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“The Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsessions with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance.”—Thomas Merton
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes of watching a praying mantis laying eggs. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. I lay on the hill this way and that, my knees in thorns and my cheeks in clay, trying to see as well as I could. I poked near the female’s head with a grass; she was clearly undisturbed, so I settled my nose an inch from that pulsing abdomen. I watched the egg-laying for nearly an hour.” Dillard goes on to describe the egg-laying process in spectacular detail, but what fascinates me even more than her brilliant writing is the simple fact that she would flatten herself against the earth for a full hour just to watch an insect giving birth.
As for me, I’m not a frequent watcher. By nature I’m too compulsive and driven to sit around a just look at life. But there have been occasions when I have watched—really watched—and those times have changed me.
During last year’s spring I sat on a fallen tree and watched turtles sunning. I noticed them first as I walked a stony path beside a backwoods pond. There were perhaps fifteen of them perched on a broken tree branch that extended out above the water. One end of the branch was buried in wet sand at the pond’s edge; from there it cut a gentle diagonal above the pond’s surface like a skinny ski ramp. “Look!” I shouted to my companion, and immediately the turtles toppled off the branch and disappeared under cover of black water.
We sat for a long time, hoping they would reappear. Eventually little black knots popped out of the water—one head, two, three, more. Perfectly still, they let the rippling current split around them. Then down again. Gone. Then up—a few feet closer to the branch. Down, wait, pop, down, wait, pop. One by one they approached the buried branch, broke the water line, then inched slowly up the ramp. A whisper or a careless crunch of dead leaves, and plop!—they were gone again.
I had previously poked fun at turtles for their plodding ways. That day I praised their cleverness. Had they sunned themselves on the sandy beach my companion and I (or some less friendly creatures) could easily have outrun and captured them. But perched above the water, they had merely to fall and they were instantly safe. Would that I so wisely adapted to my limits, covered my weak spots and planned my escapes.
As a child, I remember watching a man buy a ceramic figurine in a discount store. The man was poor and old and looked nearly as breakable as the statues he fingered. His angular shoulders defined his tattered grey jacket like a wooden hanger shapes an overcoat. His tired feet shuffled up and down the aisles in coarse work boots that hinted of a more robust past. The deep lines in his thin face suggested the bittersweet tale of ordinary life—long days and hard work, simple homes and meager meals, children raised and now gone, fortunes dreamed of but never won.
The figurine, obviously a gift, was cheap, but the care with which he chose it, and the gentle way he held it in his frail, wrinkled hands spoke eloquently of his love for the gift’s recipient. I imagined who that might be—an old woman, I assumed, perhaps as wrinkled and tattered as he. But I imagined her delight at receiving the gift. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” she would say. “You shouldn’t have. But I love it. Thank you!”
I try to think about that old man and his simple gift without getting choked up, but I can’t. Remembering him always softens me.
While on a vacation I once laid on my back for two hours on the deck of a sailboat in the dark. I watched the blackness and the stars. The longer I watched, the more vast the blackness seemed and the more numerous the stars. I felt suspended in infinity, weightless between the vaporous black above and the liquid black beneath. Never have I sensed so keenly the scope of the universe or been so awed by the mystery of creation.
Years ago on a sunlit morning in Moscow I stood on the red bricks outside St. Basil’s Cathedral and watched the crowds pass Lenin’s tomb. I watched especially a brown-uniformed soldier, like many fresh from the raging war in Afghanistan, walk hand in hand with his wife and daughter. The muscular husband walked purposefully, his deep-set eyes clear and alert; the wife, like so many women I saw, was drably dressed and thick and solemn; the little girl, skipping cheerfully and half pulling her parents, wore in her hair a giant, colorful chiffon bow, like the ones that adored nearly every little girl I saw. When Americans thought of Russians during those years, I don’t think we envisioned cheerful little girls in turquoise bows.
I remember another evening in Russia, watching two men play chess on a park bench. I watched the muscles of their jaws tighten as they planned their moves. I edged closer when dusk obscured their game. And at the end of that day I pondered man’s common needs. For family. For friendship. For rest from labor. For simple pleasures. For peace. And I prayed for the men and women whose decisions shape the world for all of us.
Just recently, in my own neighborhood, I watched two Canadian geese. I’d been out running and stopped for a rest. It wasn’t the run that had exhausted me, but the baggage I’d carried in my mind for three days—an unresolved tension in my marriage, an issue to be worked through. I was tired, not of the particular issue but of the general work of marriage, the constant effort it requires for two so different people to live in harmony. I’d given myself the usual pep talks about the rewards of “working things out,” and I’d prayed the usual prayers for guidance and humility, but the tiredness won out.
So I watched the geese—gliding, diving, splashing, circling, flapping—and something happened inside. Somehow those geese did what my pep talks and prayers had failed to do. They awakened my motivation to get back to the sacred work of marriage. I don’t know how they did it. It was just something about seeing them together, as a couple, doing the ordinary, wonderful, silly, mundane, fun things geese couples do. When I sat down I was exhausted, despairing; when I got up I was energized, hopeful.
Watching can do that. It can refresh and enrich us, teach and tenderize and transform us. Yet we seldom watch. We perceive watching as unnecessary, or worse, a frivolous violation of our work ethic. Why waste time observing when we can be doing? Why sit and ponder when we can produce? Why watch a silly goose duo when I could run another mile or squeeze fifteen more minutes of completed tasks into my day?
Francine du Plexxis Gray say that “the routine of our daily work has too often served as deep dumb, deaf sleep, a refuge from two of life’s most crucial states of being—keen awakedness to the needs of others and equal awakedness to the transcendent, which only comes in some state of loitering, dallying, tarrying, goofing off.” And might I add, in watching.
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