Perspectives

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.