Looking as Blessing
From the archives: on receptive vision
Weekend Exhale is a slice of creative margin and embodied attention. You’ll find bits of poetry, discussions of art, and embodied practices that keep me centered and living slowly in a culture that often pulls the other direction. If this work resonates with you, please consider becoming a subscriber. Or you can buy me a coffee. I’m so glad you’re here.
Hi, friends—I’m coming off of several weeks of a procedure for one kid, then Flu B hitting the household, plus plenty of work and normal responsibilities mixed in. So I’m resharing a post from the archives, February 2023, which maybe rings even more true for me today. All the best to you, wherever you are. Stay sane and soft!
My youngest son predictably asks for one song in the grayscale hush of his room. I sing it over and over for him:
I see the moon, the moon sees me,
The moon sees the one that I want to see,
So God bless the moon, and God bless me,
And God bless the one that I want to see.
It is a melody I’ve only ever heard sung by my grandmother and the people to whom she sang it. When I sing it, I sense her nearness.
I hear her voice, scraped thin by decades of cigarettes. I see her pink lips, her clear blue eyes shining against a velvet night. I smell her smoke and cinnamon.
For a moment that passes quickly as a shadow, she is a silent observer of my life, blessing me and my son, whom she never met.
The song itself is a somewhat strange one. It projects a bit of agency onto the moon, casting it as a distant body that sees it all, beholding the entire world. Could this kind of attention, this blank and limitless gaze, be a form of blessing?
On Good Friday last year, I took a good portion of the day to visit my local art museum. I walked the blank corridors with a few other patrons and felt my gaze take on a different quality. My vision became soft and meditative, diverging from the way I see when I’m at work. Instead of a utilitarian sense of focus, I was here to take in essence, nuance, color, mood.
At the time, the museum housed an exhibition called Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice. The paintings hail from the mid-1940s and celebrate Black activists, scientists, teachers, and performers—some well-known and others lesser known—in their bravery and suffering.
I saw a series of violent paintings rendered in paradoxically bright chartreuse and teal. I saw Black bodies celebrated and slain. I felt uncomfortable, but I did not look away.
It is easy for me, a middle-class white woman, to distance myself from many forms of suffering; my world is fairly insulated, and I have the privilege of forgetting. There are so many more things I could be doing to work toward equity, I know. I do not give myself a free pass from owning and repairing the ways my ancestors and I have benefited from and perpetuated a system built on the backs of others.
But there in the museum, I discovered one minuscule way I can honor experiences unlike my own: by looking closely and long1. I can give my attention to what asks to be seen.
This kind of looking bears no agenda other than blessing the truth of what I see.
I wouldn’t learn until months later that the human gaze moves between two primary visual functions: exploration and exploitation. The first is the realm of perceiving threat and scanning surroundings. Am I safe? Is there food, shelter, or community on the horizon? During this state, the pupils are wide open.
The second state occurs once the viewer gains some perceivable measure of control. Can I use this? Does it meet my needs? Acuity matters most here, so the pupils narrow like the aperture of a camera lens.
I think about these two ways of looking: one that is passive and receptive—vulnerable, in other words—and another that is narrowed and aimed at control. How much human suffering could have been avoided if we had embraced the first way of seeing more constantly?
Of course, both ways of seeing are essential. There will always be a time and place for utility, systematization, and function. But when it comes to attending to art, to nature, and to people, I want to learn how to toggle back into that other way of looking. Open, receptive, given over.
The moon, reflective and ready to receive, surely sees the material of my life and of so many others—all our wars and awards and egos and generosities. She holds, in her steady gaze, our truth and contradictions.
God bless her for her looking.
Looking for more?
Read this poem on Black vision by the inimitable Langston Hughes.
Explore some of William H. Johnson’s art over at the Smithsonian.
If you love the moon like me, don’t miss the blood moon on March 3! It will be visible in my part of the world (Oklahoma) starting around 5 a.m.
Jane Hirshfield’s definition of poetry, for what it’s worth.