goodness in you that still needs to rise, and there’s too much work in the world that still needs to be done.” — Benedictine nun and poet Mary Lou Kownacki
Title: “Children at Play”
Paper Mache Art
Artist Robert Cather
Photographer Carol McKee
Watching Children Experience Creativity
I watch children play in the dirt with sticks and round stones. One boy drags a makeshift sword in the wet red clay making small tunnels and circles. Little holes. Another child watches, sitting on her haunches. Hands clasped loosely like cupping a lit candle. After a while, she picks up a jagged stone places it with care underneath two small pieces of red granite. Then, she skips to a small hill peppered with rocks like the surface of a small Mars. With several pea-sized pebbles in her hand, she tiptoes back cradling the tiny stones like hummingbird eggs and then kneels. One-by-one the pebbles are placed in a half moon circle on the ground, a face smiling at her. She smiles back.
Creativity as Play
I wonder if this how children first experience creativity. They play making something with their hands and the surprise of recognition occurs. The searching, digging, building, moving objects here and there offer a possibility for something known to them. A-ha! A truck, a bear with a missing leg. A bird’s tail. Similar perhaps to when adults are sculpting and see the profile of a face emerge from the rock or a painter who recognizes another oak is needed for the composition. Each adventurous and determined action untwines and brings them closer to an emerging image. Philosopher Kierkegaard said we are most courageous when we walk towards an answer, it is our soul work.
Liminal Space – Creativity Spark
It is when we are betwixt and between, have left one room but not yet entered the next room, any hiatus between stages of life, faith, jobs, loves, or relationships. – Richard Rohr
An In-Between Space
Misty Dawn
Photo by JoAnne Young
Initially there was not cognition. Only later after reflecting I realized it as a liminal space, an in-between space that signals a change and a feeling of being transported. A liminal space is often described as a portal that momentarily ushers a person from a place to another world. Yes, it can be unnerving, but also magical. According to Rakel’ Elizabeth Sampson, those who bring awareness to the transitional space “find value and re-enchantment.”
For All Creatives
Writers and artists use this spark of creativity to awaken, be lifted and create. Such places transport by creating a pause for one to reconsider time and place. Meaningful perspectives and new mindsets are its offspring. Following the hospital experience a poem called “Abandonment” was forged. My friend Sarah sanctified the value of liminal space when her father was in an in-between place in hospice. She noticed that fresh flowers were delivered daily to the care facility and often wilted before they were used. Sarah said she recognized the liminal space as the spark for creativity. Sarah and her father got to work arranging flowers in vases and delivered weekly bouquets to the hospice roommates.
Extraordinary! Creative Peak Experience
- At April 15, 2024
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- 2
Peak experience in nature
The morning poet William Stafford died, he drafted a poem containing these lines: You can’t tell when strange things with meaning will happen. I’m (still) here writing it down just the way it was .“You don’t have to prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand into the sun again. It was all easy.”
Watching the horizon
Out of the far sky, sounds like frogs’ croaking and braying from donkeys pervade the air, dark spots flying a moving amoeba. The black birds, I learned later anhingas, circle the Shumard oak trees floating a while on tropical air currents before coasting to nearby branches.
Rising Hope
- At November 20, 2023
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- 8
The Power of Rising Hope
“Your struggle with your varied self, or selves, yields your art… .” – Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer.
Morning begins with chirping cicadas, the hum of distant cars winding their way to work, and the smell of rich coffee. For a few single breaths, it’s a narrow and wonderful place where I find myself. The harmony of simple things and places is gold to me. Then, an unexpected rap on our door, again and again. Kerplunk! Rising hope vanishes like a stone thrown into the river–frustration and irritation tornado in. Suddenly, my castle of contentment crumbles.
Write this story? Why not? Who knows what unloved parts of me need attention. I’ve learned writing about deep feelings my own humanity becomes known to me and rising hope follows.
Read More»Father on Father’s Day: Caretaker of the Earth
- At June 13, 2022
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- 10
We come and go, but the land is always here, and the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it – for a little while.—Willa Cather
Father’s role was caretaker of the earth.
Although my father was a private person, his beliefs were evident in his role as caretaker of the earth—as if it were holy; and the many ways he applied the wisdom of nature to his life. He didn’t just think about how he valued the planet, he lived out that basic precept in his activities of each day. Coming from the old school of farming, he knew that all things mattered, that the world consisted of intricate, interwoven elements and he was a caretaker of that design.
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