It occurred to me a couple weeks ago, while reading The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris
(which is one of the loveliest books I’ve ever read) that the reason I’m a
lousy poet and the reason I often have trouble seeing God is probably the same
reason—because I’m not in the habit of looking at things sideways, or
upside-down.
Of course, sideways and upside-down are relative—as any
astronaut will tell you, it all depends on your coordinates! But most of us
default to the same set of coordinates, and then wonder why there aren’t any
nice God-shaped-data-points on our grid. Because it’s the wrong grid
altogether.
I’m pretty good at doing this with literature—otherwise how
would I come up with a reading of a text that none one else has considered
seriously yet?—but with everyday life, with loads of laundry and the dishwasher
and potty-training, I keep too busy to pause and crouch down and look at what I’m
doing from underneath. Which is something that Norris is exceptionally good at—her
description of laundry as liturgy makes me almost
look forward to folding towels.
Anyway, I wasn’t really sure how to proceed with this
thought, so I stuck it in the back of my mind, made a note that I should
probably try writing poetry again, and kept right on with the dishes and job
applications and refereeing sibling melees.
In the middle of all this, though, I looked out the living
room window and got a surprise. A yard full of August Surprises, in fact.
I’ll be honest—I’ve never really got August Surprises (or naked ladies/lilies)—they’re kind of weird
and stark. I like my flora to be lush and effusive—I love a pergola overflowing
with clematis and unpruned Rose of Sharon bushes. The area between the front of
our old house in Lafayette and the sidewalk was an overflowing block of
columbine and purple coneflowers. August Surprises, by comparison are basically
decorative toothpicks.
But I went out to take a look at them, and it occurred to me
that their long, narrow shape would make a nice little mural on the edge of a
wall in the bathroom. So I took a picture with my phone. Then another picture,
just to be sure. I had to take pictures from lots of angles, of course, so
that I could compose my own clear image of them with paints later. But the more
different ways I looked at these lilies, the more compelling they were.
Finally, I crouched down and took this picture.
While I was down there, suddenly I got it.
From above, at a normal adult height, yeah, they do look a
lot like decorative toothpicks on an oversized burger. But from down here, eye-level
with the flowers themselves, they suddenly become tree trunks in an ancient
grove, or arching pillars in a cathedral.
***
This evening while I was cleaning the kitchen, I felt like
sitting down, but I had already folded and hung up the kitchen chairs so I
could sweep. So I sat on the floor.
My house looks different at a toddler’s eye level—tall and
spacious. The furniture looms, and under the table suddenly becomes a
tantalizing place to hang out (well, to a toddler—I was distracted by the
pieces of spaghetti I had somehow missed when cleaning up).
Our basset wandered in, and I leaned forward to lower my
head down to her level. Then all the way to the floor, and back up. There’s a
bunny I know who, whenever he encounters a new space, does a high-middle-low
check, stretching his body up as high as he can to smell the air up there, then
down to his own level, and finally sniffs at the floor, too. Investigating
space in another axis.
I got myself off the kitchen floor before anyone came in
to ask what I was doing—last time I was flat in the kitchen it was
because I had nearly shattered my tailbone on an unseen puddle of dish soap.
