In 2009, I had decided to get pictures of at least one sunset per month for an entire year. In order to keep things interesting, I of course would not always get the pictures from the same place. Sometimes, something else became the subject while the sunset was in the background. One set contained my mountain bike in the foreground, another set with my brother’s cat, Baby.
As time wore on, it would get closer and closer to the end of the month before I would get the pictures. Eventually, and before the year was done, I had missed an entire month - thirty evenings without once trying to get a sunset.
Before that happened, though, Thanksgiving rolled around. I was in college, and trying to enjoy Thanksgiving break, though I had a hundred and one things on my plate to accomplish. I had gotten up Thanksgiving morning, looked at how much time I had and all the projects I wanted to complete, and set myself some goals. I forget what all they were, but they kept me mostly in my room.
As fate – or Providence – would have it, sometime at the end of the evening I came downstairs for something. As you come down the stairs in my house, there is a window directly in front of you facing west. Through that window, I saw the sun setting, and immediately my sunset project came to mind. It didn’t take me long to decide; I grabbed a coat and boots and my camera and headed outside to snap a few pictures, including the one at the head of this post.
Eugene Peterson, in his article titled: Annie Dillard: With Her Eyes Wide Open, says of Annie: “She has assimilated Scripture so thoroughly, is so saturated with its cadences and images, that it is simply at hand, unbidden, as context and metaphor for whatever she happens to be writing about....Her knowledge of Scripture is stored in her right brain rather than her left; nourishment for the praying imagination rather than fuel for the apologetic argument.1”
Similarly, I believe, Annie stored her appreciation for beauty in her right brain. She recounts, in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this story of a mocking bird:
“The mocking bird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still tightly folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight.2”
I am not a slow reader, and still that took me a few seconds to read. The act, however, would take a split second. And yet Annie Dillard, always keen to beauty in this world, caught it and marveled at it.
I do not have beauty in my right brain. I don’t know if I ever can. I am very much more a left-brain kind of guy. But far from deploring those who don’t use their left brain, I am eternally grateful for those like Annie Dillard who can show me where the beauty is in every-day life. I had to set out specifically to capture the beauty of sunsets, and still I can go an entire month without paying attention to a single one. I saved the end of Annie’s quote for this point; at the end of the mockingbird story, she said: “The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.3” (Italics mine.)
Sunsets happen whether I will or sense them; and yet how much of my life is spent not being there to enjoy them? Earlier in the chapter, Annie quotes Einstein who said: “God is subtle...but not malicious...nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning.” God does not hide the beauty from us, He doesn’t need to. We have enough work getting ourselves to look for it, to take time from our day to seek it out, and to recognize it when it happens.
Finally, in her chapter Seeing, Annie relates the stories of people who had been blind since birth from cataracts, have surgery performed, and now can see but have not had the chance to develop in their brains exactly how to interpret colors and lights. For some, it is too difficult a transition and they continue to walk around with eyes closed, blind as they are accustomed to being. Other make the transition, but with difficulty. One in particular Annie quotes that:
“When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the trees with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.4”
What strikes me about this passage is not necessarily what she saw; although, if I saw it, it might strike me more. But what struck me is Annie read an experience of one who had been blind and could suddenly see, and in Annie’s mind she must have thought “this girl saw this; why shouldn’t I be able to?” One does not search for something they do not believe to be real or true. Yet if I had read the story of the girl, I would assume it was an anomaly of newly-gifted sight. But not for Annie; she went through the next few years looking for this “tree with the lights” until she saw it.
Oh that we all would see the tree with the lights, and give thanks to our Father who is in heaven. Beauty is fleeting, and beauty will not trumpet its existence; we must search for it and be able to recognize it when it is upon us.
1 Peterson, Eugene. “Annie Dillard: With Her Eyes Wide Open.” Theology Today. 43.2. (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1986).
2 Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (New York; Harper & Row, 1974), p.8
3 Pilgrim p.8
4 Pilgrim p.33
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