Always be ready to see what you haven’t seen before. It’s a kind of looking where you don’t know what you’re looking for.*
(Corita Kent)

Our times are driven by the inestimable energies of the mechanical mind; its achievements derive from its singular focus, linear direction and force. When it dominates, the habit of gentleness dies out.**
(John O’Donohue)

Placing these two together caused me to think about gentle eyes. Whether there is a way of seeing without agenda or judgement making it possible to see new, to see more, both people and things.

The context of Corita Kent’s words is an exercise for seeing and I notice that she uses the phrase “soft focus” for the way of looking to be adopted – which feels like having gentle eyes. I thought to write it out as a whole here because you may like to try it – perhaps connecting it with John Cage’s 4′ 33″, setting a timer and looking with gentle eyes:

There is an exercise I’ve learned lately, and that is to be quiet and look at an object or space directly ahead of you. Keep a soft focus and also allow your attention to reach past your peripheral vision, left and right. In addition, place your attention on top of or above your head. All of these directions – front, right, left, above – being looked at with a kind of diffuseness. You try to have a clear moment when you are empty and open to things around you. You see them new – your vision is cleansed and you can make contact with what is really there, uncluttered by old thoughts and prejudices.*

It is the difference between looking for something and seeing or receiving what is there, be it object or subject.

(*From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.)
(**From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.)

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy.*
(Anne Lamott)

Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyon speech, beyond words – in short, what we call transcendence.**
(Joseph Campbell)

Our full confession involves owning up to how we mess up – ourselves, each other, the planet – AND

how we are also capable of joy and beauty. We are made for transcendence.

(*Anne Lamott, quoted in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings: Anne Lamott on Forgiveness, Self Forgiveness, and the Relationship Between Brokenness and Joy.)
(**From Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey.)

We are accustomed to looking at objects.  We need to become accustomed to seeing spaces between and around objects as if they, too, were solid.  Seeing spaces can free us from deadly assumptions.  Spaces can help us understand where connections are made.*
(Corita Kent)

One of the ways Corita Kent would encourage her art students to draw a chair was by drawing the spaces.  These are part of chairness, too.  This illustrates how the unseen spaces between the things we often notice about ourselves are also who we are, part of our stories, making our stories more than good-enough.

(*From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.)

You have the right to remain silent. But I hope you won’t. The world conspires to hold us back, but it can’t do that without our permission. […} What do you sound like when you sound like you?*
(Seth Godin)

It’s always an evolving conversation between self and society. It’s always balancing tensions and trying to live life in grace and balance.**
(David Brooks)

It’s astonishing how we can so quickly identify the voice of someone calling us, but there’s way more to a voice’s uniqueness than this. We are all capable of speaking out new things from the depths of our lives, from the things that have caught our attention and captivated us.

And yet we have learnt that life is more straightforward if we keep quiet or sound like everyone else, but that’s survival rather than thriving. We are meant to add our voices to the great conversation taking place between the richness of individual lives and the richness of society. This is nothing less than a a quest of mythological proportions, as mythologist Joseph points to in the hero’s journey:

The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealised, unutilised potential in yourself.^

We can use our voices to drown others out or to ask a question and open a space for listening. I choose the latter.

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(^From Joseph Campbellll’s The Hero’s Journey.)

There is a constant struggle [for the committed person] to live as an effective giver and receiver of gifts. There are millions of people around us whose lives are defined by generosity and service. Personal being [Emmanuel] Mournier continues, is essentially generous. But our society does not teach us how to be an effective giver of gifts. The schools don’t emphasise it. The popular culture is confused about it.*
(David Brooks)

Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.**
(Seth Godin)

What better reason could there be for continually searching for ways and means to improve and develop ourselves than to become more generous?

Then Godspeed as you enter your art.

(*From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(**From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)

This is art. Not painting, but art: the act of doing something that might not work, simply because it’s a generous things to do. The combination of talent, skill, craft, and point of view that brings new light to old problems.*
(Seth Godin)

A committed life involves some common struggles. It is, for example, a constant struggle to see people at their full depths. In the business of daily life there is the constant temptation to see the other person as an object and not a whole.**
(David Brooks)

Many of us will find our way and purpose in life by noticing a problem others do not, even though we may all be looking at the same thing.

Where others pass by, you decide to commit and bring your talent, skill, craft and way of seeing to bear.

You must trust that if this is so then there will also be the elegant solution within you. When you recognise this it comes to life, but it also needs form, and life and form equals beauty.

When this happens you will have begun a great struggle, not only with the forces surrounding the problem you have noticed, but also those within, as Richard Rohr recognises:

What the ego (the False Self) hates and fears more than anything else is change.^

We will find many reasons for not turning the life of our elegant solution into form, the thing that will shape our lives – our True Self.

By heart I mean the place emotions meet reason, mobilise the will, and shape identity.^^

(*From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)
(^From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(^^From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire.)

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.*
(Maria Popova)

Genius is looking at things in an unhabitual way.**
(Corita Kent)

Whatever it is that lights you up – with curiosity, interest, pushing in deeper, leaping, failing, starting over, commitment – that is the light of your attention we all can benefit from.

You need to not only figure out what kind of light is yours but make sure you do not cover it up or hide it away. Let it be your identity and bring it to others:

Julia Cameron’s morning pages help unlock something inside. Not the muse or a magic mystical power, but simply the truth of your chosen identity. If you do something creative each day, you’re now a creative person. Not a blocked person, not a striving person, not an untalented person. A creative person.^

I take from these words of Seth Godin that to begin the day with some journaling about your light identity is a good place to start because your are owning it, but it will also identify moves you can actually make happen. Journal about your light and then shine … for someone or somemany.

(*From Maria Popova’s Figuring.)
(*From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning By Heart.)
(^From Seth Godin’s The Practice.)

The human soul is hungry for beauty: we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves.  No one would desire not to be beautiful.  When we experience the beautiful there is a sense of homecoming.*
(John O’Donohue)

An individual who has become a person has staged a rebellion. She rebels against the individualistic ethos and all the systems of impersonalism.**
(David Brooks)

Perhaps beauty becomes possible when we rebel against all that disconnects us from each other, our world, and from ourselves. Beauty, then, is found in connection – wherever, whatever, whoever. And everyone has a capacity for beauty.

(*From John O’Donohue’s Divine Beauty.)
(**From David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.)

Finding something can mean “rescuing it from oblivion,” he mused, which is a “kind of noble act. […] You’ll never know unless you take a look.”*
(Rob Walker and Davy Rothbart)

When you get past making labels for things, it is possible to combine and transform elements into new things. Look at the thing util their import, identity, are, use, and description have dissolved.**
(Corita Kent)

Davy Rothbart may be referring to the detritus others pass by and Corita Kent pondering what lies beneath the labels we give things but their words work even better for people. Finding the hidden treasure that exist in all people. Treasure they may not even know exists themselves.

It’s hard to look beyond old labels and descriptions, but once we do and discover what has been hidden and unknown, we also find persons of new possibility.

(*Davy Rothbart, quoted in Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing.)
(**From Corita Kent and Jan Snowden’s Learning by Heart.)

Devorah teaches philosophy at London University and is a follower of Spinoza. I asked if she would sit for me so that I might draw her. I’ve never been drawn! she replied. And then she started talking , questioning, wondering, and I drew her.*
(John Berger)

You don’t climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don’t avoid all falling.**
(Richard Rohr)

I’ve been reading through accounts of scientists working on challenges they may never see the results of in their lifetime. This kind of commitment comes from a deeper place than the mind; it comes from hearts and souls.

We must find the thing that gives us such joy, that extends the reach of your lives, helping us to see ourselves ad our work differently. Rainer Maria Rilke writes,

Art always promises the most distant and then even more remote future, and for this reason the crowd that passionately reaches for the nearest future will always be of an iconoclastic bent.^

I found myself wondering whether Devorah began to see herself differently when drawn by artist John Berger.

I wonder how identifying our art helps us to see ourselves differently, together with the work that we must do.

(*From John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook.)
(**From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(^From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on Life.)