By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
If from an unlit room you look through a window into daylight then close your eyes, you will see an after-image.
The dark lines of the window frame appear bright against the now relative darkness of the sky. The image is briefly “burned” into your vision. Circumstances can burn a kind of psychological image into our souls: cynicism, hope or maybe something in between. We are usually ignorant of it until we pause to reflect, and even then, like the after-image, it is hard to hold in focus.
This occurred to me recently while in my garden. I was scanning the tree line for the birds I heard calling. After a minute or so, when I closed my eyes, the after-image of the tree line against the May sky appeared. The dark silhouette of Douglas fir, western hemlock and westen red cedar (the quintessential climax forest of the Puget Sound) set against the sky and reduced to a black and white photo-negative burned onto the back of my retinas was deeply familiar. You cannot see precisely that image anywhere else in the world, but I have known it for a lifetime.
I felt a deep sense of belonging, “humble pride” and gratitude at the realization that I am so connected to this place that a rudimentary physical response to light (like an ameoba in a Petri dish) elicited a subsequently deep spiritual response. I am part of this landscape, and it is good.
The six hundred words gifted to me in this space do not allow for a detailed description of my subsequent thoughts and feelings, but I can summarize. Invading that joyously numinous moment like a leak in a boat came anger and sadness. Sadness because this image is becoming rare. Anger because the loss is preventable. Judgment followed when I thought of how “they” are destroying it through blind arrogance. Then doubt and shame arrived as I could not escape the truth of my own blind arrogance and that of the four generations of men before me who devasted this landscape with ax and saw. Grief, then apathy, and finally despair settled on me like a spring cold: suddenly and heavily.
My downward, existential spiral was interrupted by a “ding” from the magic rectangle in my pocket (ironically). One of my lovely and brilliant daughters was in the midst of her own kind of spiral, feeling hopeless and impotent in the face of our present societal turmoil. “What the hell are we supposed to do?” was the concluding line in her text message. I know her well enough to have surmised that this was only a partially rhetorical question. She wanted a response.
When my focus moved from self to that of someone else, a little clarity for both of us dawned. As I composed a response, my own spiral slowed, stopped and then reversed.
In part, I wrote, “we must address pain, suffering and injustice that is within reach and at the human scale. It’s what Jesus did. Yes, things were happening on a cosmic scale, but his eyes, his hands and his heart were entirely present in one place and time, focused on only a few dozen individuals because that’s as far as a man can actually reach. … Love your neighbor.”
I’m not gonna lie, I smiled to myself when I pressed “Send.” I put the magic rectangle back in my pocket and turned my attention from the distant tree line to the tender, hopeful plants at my feet.
Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.
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