Beholding the Canal Eye

9x12 oil on mdf panel of the canal from the Grant Street bridge.

Brian McLaren writes about "beholding" in Naked Spirituality, "...the winter season beyond Perplexity begins with a kind of nakedness.  Naked trees. Frozen ponds.  Hibernation.  Starkness.  Long, dark, silent nights, and cold days blanketed in snow.  Autumn exhaustion leads now to winter's rest.  That chattering, hypervigilant consciousness--that first judged in Stage One, and then analyzed in Stage Two, and then deconstructed in State Three--now goes silent.  It takes a breath.  When we open our eyes in this space, we begin to see and know with the meditative mind.

What you look for determines what you see.  What you focus on determines what you miss.  The way you see determines what you are blind to and what you render invisible.  So this meditative kind of seeing accepts the limitations of earlier and noisier ways of seeing, and it practices, in their place, a new vision, a new beholding.  When we behold in this new way, we enter a second naivete."