A new way of seeing

Using a drawing pencil and pad, I traced the space around the table in my mom’s hospital room. The switch in my brain felt painful.
I’d never noticed the negative or white space before, but Betty Edwards, Ph.D. had developed a series of exercises in her book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, one of which required drawing the space surrounding an object rather than the object itself.
When I completed the sketch, although I had seriously doubted the outcome, I was amazed to see the table’s rough outline on my paper.
I was sitting beside Mom’s bed to make sure she had everything she needed after a double knee replacement.
She had just endured a very difficult operation and ended up in the Intensive Care Unit, so after the doctor moved her into a regular room, I stayed with her during the day.
Besides being a watchdog, I felt helpless to make a real difference in Mom’s healing process, so to take my mind off her painful recovery, I prayed, wrote, or sketched while she slept.
Edwards based her methodology on the theories of Dr. Roger Sperry, who won the Nobel Prize in 1981for his understanding of the brain’s hemispheres.
He and his colleagues were pioneers in the field, but with the new imaging technologies, brain research has come a long, long way.
In fact, Dr. Rahul Jandial, a brain surgeon with a Ph.D. in neurobiology, says, “Math geeks and computer programmers use both sides of their brain equally, as do painters and poets.”
Despite Dr. Jandial’s update on whole-brain functioning, Edwards’ exercises are meant to shift a person out of the verbal and analytical thinking mode into the visual mode and are still used today to teach students how to draw realistically.
One of her goals is to help students actually see what is in front of them rather than sketching from preconceived ideas.
As I tried many of her techniques during Mom’s hospital stay, something strange happened.
I started to see not only the objects differently, but also the flowers in the hospital’s gardens, the trees along the boulevards, and the cars in the parking lot.
Mom and everyone who walked through her door looked beautiful, almost as if I could see their essence.
Now, when I walk in Westwater, even though I’ve put away my sketchpad, I still sometimes try to see the essence, the true beauty of canyon life rather than a stereotyped image.
However, this summer I had trouble perceiving anything beautiful.
The stream, such an important part of that ecosystem, went dry for several months with the soil cracking in the bottom.
The sandy washes started resembling sandstone and showed no sign of tracks, and except for vultures, jays, and ravens only a few birds flitted in and out of the trees or flew into a sky brilliant with a very hot sun.
The three-leaf sumacs produced few berries, the willow leaves turned brown, and more of the pinyons started dying.
Government reports cited a 20-year megadrought with predictions of the dry conditions becoming the “new normal.”
As the waters in Lake Mead and Lake Powell receded, experts made dire predictions about the impact on the power grid.
I was ready to head to Missouri, but it, too, was experiencing dry weather.
I felt saddest about the pinyons, victims of the pinyon Ips beetles and the fungus those beetles carry. Even though the larger ones were probably 600 years or older, their crowns turned yellow and brown. I felt helpless to change their fate.
About midsummer, in the midst of the heat, I had a switch in perception that seemed as profound as viewing the space around an object.
In the book, It’s Not Your Money, Tosha Silver includes a “Full Abundance Change Me Prayer,” which affirms that the divine is “the unlimited Source of all.”
The basic premise of the prayer and book is to “offer” all to the divine.
Offering is the hardest thing I have ever done or will ever do, but instead of lamenting the browning pinyons, I felt gratitude for those ancient trees and all they had given to the canyon and those of us who walk, run, or live nearby: Food and shelter for wildlife, pine nuts, oxygen, filtered air and water, lower blood pressure, and stunning beauty.
Later, at the tail-end of summer and the beginning of fall, the rains came.
The pinyons’ brittle needles did not return to vibrant green, but the sand softened and swirled in new configurations, showing once again the imprint of many tracks.
A myriad of small birds returned to the canyon, including titmice, wrens, gnatcatchers, robins, and chickadees.
Daisies bloomed. Ducks floated on the small pond. The stream flowed and sometimes roared as waterfalls poured down the slopes and off the sides of the canyon.
The waterfalls, which often run only once or twice a year, if that, have cascaded down the ledges four or five times, and in the week since the last rain are still flowing
When I finally became conscious of Mom’s essence, her beauty and immense courage as she lay in the hospital bed with both knees swaddled, I felt I had shifted into a new way of seeing.
Although it has taken a long time, those new eyes can now also behold the exquisite bones of the dying pinyon trees, rejoice in the canyon’s waterfalls—and offer it all.