Hidden in Plain View

The other day I was talking on the phone and looked out the window. I looked around at the plants growing in the flower beds and noticed a pattern disruption. Something wasn't quite right. What was it? Then the Pacific Tree Frog emerged from its camouflage. It is truly remarkable how this creature could adapt to the color markings of the surrounding vegetation. Even though a scientific explanation exists about how this works, it is still a wonder to see it in action. Have you ever heard a frog croaking outside one of your windows and went out to find the "singer"? I have done that many times and most of the time not been able to find the source. Now, when I'm in the garden I look at these leaves with a new focus; a different type of attention.

This also reminds me of a gift I was able to pass on to my father. Photography has a been a part of my life for so long. I can remember some of the cameras I used as a child and then discovering the science and art of photography in high school. For years I only worked with black and white. At one point my father took a photography course at Skagit Valley Community College in Oak Harbor. Then one day he told me that he was seeing things in a new way- he was seeing birds on wires and patterns on the sides of buildings. He was discovering a new way of seeing the world. It is something that I'm grateful he discovered before he died. His world became larger and more intimate.

There are many things we don't see because we don't know to look and there are other things that we don't recognize because we see them everyday: mission/value statements on a company wall, a mileage marker on the freeway, a loving gesture by a partner. Neuroscience is helping us to understand a number of things about our human-ness. One of the things is that there are so many good things that go on in our everyday life that we don't see them. Love, joy, and compassion are so prevalent that we don't see them. Our systems become high jacked by the intense emotions that stimulate chemicals like adrenalin. These experiences are so intense (and pleasurable) that we see the world from the viewpoint of those things that evoke those wonderful sensations and feelings. Yet, if we measured how much of our time is filled with those intense moments we would have a few examples as compared to the number of times that a person has done us a kindness, that we have experienced the goodness of someone extending a hand, or the fleeting moments of beauty that we actually see in the world. 

This happens around the world and Jeremy Rifkin has written about this in his book, The Empathic Civilization and I'm looking forward to reading his thoughts. It has just landed on my to-read pile.

There are problems in the world and some people deal with horrific conditions. There is no doubt about that. At the same time there are billions of actions each day that bring beauty into the world. The sound of a creek,  the image of a swallowtail landing on a peony, or even that your soccer team won last night... whatever. There are always opportunities when our viewpoint is open.

This morning, after completing my morning meditation, I was reading a passage in the book, The Joy of Living by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. (I highly recommend this book.) Here is the passage for you to consider (p. 111): "... I began to see that when the pace of external or material progress exceeded the development of inner knowledge, people seemed to suffer deep emotional conflicts without any internal method of dealing with them. An abundance of material items provides such a variety of external distractions that people lost the connections to their inner lives."