How to See Better

This morning I was reading Chris Bradley's blog, Practicing Wonder.

I met my Kerrville friend at a StoryCircle conference several years ago--and I always enjoy her perspectives, in person and on her blog.  Chris is much more attuned to nature (actually knowing the names of insects and plants that I'd have no clue what to call!) than you'll find on my blog posts.

It strikes me that we write better about anything if we know the names for what we're looking at!

And conversely, we don't write about what we don't know the names of--other than in vague and general and broad-brush ways, the ways I might try to describe the particular reds and golds on a section of coast without knowing what leaves produce those colors.  Knowing what to call a living thing matters.

Chris' blog also invites the reader to reflect on a different question each week.

Yesterday's entry was about having "different eyes" for the familiar after we return home from a trip.  She challenges me (along with all her readers): What would you notice if you took fifty photographs close to home?

She includes a quotation by Marcel Proust that I often think about on the road:

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

The question that drives us to travel is  like the question we ask (audibly or not)  when we read literature.  We follow this character along the journey we call a "plot" and we're wondering: how does he/she change?

On my travels, close to home or far away, the unspoken question is the same:  How does all this looking change the way I see?

I have a magnet on my refrigerator in the writing room that someone once gave me as a gift: "Change not how you look but how you see."

At this very moment, however, before setting out to see some new places, my hair in a tangle and my clothes needing sorting, folding and/or putting on--I'm going to start the day with attending for a few minutes to how I look.