Or so I would have said--before Joy showed me something intriguing in one of her slide shows. I'll tell you more about that in a minute.
Joy is a painter and has illustrated several beautiful books for children, including Miss Lady Bird's Wildflowers; Bloomin' Tales; David Crockett Creating a Legend; and Sam Houston, Standing Firm. She's also a master naturalist and gardener. Every time I'm with her, I come away with a deeper appreciation of nature, art, healthy food, and Joy.
We made clay bunnies and we watched several episodes of Super Soul Sunday, including a session with the creator of Soul Pancake, another with Jean Houston, and another with Ed Bacon and Mark Nepo. When anyone asked a question we liked, we'd stop the program and talk about it:
What do you miss most about being five?
What has been your hardest lesson to learn?
What does your soul look like?
How do you imagine your life when you're 75?
(Joy said her soul was probably purple and what she misses about being five is swinging on a swing and singing real loud! I said my soul probably looks like a vintage Mini Cooper.)
It's amazing how much conversational territory kindred spirits can cover when we give ourselves time to take a break and Just Be. Joy's house is a treasure-trove of things to look at: her paintings and Frank's, a lifetime of treasures made and saved. I looked through some books of hers that I used to look at thirty-plus years ago in that very room! We read some poignant, handwritten letters from Frank's grandfather to his grandmother, Frankie--who died in child birth. Reading those letters his mother had saved in a blue vacuum cleaner bag was like traveling back in time a hundred years!
I tend to call flowers by their colors: the pink ones, the yellow ones. Joy knows the actual names of every plant and flower she's ever seen. When she drives around, she likes to take the back roads, too--but for a different reason than mine: she likes to see and recognize plants and trees she hasn't seen in a long time. It's like re-connecting with old friends, she says!
It has always fascinated me what people see. What's equally fascinating is what we don't see. At one point she showed me a photograph of Max. "What do you see?" she asked.
"A dog," I said--thinking: what an obvious question!
As it turns out, the photograph of Max was part of one of her slide shows on "plant blindness." When she gives her slide presentations to students, she includes this picture of Max, and everyone answers the question just as I did: they all see a dog. But what about the hundreds of grasses and flowers in the picture? Most of us focus on the dog and don't even notice the "background."
We take things for granted that are essential to the life of animals and humans. What we don't have names for we often don't even see.
So when I said earlier that it was just Joy and Max and I in her yard--I was focusing on the three of us and ignoring the hummingbirds traveling back and forth above us, the wren going in and out of her nest to feed five newly hatched babies, and the dead tree trunk Frank and Joy have left in place because the squirrels like traveling in and out of it.
I can imagine re-taking any one of the road trips I've taken--with Joy as my companion! I'd say: "Look at that"--and point to an old house in a field or a line of laundry or reflections in a pond. Here's a picture taken in Rio Medina on a foggy Thursday morning driving to Joy's place at Medina Lake. I love the way five objects are lined up against the white sky like words on a page.
Joy would say "Look at that!"--and I'd see a brand new tree or flower that I'd never even noticed before--and before long, it would be something I'd always notice after that because it would have a name and someone would have told me what it is!
Isn't that why we write and paint and take pictures, after all? To say: Hey, look at that! Isn't it amazing, heartbreaking, beautiful? Isn't that why we read and look at other people's art--to expand the ways we see and appreciate the world?
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