Am I Seeing Too Much?

Limiting my view to see beauty

Everlastings blooming at Evergreen. There are so many to look at. Each one has its own distinct beauty.

Are the windows in your house big or small?

In his book Divine Beauty, the Irish poet, priest, author, and philosopher John O’Donohue, wrote about the size of windows in the old traditional cottages built in the western areas of Ireland, where he grew up.

They were small.

The practical reason for small windows was that it’s freezing and wet in Ireland and windows are notorious for letting in the cold. In the old times there were no air-conditioners to soften the effects of winter, just fireplaces. Plus, I suspect windows were probably more expensive than the stone building material quarried from the surrounding countryside.

The small windows gave a limited view, a mere glimpse of a specific part of the landscape to those who looked out.

But paradoxically, because they had less to look at, the people noticed more.

They noticed the beauty in what they did see. As O’Donohue put it:

Yet a small window exercised a discipline of proportion in relation to the external beauty. It never offered the whole landscape: instead, from every angle you looked, it chose from the landscape a unique icon for your eyes. The grace of limit suggested more than your eyes could visually grasp.

Their eyes zeroed in on sunlight bouncing off a single boulder; a tiny patch of sea frothing and roiling on a rock; a lone wildflower listing in the wind; one tree trunk slowly thickening as it gnarled with age, even as the viewer aged.

People with money are moving into the area and building homes to replace these old cottages. They feature enormous windows that supposedly link those living within with the great outdoors.

But to O’Donohue, these giant windows are depriving the owners of really seeing — because there’s too much to see. Their eyes can’t grasp it all. Their minds can’t absorb the deep beauty of each little thing.

If one inquires about the particular rhythm of the place or the patterns of light the owners often seem baffled. The total view detracts from the eye’s refinement.

I mull over his words. Have I been seeing too much? Am I seeing so much that I end up seeing nothing at all?

The window in the old house in East Victoria Park was similar to this one in the shed at Evergreen.

I recall a time in my life when a window forced me to narrow my gaze. Years ago, I lived in an old, red brick house in East Victoria Park, a suburb just outside of Perth, Western Australia. The columns supporting the front verandah were cracked and the mortar holding the bricks in place was crumbling. The laundry and bathroom had sloping floors, and the roof needed replacing. But it was where our first three children were born. It was home.

There was a small, old-fashioned window in the kitchen of that old house. It was divided into four squares by wooden crosspieces and provided four restricted views of the back yard.

Because of the position of the window, I had to stoop to see out of it. When I did, I was always struck by the beauty each of the squares contained.

Dirty nappies soaking in the bucket under the trough in the laundry were forgotten. As were my aching legs, the burnt saucepan, four hungry chooks awaiting food scraps at the side door.

In a brief lull from motherhood, I’d lean down, put both hands on the narrow wooden sill, peer through that window, and notice beauty. Each of the views held so little that I could absorb the details contained in each of them, one at a time, in four heart-lingering glances.

• A flash of sunlit lawn.

• A section of rickety trellis, barely holding up strings of teardrops formed by orange flowers.

• A ragged hole in the side picket fence.

• A sliver of the door of the wooden dunny still standing at the end of the grey slab path.

Today I live in a bigger house with bigger windows. When I sit in the living room to sip early morning tea, the view through the almost wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling window encompasses distant coastal hills, a low wall of reeds fringing three acres of kikuyu grass dotted with willows, a section of garden, a yellow arch up which a pink-flowered creeper creeps, a heavily fruited lemon tree, leafless fig trees, a red row boat beside a small dam, and a long stretch of sky above the undulating tree line.

My eyes skim the broad scene, taking in everything in general and nothing in particular.

I’m seeing too much; noticing nothing specific.

It’s like watching a film in fast-forward. I can’t grasp anything. I understand nothing about it.

A winter view from the house at Evergreen. So much to see and absorb.

In an interview with O’Donohue titled, ‘The Inner Landscape of Beauty”, Krista Tippett mentions O’Donohue’s grounding in Celtic Christianity. To Celtic Christians, divine beauty doesn’t exist in a distant heaven. Divine beauty manifests everywhere, in everything. Divine beauty is all around them. Landscape isn’t just matter. It’s alive. Alive with beauty.

O’Donohue suggests that I will find divine beauty in the landscape if I:

. . . go towards it with an open heart and a real watchful reverence that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you.

Reverence

I’ve spent most of my life looking at too much all at once.

I’ve seldom given myself a chance to be amazed by beauty because I’m not approaching the view with watchful reverence.

Although the outdoors is awash with beauty, my heart touches nothing and nothing touches my heart because I’m looking at too much and thus end up seeing nothing at all.

Beauty is shy. It doesn’t announce its presence with booming drums. It doesn’t push itself forward.

Beauty waits to be noticed.

Beauty only emerges fully when it is met with my reverent attention.

Of course, I’m not going to trade-in my expensive, expansive windows and install narrow, mullioned ones I have to lean down to, in order to look out of them. I love the play of light and warmth in the house that the wide, deep, uninterrupted stretch of windows lets in. But after reading O’Donohue’s book about beauty, which he refers to as the invisible embrace, I will remember his words and adjust my gaze occasionally so I’m looking at less, not more.

Sometimes I’ll get down on my hands and knees to notice the beauty and complexity of one minuscule thing. A toadstool emerging amidst a bed of gotu kola. A ladybird walking delicately along a stalk of chard. An ant unerringly finding its way home.

Instead of wandering around the garden with eyes flitting aimlessly from this to that, I’ll occasionally stop and pay attention to the tinge of red on a ripening Roma tomato. The varied colours veining a beetroot leaf. A bee circling the multiple faces of white alyssum.

I will cast my eyes over a bed of blooming everlastings, then zero in on the glory of one.

Zeroing in on one everlasting flower to appreciate its unique beauty.

And perhaps I’ll cup my hands around my eyes as if holding a pair of binoculars, and slowly swivel my neck from side to side, stopping every now and then to hold a particular limited view for a few moments so my soul can drink it in. A bright orange banksia flower thrusting up, up, up like a complex flame. A straight-trunked towering karri tree. A hovering harrier.

A banksia flower forming a complex flame.

I will let my slow gaze and open heart feed my soul on beauty. Divine beauty.

It’s nice to stand on top of a hill and see a vast vista laid out before me, but my heart often longs to feed on the beauty of unique and ever-changing things within reach, things of beauty glimpsed outside a tiny window, or erupting at my feet.

And I will be amazed.

With love, Marlane