O say can you see

O say, can you see? It's hard to see all there is to see when fatigue overpowers. Or too much work. Or stress. Or more bad news. Or too much political rhetoric. Or just getting too used to keeping eyes closed or down. O say, can you see....

Hush now, and hear some reviving words from the best ever essay on seeing, words from Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

"When her doctors took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells inflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam."

You may have read this passage before, and if so, hopefully it was good to read again, as it was for me. Dillard calls the secret of seeing, "the pearl of great price." Tomorrow night as I see fireworks go off over the lake and hear in my mind our national anthem – O say, I’m going to think about that blazing transfigured tree; about that joy of seeing, of being seen, of putting oneself on that path; about that joy of being a bell finally lifted and struck.