Learning how to see

“Then, I think there is a looking with your whole body as if there were tentacles that sense and touch the totality of the thing you’re looking at so that the tree stops being leaves, branches, roots. It starts becoming a clustering, a gathering, a drooping, a lifting, a turning.” – artist Jane Rosen in Parabola Magazine

“When you ‘see’ there are no longer familiar features in the world.  Everything is new.  Everything has never happened before.  The world is incredible.” – Carlos Castaneda

“Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. – David Abram

The protagonists in my novels are all learning to see the world as it is rather than as they think it is. Robert Adams (The Sun Singer,) David Ward (Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey) and Sarabande (Sarabande) face many challenges in their novels. Those challenges are called the plot. The plots of novels are often distilled to their essential focus in the publisher’s or author’s description found on Amazon and Barnes & Noble:

Robert: Now he must resurrect his dangerous gift to fulfill his promise, uncover the true secret of Julianne’s death, undo the deeds of his grandfather’s foul betrayer, subdue brutal enemy soldiers in battle, and survive the trip home. The journey is a physical one: mountain trails, a resistance group fighting a tyrannical king, a vision quest on a mountain peak.

David: After he lands a teaching job at a small college in central Illinois, he suspects he was conjured there by a woman standing in the moonlight on Moon Hill. Siobhan, the wise woman in his life tells he will never understand what has happened to him until he can answer the question: “who tried to kill me and why?” As a “light-dancer,” he remembers well the alchemists’ guiding principle: “By fire is nature renewed whole.” He suspects all paths lead to that point.

Sarabande: She leaves the mountains of Montana for the cornfields of Illinois on a black horse to seek help from Robert Adams, the once powerful Sun Singer, in spite of Gem’s prophecy of shame. One man tries to kill her alongside a deserted prairie road…one tries to save her with ancient wisdom… and Robert tries to send her away. Even if she persuades Robert to bring the remnants of his magic to Dryad’s shallow grave, the desperate man who follows them desires the Rowan staff for ill intent… and the malicious sister who awaits their arrival desires much more than a mere return to life.

In order to survive the plots they find themselves within, each of these characters must learn a great deal about himself or herself. The world as it is is their greatest teacher. Survival—in fiction as in life—depends upon our  learning that as long as we are looking at the world, we are blind to it. Looking is a one-sided, often-arrogant approach to everything and everyone who is not us. Seeing only occurs when we stop looking, when we participate with all that is not us in the creation of the world around us.

As you read The Sun Singer, Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey, and Sarabande, I invite you to see what my characters are learning to see: the vast wonder that often hides in front of our eyes.

–Malcolm

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