Seeing

A couple of years ago I spent a day walking through the woods with a friend of mine.  She was going through a tough transitional period in her life.  At one point, we sat on a rock under a big pine.  "I want to show you something," she said, and she pulled a small notebook out of her pack and opened it.  On the first page there was a stick figure person staked to the ground.  She explained that the restraints represented certain problems in her life.  On the next page was a box with the flaps open.  All around the page were random words and symbols.  "That box represents one of my problems.  See, these words and little pictures?  These were the things inside the box."  She showed me her whole journal page-by-page, without shame, one traveler to another.  What struck me were the pictures.  She said that drawing them helped her to see.

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When I was twenty-six years old we stayed in a cabin on Raquette Lake up in the Adirondack Mountains.  My sister-in-law had just buried her father the week before.  One night, she and I tried to walk to the lean-to near the water's edge.  The night was so dark it was like stepping into a closet.  We held onto each and walked very slowly, listening for the water.  We couldn't see a thing.  

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My son bought me a watercolor paint set for my birthday.  I haven't painted in a long time.  My problem is that I can never think of what to paint.  I sit with the paper in front of me.  I swirl some yellow on the wet paper. Then blue.  Is that a tree?  A bird?  I load my brush with red and wonder where it belongs.  

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Sometimes when I awake during the night, the chair in the corner looks like a monster.  If I look very hard, I can see it breathing.  One time I waved at it and it waved back.  The next morning it was just a chair.  

Sometimes my eyes play tricks on me.