Looking at a small cup in the sink, its proportions are just right. The pencil holder on the desk, with all its pens and markers, is somehow arranged just so. The wrinkles in a few inches of sheet show the richness of light and shadow, the hills and valleys, the pleasure of paralleling lines.
It’s a matter of tending—attending—to the ordinary. Tending as in “attention,” as in tender regard. Gentle, unstrained attention. Attending to the act of looking. With this kind of attention, truly attending without thinking about definitions or descriptions—“those are cups, there are pens and pencils, here is the unmade bed”—things have the chance to shine. In that kind of attention, even if thoughts come up, the light of attention is not captured by thought.
This kind of looking lets things be themselves and show themselves as they actually are. This kind of looking lets the beauty of the ordinary shine through. Looking as though our gaze might disturb what we see, a kind of letting in with delicacy, with care—as if our very gaze might disturb what we are looking at, the way a pebble dropped into a pond disturbs the surface of the water, making ripples that keep us from seeing what’s underneath.
In order to see beneath the surface, the ripples need to subside a moment, the water needs to settle. This can happen when we look with a quiet mind, a mind without expectation, without agenda, without wanting things a certain way. Without focusing on our thoughts about something instead of on the thing itself. And this can also happen as we are arrested—made to rest a moment, made to come to rest—by something suddenly seen, something unanticipated.
In an unexpected moment a gap in the ripples of thought appears, the surface of the pond clears, and the beauty of the ordinary shines through. And somehow for a moment everything is suddenly perfect. No ideas about how things should be. No categories or labels.
This is one way to see perfection. Without ideas about something, its perfection of being perfectly itself is allowed to shine. Without letting our preferences define things, we allow things to be truly seen. Drinking from this perfection is drinking from the elixir that changes base metals into gold.
There is nowhere the ordinary beautiful is not, if we only have eyes to see. In every direction, the ordinary beautiful shines through.
© 2021 Shanti Natania Grace
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Whenever you look deeply into anything, it’s a window into everything.
– Bodhisattva Shree Swami Premodaya
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Thus, without expectation,
One will always perceive the subtlety,
And, with expectation,
One will always perceive the boundary.
– Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, translated by R.L. Wing
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When you gaze at an object, you bring blessing to it. For through contemplation, you know that it is absolutely nothing without the divinity that permeates it. By means of this awareness, you draw greater vitality to that object from the divine source of life, since you bind that thing to absolute nothingness, the origin of all.
– Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch, translated by Daniel C. Matt,
from the book The Enlightened Mind, edited by Stephen Mitchell.
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“Wherever you turn, there is the face of God”– Qur’an 2:115
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Photo by Shanti Natania Grace
