No, I am not pretending to be my eye doctor! Recently I have been thinking a lot about looking.
‘Look’ is a word we use in so many ways.
Some weeks ago I heard a radio interview in which an expert in the field of discussion was clearly frustrated with the common talking points being posed by the journalist, and I noticed that from then on every point she made began with, ‘Look …’ In effect: listen and take notice.
What we notice and what we fail to notice—that’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Look up.
There has been interesting research done on the positive effects on our mood and mental wellbeing if we simply take the time to look up, to notice the sky above us. It’s so simple that we basically ignore this possibility.
The novelist Thea Astley lived for some time in Britain and when she returned to Australia she remarked on the bigness of the sky. I remember the same sensation when I too returned from that same country. Here we are blessed with so much open space and open skies. To look up and see the sky is to recognise how small we are in the scheme of things, but then too how we are enveloped, held in what earlier cultures called ‘the firmament’. We are not trapped but held.
At a dinner recently I met several women who shared a deep interest in clouds. One had more scientific interest, the other more aesthetic and photographic. To hear them converse was to get a sense of the living presence which is above us. We live with and in important ways live from the sky, the clouds, the sun, the moon, and all that is beyond. They effect our lives and in important ways affect our lives. ‘Clear skies’ or ‘dark skies’ are not just metaphors. They refer to how things are. Look up and see!
Others have described the impact of looking up in urban environments. This is not just about the sky. We can, if we take the time, see above the shop fronts and glitzy windows to the upper domains: we may, for instance, see laundry hanging from a window ledge, signs of home life above the busy street. In windows and upper balconies there are signs of life, plants and tables and people.
In so many places the upper parts of older buildings reflect earlier decades or centuries: crests or ornate decorations indicate the ideas of beauty, value, solidity, even pretension, of those earlier times. There are building and business names that speak of another time and may remind us of values and visions that have been lost or forgotten, as well as stories of failure and some institutions we have rightly left behind. Looking up informs us of where our community and institutions have come from.
Look up and see, think, feel, and know that who we are and what concerns us belongs in the long stream of things, history, nature, far more than we can imagine. Look up and know where we belong.
Look down
This term has an immediate connotation, the negative attitude of disapproval, disdain, or superiority. On the other hand, we may look down to much the same effect as we have just been mentioning: to see and learn from many things we easily ignore or maybe never noticed at all.
Looking down a microscope may give us vision of living things, dimensions of our own bodies or of other living things around us. Soil is never ‘just dirt’, but is filled with dynamic life, crucial to the growth of plants and trees, for our food and the wellbeing of animals and insects as well. Ask any expert gardener about what lives in the ‘dirt’.
Naturally we look down to small children and smaller animals, and this may be in attentiveness, watching over their play, and simply in enjoyment and affection.
Reading is a form of looking down, even when we say we are going to look something up in a book. We look down in concentration, focussing upon the story or information. When we do that, we are actually looking away from other things, which may be hard to do at times.
I recall that as a child I would often watch the activities of ants. The number of ants in the world is simply phenomenal, even for just one species. Yet if you watch the ‘simple’ household ant, usually in a long stream of them, busily rushing from one side of the path to another, or up a wall and into a hole, carrying a particle of something perhaps equal to its own size or weight, you are watching a marvel. How ants know what to do, where to go, and when to go—for instance, they notoriously prepare for rain—is simply amazing.
Look up, Look down, and wonder.
All this is the stuff of challenge to the pretensions of humans and at the same time an invitation to know that here we are at home, between earth and sky, in this universe which is given to us for a time as our home. Look up and live. Look down and live.
The eco-theologian Sallie McFague once suggested that sin is not knowing our place. That suggestion releases us from the appalling focus of so much religion upon sexuality and money, as if this these are the primary concerns of morality or God. McFague thinks our moral challenges are about knowing how to live creatively, responsibly, and simply in this world, and my sense is that ‘knowing our place’ and how to live in that way is enhanced and strengthened when we learn from looking up and looking down.