2 Reasons to Look Harder

This morning we find a Tomato Hornworm on our tomato plants.  These bugs are huge and yet so difficult to see.  They almost perfectly resemble the background leaves and stalks.

I'm staring at the plants, and all I see are leaves and tomatoes.  But when my entomologist friend comes by, she spots the camouflaged creature immediately.

I can't see anything.

I look harder, burying myself in tomato leaves.  Finally, I see another one. I almost have to cross my eyes and squint to distinguish the bug from the plant.  It feels like I'm in some Magic Eye book. 

I had this 3D Magic Eye poster in college.  In 1993, you could go to shopping malls and look at these posters to find the hidden pictures within them.  There were stereograms, or more specifically, autostereograms. 


 A stereogram is an optical illusion of depth created from a flat, two-dimensional image.  The point is that another image exists buried deep within the other.  This poster, for example, hides glasses within it.  I would stare until my eyes ached as I tried to get that image to pop out of the poster.  It drove me nearly crazy to think that something was really there, but I couldn't perceive it.  It infuriates me like those Tomato Hornworms that are really there--devouring my plants--and escaping my perception.  My eyes fail me over and over again. 

How many things hide within my reality that I don't perceive?  And how many things do I discount as real simply because they dwell outside of the realm of visual perception?  Tomato Hornworms and autostereograms are two reasons why I'm willing to believe in what I cannot always see.

I'm sure that living with flair has something to do with stereograms and seeing beneath the surface of things.  



(Tomato Hornworn, courtesy of Whitney Cranshaw, CSU, bugwood.org)

"The Lincoln"

There's a new challenge at the pool.  It's more like a dare, and for teenage boys, it's hard to resist.

It's called "the Lincoln."

I'm watching teenagers take running leaps off the diving board and land flat on their stomachs or backs.  But every once in a while, a boy will complete the impossible trick dive called the Lincoln.

You run, you dive, and mid-air, you turn to the side and do a side flip.

The Lincoln.

"What makes it so hard," one teenager explains, "is physics.  You're going one direction, and you have to tell yourself to turn to your side and do a flip in a perpendicular direction."

I nod, wondering why it's called the Lincoln.  Then I remember that gravity experiment when a penny falls straight down after you push the round tube it's sitting on to the left or right.

All the older boys line up and try to do the trick.  Of the group, only one can do it.  The lifeguards cheer.  This is the stuff of summer legend.  Somebody can do "the Lincoln!" 

Then, a little boy, maybe 6 or 7, gets up on the board.  He runs, he dives, and, smooth as butter, turns to his right and flips in the air.  The Lincoln.  Collective silence all around.  The lifeguard stops twirling her whistle.

"No way," the guy who knows the physics and how hard this dive is says.

The little boy, the one who hasn't had physics yet and only knows gravity by experience--and not theory--, surfaces, smiles, and says: "That wasn't hard.  I didn't even have to think about it."

Changing direction and form, mid-flight, is hard for anyone.  I hate change.  I hate everything about it.  But watching that little boy just get some speed and do it, without over-thinking the difficulty, inspired me.

Yeah it's hard to do whatever it is I've got to do.  But today, I want to pick up some speed and do it.

Sucking all the Marrow Out

The day stretches out before us.  I can let it happen to me, or I can seek out the complexity in common moments.  Complexity refers to many parts in an intricate arrangement.  If you can find this particular arrangement, you can suddenly understand something differently and more deeply.  There's complexity in this piece of toast, this cup of coffee, this orange.

People have said I think too much.  

A fellow faculty member and I commiserated yesterday that students like to say:  "But why does it have to mean anything?  It ruins our enjoyment when we have to analyze stuff.  Can't we just enjoy the story?"   I think we confuse complexity with unnecessary complication or confusion.  We think complexity means we shroud something in difficulty.  But this isn't the case.  Finding patterns, connections, and symbols unlocks this whole other world--this whole other subtext--that makes a text (or a life) so rich and beautiful.

Examining life for all its complexity pours a warm syrup over our day that makes it good.  We begin to see spiritual truth in the tiny, mundane thing.  We see God reaching out to us from the confines of a bedroom or a minivan or a rocking chair.  There's a message inside of everything confronting us.

Why not live a complex life?  Socrates cries out:  "The unexamined life is not worth living," just as Thoreau fears that "he would come to die and find that [he] had not lived."  He famously commands himself to "live deep and suck all the marrow out of life." 

Marrow, after all, is the choicest, inmost, essential part of a thing.  There's marrow in this day, and for me, it's whatever trace of God's beauty and goodness I can find and suck out. 


(Special thanks to Charity G.and Gigi M. for inspiring this post.)