IF WE CAN learn once more to see what is around us, to have the Joy of Looking, all sorts of amazing things start to happen to us. We begin again to experience wonder, awe, and the serenity that that these bring to us even in the midst of the chaos and awfulness that surround us everywhere in the world. Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychologist imprisoned at Auschwitz, describes the saving grace of the few tiny glimpses of nature they managed to get in that hellhole – a little bird perched on a nearby twig; a sunset seen through a barbed-wire fence. The cover of Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, shows a strand of barbed wire in close up. On that wire perches a tiny finch.
But first we must learn to look and really see. To gaze instead of glance. To attend to the things we can see around us if we only really look – in the sky; in the sea; in the fields and hedgerows; especially at the edge of things – in the dawn where night meets day; in the twilight where day meets night; in the swerve of shore and bend of bay where land meet ocean; in the mountain tops where sky meets earth; in the hedgerows where field meets tree; in the spring where winter meets summer; in the autumn where summer meets winter; in the clear night sky where we meet the universe.