ANEW: Seeing Different
What is it like to look out and see forever?
Where do you go when you want to feel limitless? By limitless, I refer to inner and outer worlds that expand our way of being and seeing what gathers underneath. For my ancestors, it probably was that moment freedom came, and they realized that even as a freedman or woman, work remained to be done. People may have multiple places in mind when they want to glimpse that faraway place deep inside of themselves or a kind of witnessing of themselves much more extensive than they seem to be in their day-to-day lives. It’s a place that feels grander than home. Like me, you probably have many places you go, in real life or interiorly, to get a sense of your vast self.
I feel limitless when I step onto some trailhead and hike the miles and miles of narrow rocky trails to get atop a peak – east or west. The distance it takes to travel, and even the more challenging and perilous the path, the more I get to touch that part of myself that grows inside. Perhaps it’s looking over the edge of Mt. Willey out onto the Presidential peaks, Crawford Notch, and the Pemigewasset Wilderness laying before you, like a place of honor around an abundant continental dinner table. Aching knees can’t compare to the much-needed balm of a mountain peek.
At other times, I look for my “always there” limitlessness by driving thousands of miles over the course of a summer, down and around open roads in the Southwest United States. In the grand scheme of things, the highway system may be relatively new. Yet, in our lifetime, it has the summoning of the ancient places. The threaded places like veins throughout our bodies, which bend in on themselves like a cloverleaf highway entrance, ribboning around the heart and limbs of the land while almost always leading home to the people we love, wherever that may be, even if we haven’t seen them in weeks, months, or years.
Finally, and most notably, it is the Mall in Washington, D.C., especially the view day or night of the Lincoln Memorial. Architect Henry Bacon, Jr. captured the grief and stateliness of a nation in an edifice and its statue, allowing other monuments to exist in its grand wake. Perhaps the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, or the Colossus at Rhodes comes or came close to what I love about Bacon’s classical take on what it meant to “revere.” It’s getting out of my car, usually at 3:00 AM, to make my way in the darkness, up the 87 steps to get to the giant of a man in the middle. The most impressive of the views is where I get a sense of my expansive nature. It is seeing what he sees and what he has seen. It’s certainly the history of being one of the great manmade structures and symbols of freedom from the last century, maybe for always. Whether it is Marian Anderson whose voice trilled, “letting freedom ring,” capturing the imagination of those who stood at the feet of the great man, or, on the same spot less than twenty-four years later, maybe it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who created a metaphor for the next generation of those wanting liberation, particularly for those folks seeking not only stirring oratory of freedom ringing but words to prick the conscience of the nation like a worker collecting money owed for services rendered; we all have come to know freedom and a truer version of the self, which perhaps it is why the monument was created in the first place.
Yet, limitlessness is not just about getting what is owed. It’s about giving all we have in us to others – freely, gladly, and gratefully. Whether traveling to a high desert plain or a great distance along a well-worn bi-way, perhaps it’s seeking freedom or liberation at the feet of an effigy of a human whose life was sacrificed to the progress of time – because the time to look for our most expansive self is when the world seems to be crashing in all around us – and staying the course anyway.
When love is absent from the world, we must possess the courage to love ourselves instead and create a window onto THIS world, at THIS time, for THIS moment.
May it always be so.
Curated Listening:
It’s hard to get enough of IAMSON. I, too, wish I could see what the birds can see. Listen to IAMSON’s “Birds (live)” HERE.