Sight and Insight

Sonja sees hearts everywhere.  At least she did when she was just five, before her birthday.  She would stop her romping on the beach mid-stride and collapse onto the strand of little stones and shells that line that was both water and land, where the back-and forth of the waves had deposited these artifacts that some of us, most of us, thought was just stuff that stuck between your toes, ending up on the carpet in the car.  She would put her face close to the shiny wet little things and with tiny wet fingers precision implements would extract something and run to me, smiling.  She would place the something in my hand, and say “Look, Bapa, it’s a heart.”   This went on for some months, her finding hearts everywhere.  They were in the lines on the bark of a tree, or in the way the winter snow melted around a leaf, or on the stem of a fork.  If it was something she could pick up, a stone perhaps, she would, and she’d give it to her mom or her dad or her sister, or if we were lucky enough to be around, she’d give it to Kathy, or to me.  I would look at it with her, she looking at my face waiting for me to see it, see the heart-shapedness of it, and raise my eyebrows in real or feigned discovery, and purse my lips into an “oooooooooooooooooo” and let the sound come out, and then she would be satisfied and go running off to resume her play.  I had seen it . . . too.

As months went on, I had to stretch my imagination to discover the heart-shapes in the things she would put into my hand.  There were times she would give me two or three tiny “hearts” over the span of an afternoon visit.  I would take them out of my pocket when I got home and look at them again, without her smiling eyes  watching for my reaction.  I would shake my head “no” and deposit them on the little pile on the shelf above my desk, smiling at her imagination, the sweetness of her seeing hearts everywhere. 

She was slipping, I thought.  The ones from the spring, exposed on her driveway by the melting snow, were recognizable as heart-shaped, all right.  But as time had gone on, these summer heart-stones were becoming more and more indistinguishable from plain, ordinary ones, the kind we walk on, the ones that roll under our shoes, or crunch under our tires, or hurt our bare feet. 

Yesterday, Kathy and I went to a film, a little piece by the Irish Film Board called “His and Hers”.  I’d seen it in the long list of films that fill this week of the Traverse City Film Festival, the list that Kathy had implored that I look at, to tell her which films I’d like to see, so we could decide if there were any we’d find worth the $19 price of a pair of tickets.  I marked it because it was from Ireland, the place that formed something in Kathy, turned her into a heart-shape that sometimes I see, but often I overlook.  The film turned out to be clips of the cinematographer recording comments of females talking about the males in their lives, from little girls talking about their fathers to adolescent girls talking about boys to young women talking about their lovers to middle age women talking about their husbands to old women talking about their deceased mates, and finally their sons. 

In all of the images of the film, the one that stuck with me was the blue-socked feet of the seventyish woman that found their way into the soft, worn, dull-black shoes that they had caressed as she spoke of her departed husband, the way her right big toe had so adeptly flipped up the tongue of the shoe, to gain entrance that I watched carefully when the left did the same.  The camera had zoomed in on her feet, her voice in the background.  Her words finished her reverie when her feet had finished homing themselves, had nestled in those soft shoes; the camera faded to black.

For a moment I had seen a heart where at other times I would have seen a stone.  The beauty of that heart was such that it remains in my memory, vivid, living, vital, like Sonja’s looking at my face, searching for signs of my recognizing what she sees, the heart shape in that stone, like Kathy turning back to look one more time at the scene that I am eager for some reason to put behind me and move on… the friends, or the sunset, or the rising moon.

As in these weeks on this blog I return again and again to the issue of empathy, of finding the energy to care, to help, to lift up and heal, I am reminded this morning of the power of seeing, of really seeing.  Sonja’s latest stones, the ones in which she saw hearts but I did not – spoke not of her becoming less discerning, but in seeing more deeply, finding the shape in everything that shapes her, that shapes her mother and her Nana.  As readers’ comments suggest that is not so simple, this compassionate helping, I wonder how much of our difficulty comes from losing insight, from ceasing to see the heart-shape in stones, and in old, swelling, blue-ankleted feet, and in faces turning back for another glance of beauty.

Tomorrow – “Cheap Grace” – Bonhoeffer’s read on compassion fatigue and indifference?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.