When you look at a friend: what do you see?
Do you notice their stature or how they have their hair?
Is it their clothes that draw your attention?
Or is it something else?
Something that expresses their essence, their wholeness, with the tone of the present showing up in the way they hold themselves and speak today?
What we see is fluid because we and the whole world around us are in constant movement.
Yet we’ve been taught to see things, object reality, when the whole is relational.
It takes quite a shift to see it this way. But just imagine the difference it would make.
The reality we see together
This is a beautiful poem for children from the American writer Rachel Field (1894-1942), which I encountered for the first time this week:
SOMETHING TOLD THE WILD GEESE
Something told the wild geese
It was time to go.
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered,—”Snow.”
Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned,—”Frost.”
All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.
Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,—
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.
+ Rachel Field, from ‘Branches Green’, 1934
And this 15-minute New Scientist video interview with the physicist Carlo Rovelli, inspired by the art of Cornelia Parker, ‘Reality is not things, but connections’, speaks to another dimension.
I hope you have space to enjoy both.