Over the last few weeks I have made friends with a rather sorry looking magpie in the chapel gardens at Dunham Road. There is actually a pair, sometimes three or four, who are regular attenders, so to speak. The others are plump and healthy looking, your typical magpies. My friend is not. It appears malnourished and its feathers look greasy and not attractive in the least. And yet it is this one that has been catching my attention; this is the one I have developed a fondness, dare I say a love for. I have identified with it. I have felt a little like that magpie myself as I have been licking a few personal wounds. So, we have become friends. Well, the magpie obviously doesn’t know this, but I do. It has no idea how much it delights me by just being its magpie self. It has also helped me with pastoral counselling as I have spoken with folk while sitting on the new benches there. I always point it out to folk, and we often weave stories about what its life might have been. It just carries on being a magpie, unaware, no doubt, that it is anything other than a magpie.
I was out walking by the canal the other day and noticed something else that caught my attention. It was three mallard ducks in a line. A male, a female and another one that had some of the male plumage and some of the female. It was swimming behind the other two. It made me pause and wonder as I tried to look closer. I should have taken a picture, but was too slow. It is the same with the magpies by the way. It did get me wondering about gender and ducks. I looked into it and apparently ducks, and other birds, can change gender. They can only go from being female to male and this is due to some form of disease when young. So over time they transform from female to male. This must have been happening to the third duck in the row on the canal. It is funny what you see from time to time, what your vision can open up to.
Things in life are not always as they appear on the surface. Once you see something for the first time it is never quite the same again. You cannot go back to that place of pure ignorance. You can live in denial, but you can’t unsee something. This is always humbling and in so doing it can open you up to new experiences and clearer vision. It can awaken you to knew possibilities. Well, I’m being humbled quite a lot at the moment. I do hope it is opening me up to new vision and possibility and will enable me to be of better service to those I share life with. New vision, new sight can awaken to new possibility. As Meister Eckhart once said “There is power in sight which is superior to the eyes set in the head and more far-reaching than the heavens and the earth.”
New sight ought to broaden our vision, so that we can begin to see things not so much as we want to see them, but as they are actually are, or at least closer to a true approximation.
The morning after seeing the ducks I was not feeling my best. My mood was low I was feeling quite self conscious, vulnerable, exposed. I went to the gym, but did not perform to my best. As I was showering afterwards one of the instructors came in and looked at me in a towel and quickly said “Could you just wait before towelling off as Alice needs to look round”. I couldn’t say anything as she came in he said “There’s just a hunk of man, do not worry” I remember I felt really self conscious and made a joke and started laughing. He said “don’t laugh, don’t let anyone tell you anything less than that”. Anyway they left and I got dressed and headed to chapel to work. As I walked through Altrincham I bumped into a couple of friends. One offered me a coffee and we talked. I told him what was going and how I was feeling and we shared together. In fact that day several people came to speak with me about other things and I was able to be open with them about feeling a little like that tatty, scraggly magpie, about feeling exposed, vulnerable. The way I was seeing myself and the world that day was not good. It was of course emanating from deep within me, because truth be told it was a beautiful day, the birds were singing and the sun was shining, but I was not deep in my soul. Yet just a few hours later I found myself singing with the birds in the garden. Another friend had messaged me saying “Its perfect weather for outdoor singing meditation.” I agreed and do you know what that is exactly what I did, whilst writing this address. There were some tears, but they were needed tears. They were tears that opened my eyes, my soul, to a new and clearer vision.
It brought to mind some wisdom by Frederick Buechner about paying close attention, something that the birds were allowing me to do it seemed.
“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not, God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”
All this brought thoughts about vision and what we see. Do we ever see reality as it actually is, or is it as much to do with the condition of the soul? The last eighteen months has brought this ever more sharply into focus for me. Diversity and life exists on a far more complex spectrum, perhaps more a kaleidoscope than any of us could ever envisage, perhaps even envision.
They say that our eyes are the windows to our souls; they say that our eyes reveal our personalities. I always remember an old friend when asking how I was would look intently into my eyes. I found it a little disturbing at first, but today I understand why he did so. He wanted to see and not just hear how I was. He wanted to see with his own eyes. After all seeing is believing, or so they say. I suspect that the friend wanted to look into my soul, to see how I truly was, not how I said I was.
It’s a curious phrase “Eyes are the windows to your soul.” I looked up the origin. Some say it comes from The Bible and certainly there are similar references to be found there. Luke chapter 11 vv 33-36 reads “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a basket, but on a stand, so that those who enter may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. If your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.”
Others have attributed it to Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Emerson, Milton. Still others have said it is an old English folk phrase. I suspect the true author of the exact phrase is the American sculptor Hiram Powers who said “The eye is the window of the soul, the mouth the door. The intellect, the will are seen in the eye; the emotions, sensibilities, and affections, in the mouth. The animals look for man’s intentions right into his eyes. Even a rat, when you hunt him and bring him to bay, looks you in the eye.”
Whatever the exact origin of the phrase it has been around in public consciousness probably ever since we became conscious. Why you may well ask? Well because it reveals a deep truth about humanity. We can hide so much about ourselves, behind a thousand and one masks, but if you look into someone’s eyes and really pay attention, you will see the soul of the person.
Of course the state of our souls will impact on what we then see through our eyes, what we project onto the world. For the eyes are also the window for our soul to vision the world.
Research at Orebro University in Sweden has suggested that that there is real truth in the statement that "The eyes are the windows of the soul". Researches looked at patterns around the iris of the eyes of 428 subjects and compared them with their personality profiles. They claim that certain patterns were consistent in individuals who had similar personality profiles. Matt Larrson a behavioural scientist at the university stated that “Our results suggest people with different iris features tend to develop along different personality lines...These findings support the notion that people with different iris configurations tend to develop along different trajectories in regards to personality.” They claim that genetic mutations may be the reason that some people have poor social skills and act impulsively and that this can be revealed through studying the pattern around the iris.
Psychologists as Yale University, in America, have suggested that we believe, even if we do so sub-consciously, that our eyes truly are the window to our souls. They conducted visual experiments with adults and pre-school children. The findings revealed that both groups reacted almost identically. Both groups believed that the essence of a character is to be found in or around the person’s eyes. They claimed that this is not culturally conditioned, more that this is something that is felt intuitively.
Christina Starmans of the Mind Development Lab at Yale claimed that
“The indirect nature of our method and the fact that these judgements are shared by adults and preschoolers, suggests that our results do not reflect a culturally learned understanding...but might instead be rooted in a more intuitive or phenomenological sense of where in our bodies we reside.”
They are suggesting that most of us intuitively believe that the essence of the person is located in or around the eyes.
Could this be true?
Well, it appears that we think so.
There is another curious phrase that we often hear uttered “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” a phrase that literally means that beauty is subjective. I was thinking of the tatty old magpie and how it fascinated me far more than the perfect plump ones. Maybe it was because it looked different that it touched my heart and soul, or perhaps it was because I was feeling a bit like the magpie myself, who knows. All I know is that for the last few weeks that tatty old magpie has enchanted me and lifted my spirits when I have felt low. It has simply carried on being a magpie, not aware that folk might not think it was the most pleasing on the eye.
Beauty is subjective and ideas of beauty change I suspect directly in relation to the state of our hearts and souls. As they say “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, another phrase that is of disputed origin. Some say it was coined in ancient Greece. While others site Shakespeare, “In Love’s Labour Lost” he wrote:
“Good Lord Boyet, my beauty though mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongue.”
Benjamin Franklin, in “Poor Richard’s Almanack” wrote “Beauty, like supreme dominion is but supported by opinion” David Hulme wrote “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” The exact phrase though is attributed to Margaret Wolfe Hungerford who in “Molly Bawn” (1878) wrote “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
But is it merely beauty that is in the eye of the beholder? Maybe everything is subjective?
It’s seems that it not only beauty that is in the eye of the beholder. So much of life is about how we see things and how we look at things; so much of life is about perspective. Actually it is more than that it is about “how” we look at things. The eyes reveal so much. So often in life what we are able to see in life is due to condition of our hearts and souls.
It matters how we see life, how gaze on each other. Yes the eyes are the windows of the soul, but also how we see life depends so much on the condition of soul, our humanity. So in actual fact it does matter how we look. Not so much our appearance, but how we vision life.
How we see the world matters and how respond perhaps even more so. Life truly is in the “eye of the beholder” How we see one another is vital. Try to look with open eyes, let your soul be fed by life and let your soul feed the life of others too. The world needs us to look through loving eyes, compassionate eyes, eyes that are wide open and thus able to create a new and beautiful vision, whatever that might be. Me I’m going to keep my eyes open for that scratty looking magpie, for it feeds my soul.
Please find below a devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"
No comments:
Post a Comment