A tree with lights in it

It was quite some time ago that Annie Dillard put a vision of ‘a tree with lights in it’ into my head. But how can I tell you what I mean?

I could use words. But language is essentially metaphorical. And words are digital. Reality, on the other hand, is analogue – and very real. It must be lived. And yet, reading ‘A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’  - and reading it again and hearing Annie Dillard through a printed page, especially her essay on ‘Seeing’ – prepared a space within my mind for my own experience of reality.

I don’t know exactly what she saw when she saw it, but through her words, I believed her. And then one day I saw the tree with lights in it.

Only it wasn’t just the tree – and not all at once. But each ‘once’ was enough for forever. Where moments before I saw a muddy river bending behind the distant trees, I saw sunlight flowing on tiny rafts. A brick wall became glowing embers. And diamonds flashed in the sky. And ordinary eyes burst into flame before my own eyes – and, then, as I watched, transfixed – they became merely the blue-gray eyes of a little girl once again.

Listen to how Annie Dillard describes it: “It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.” And again, she offers another image: “I had been my whole life a bell, and I never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”

Earlier in her chapter on ‘Seeing’ she recalls others as they have tried to describe their own experiences. They wrote words that she believed before she lived them.

All of these words are merely tracks in sand. These words mark what has already been in time – in reality. The words can build an anticipation – an expectation – in the reader. But what those writers saw in their time had been seen only in the moment that they were living in. You will see – or not see – what you will - somewhere in the trackless ripples of sand ahead of you.

Seeing happens in the mind. If you are sighted, light enters through your eyes. But all of your senses can take perceptions of reality into your mind, and then you ‘see’ something. What you see is more or less what is out there. What everybody else sees, perhaps. Except everybody doesn’t actually see what you see. Everybody is looking at everything else at different times. Reality is overwhelmingly too much 'everything' to be fully seen. Still, if I point to a seagull circling just off the Kaw River Bridge in the late afternoon sun in November, that is pretty much what you will see. These are commonplace perceptions.

This kind of seeing is a wonder in and of itself, but there is also another level of seeing. You can believe it or not.

Annie Dillard says it - and it has been my experience - that you cannot make this seeing happen. Certainly if you have your mind closed, if you are not giving considered attention to your experience, you will see merely shapes and colors blurring into forgetfulness. But even if you fully expose yourself to reality, you will still see only two squirrels scampering in a yard. Or something like that. Maybe their bushy tails twitch.

Or this. One gray afternoon I was walking towards NY Elementary School. I volunteer with the kid’s chess club on Friday afternoons. I was early and since I never seem to tire of looking at the river, I went on past the school for several more blocks. Near the Amtrak station there is a wooded area with trails that wander alongside the river. I walked on to where I could see the river through mostly bare branches. The river was muddy, gray from the reflected light from the overcast sky. No rafts of light. Still, it was something.

I turned back. I had nearly reached 7th street when I saw the tree with the lights. Well, this time it was merely a maple tree, half the leaves fallen, the rest a flaming red. It was barely only a glimmer of the tree that Annie Dillard wrote of – that I have indeed seen at other times. But it was enough for me to be reminded.

This seeing is only to be believed, after all. The sensation that reality is somehow more brightly burning than commonplace appearances, that reality is more real than the bricks on New York Street between 9^th and 10^th, that wonder merely hints at the possible truth that seeing can only be believed -  that is quite something else.

There are kids waiting in the library with chess boards and chess pieces on tables as they sit across from each other. Their faces have become familiar to me. Often the kids are more distracted with each other than attentive to chess. Noise levels rise. Kids climb out of their chairs. And sometimes - sometimes the time is simply about the game of chess.

One day, I was playing a game of chess against a third-grade girl. Her lips were pink and her face was smooth. There were a few freckles scattered across her cheeks. I advanced my Queen and watched her eyes. She couldn’t yet understand what I meant by that move. And when she looked away to one side, I could only guess what she meant by that. I looked over to where her gaze fell. It was only a blank wall. I had nowhere else to be and so I sat there and I waited for her to move. Eventually she turned back and gave me a quizzical smile. “I could take your bishop?” It was a question. I looked into her blue-gray eyes. And I saw the light there, but I went ahead and spoke anyway. “You could, but then what would I do with my Queen,” I asked carefully. And then the girl so very young, with her eyes once again blue-gray, looked away from me and twisted her small mouth sideways. It was only chess. But I had been struck for an instant. I would hold in my mind the afterimage of the light in her eyes for as long as I possibly could, although more than a glancing look and I might well have have been blinded.

It’s like that, a little, but I wish that I could tell it better. But still, it was my vision – and mine alone. I saw the light that I saw. And I don’t know entirely what I mean. But I believe what I have seen.

This is what Annie Dillard concludes: “I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.”

Mine eyes have seen the glory. My advice is the same for you as for myself. Be open and wait.