Moss Whispers

The imagination is a wondrous thing, whether we are children or adults with inner children embedded in our beings! I’m forever amazed at the mysteries of perception!  And of course as I write this, it’s from MY point of view!

I remember pondering this in my more studious stages in college: Once in a course called, Phenomenology and Religion of something like that. Another as I delved into it on my own in an Independent Study I created for myself at Duke, which I’ll name, A Child’s Perception of the Unseen, mysteries such as god, fairies, spirit, wind….especially dealing with a child ‘pre-lingual’ if there is such a time…for I’m convinced children are already learning language in utero.                                                                                                                              In the first course I mention, we journaled  a lot about our own perceptions and also looked at how others expressed theirs, using a benchmark book called, Visual Arts as Human Experience, by Donald L. Weismenn.

…He also wrote another book that fascinated me called Jelly was the Word. I remember being intrigued as I tried to ‘word’ what I perceived…”the shadows of trees on the wall…am I seeing the tree or the absence of the tree? is it the light or the dark that makes the form? does it come into my eye right-side-up or up-side-down?…and just the opposite in my brain? and if I were to draw it?…”  The questions rolled faster than my thoughts!

Now as I write…which came first…the Hillock settings and dwellings? and then my ideas? or the other way around? and in my head…first the words? or the images? from my mind? or from mine eyes?…

Each day as I walk our adventure dogs, we come to The Hillock and I’m compelled to stop…to listen, look, smell….to take in what I see…to look for mysteries to unfold, characters to come forth, clues to evoke my curious ponderings. And sometimes they come forth as easily as the slug who appeared under a rock, and responding to my unearthing his hiding place, he acts out his character in ‘rare form’ as he climbs the castle turret and extends his head and hence his whole body out in mid-air to stretch a ‘kiss?’ to the iron fairy guarding the stone wing of the one-winged bird. So from whence comes Slug, the character?… from the rock? from my mind? from the paintbrush? and what if I hadn’t months, no, years ago, plopped there the broken pieces of sand castles, the flat, moss-covered rocks, the lone iron fairy, and the piece of cedar that in some perceptual or primal order became over time, The One-Winged Bird? 

Is it my imagination that intervenes? Or is it the mysteries of the land having conversations with my imagination? Who/what shapes whom/what? The questions never stop!

Again, I’m called back into my mind to a time to my second studious situation, my independent study on ‘A Child’s Perception of the Unseen’…that’s what I’m calling it now. I think back in my college years, I had applied for my ‘independent study’ under the name I concocted: Christian Education and the Preschool Child. It was at a time on my spiritual journey when I could not STAND hearing even one more time the words: holy spirit, God, father, son, Jesus.   Even though my early years were precious and alive, and I was so authentically loved, I was an age where I needed to ‘strike out on my own’ and discover what ‘was true’ and what was really ME! I had grown up hearing these words since birth and needed to reject them and either create new ones or find their alive meanings ‘all by myself’!

I remember stumbling upon a book somewhere in the Duke Divinity School Library, where I spent hours trying to get ‘at the root truth of things…from Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, to the roots of perception… It was there I came upon two words that I just LOVED…mostly because of the possibilities they brought forth in my mind: BLIKS and ONLOOKS…I must go find them again!…More on them another time!