Perspectival

One summer day my college aged daughter asked me if ‘perspectival’ was a word. Even spell check is trying to switch it out on me. I started looking through the variety of dictionaries I keep on hand. Found it online. Then she says, “Dr. V. writes ‘History is perspectival’ across the board every day. And my response was , “Well, if Dr. V uses it, it’s a word.” I like to say it’s the adjectival form of perspective. I feel as though I am at a point in my life where I keep needing to shift my perspective, there are things I couldn’t see before. For instance, one time while visiting a friend who was caring for her mother who was in early stages of dementia, she showed me the coloring book she was filling up of beautiful birds to help keep her brain as alert as possible. I assigned such coloring to dementia therapy in my mind, a long way away for me. But one time, in the art store, I couldn’t resist. There was one of all these magical drawings of trees. It sits on my shelf. It looks too complicated to color. Sometimes I use it for drawing inspiration. I look at these magical drawings and try to envision it with realistic colors. I just do not have the eye for this. I color one, then another….. and I start thinking while I color. I got new markers for Christmas, paint brush markers and I pick one up and start at one side of crazy designs and putting it wherever I feel like it and then another and another, and I see a circle where everything had been a jumble to me before… and a turtle, a snake, a bird. I color while I eat. I put the marker down a while, it does not have to be finished in one sitting. This is kind of a big deal to me. It’s probably as big a deal as not losing my temper when I put too much stuff in my Ninja blender and it spewed the mess of my rotting banana peels I was going to put around my tomato plants And I didn’t lose my temper. Joel and I agreed that was probably a first.

So while coloring this it reminded me of a conversation my husband had with a friend who farms. They could go on and on about what is under the surface of the soil. Maybe we go through life with the perspective of ‘ the grass is green, the trees are brown, the sky is blue’without taking much time and thought of what made it so. Maybe the atmosphere is Full of color all the time , but we get a glimpse only when the sun shines through the rain. Maybe, like under the surface of your skin, under the crust of the soil in your backyard fabulous things are going on more amazing than the bright colors of my coloring page. And while it may seem like a lot of this and that going here and there, there is also a wonderful symmetry to it. It all works together. Everyday life might have a simplicity that doesn’t show its source often, but I want to be on the lookout for when it shows. There is a Christmas story called ‘The Holy Night’by Selma Lagerlof and at the end the rough shepherds who didn’t want to help the poor man begging him for coals to warm his wife and child, has compassion when he sees their poverty and offers sheepskin. In that act his eyes are opened and he sees cascading angels singing of the holy night of the Savior being born. The story ends with ‘What is needful is that we have such eyes as can see God’s glory.’ It shows up in unexpected places. Sometimes it shows up in places we weren’t looking for it.