Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Recalling the start of a movement on the retail front lines
• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• From suffering can come growth, joy

The human eye falls in love with the enthralling plenitude of the visible. This fascination is addictive. Fixated on the visible, we forget that the decisive presences in our lives -- soul, thought, love, meaning, time, and life itself -- are all invisible.

-- John O'Donohue

I was rambling a dirt road with a two-legged and four-legged friend. We paused to look toward a creek bed, where a line of jagged, dead trees stood like specter-ships over the water.

I was wondering if acidified water might have spurred their demise, just as my friend shouted, "Firewood!"

Then I saw the stand of firewood, and he noticed the creek. "People see what they've always looked for," he laughed.

He'd lived in a religious community whose buildings were heated by wood fires, and had long scoured landscapes for dead wood. I'd been trying to reforest for years and was habitually wondering "what happened to the trees."

I then remembered my ninth-grade art teacher, Marie Utt Hoal, who saw so much beauty in dead trees she required them in every landscape painting.

So what were these particular dead trees? Beauty? Firewood? Signs of acid deposition?

Some crows began exiting one tree, which I realized was also a perch. For a hunting hawk, it would offer a tree stand; for a woodpecker, a snack machine plugged with grubs. And who knew how much was going on underground, among the unseen roots?

Meanwhile, the dog had been urgent to plunge down the pasture. He didn't see the trees, but smelled the deer who'd recently bounded into them -- deer for whom that grove was shelter.

The "fact" was, those trees were more than one creature could perceive. Yet I, a trance-dazed and distracted human, had instantly assumed my little eye holes conveyed their reality.

In the shadows

"We trust so heavily in appearances," my philosophy student, Tom Umberger of Cripple Creek, wrote recently. "But there is more to life than what we see. We discover every day that nothing is what it seems at first ... that if you look harder, you will discover things you didn't see before."

We'd been reading from "The Republic." Socrates was describing a cave, its inhabitants sitting chained and staring at shadows on the rear wall, assuming these flat, surface appearances the summation of reality.

As Socrates, Plato and Umberger could "see," we humans are often those cave dwellers, taking our dim view for utter reality, rarely aware of the unseen world behind appearances -- or behind our own eyes.

Cognitive researchers tell us each child forms a subconscious "filter" by age 6, usually affecting his view for a lifetime. He may learn to fear strangers, darkness, vulnerability, mistakes, the unknown or whatever else. He may "see" that he must lie to avoid punishment, mimic others to win approval -- any number of perceptions coagulated, by the well-meaning survival instinct, into a kind of "UV-protection lens" he doesn't know he's wearing.

Via "the unexamined life," Socrates already reckoned 2,400 years ago, adults continue "seeing" through this fog. We also project our interior "shadow" onto the world, Carl Jung said, and mistake its appearance for objective reality.

Ignorance is bliss?

Being a nearsighted, oblivious person myself, for whom the world resembles a splotchy, pretty, impressionist painting, I've been struck recently by how rarely our educational, economic, news media, or even religious certitudes ever hint to us that we see "but through a glass darkly" (St. Paul tried to tell us) only the murkiest speck of reality.

Maybe in Socrates' and Paul's eras, the world could afford our oblivion. Awakening was optional. But today, our ongoing, blind presumptuousness threatens life on Earth. How?

Say we "see" a mountain as "underutilized" because we haven't developed it commercially for ourselves or blown it apart for coal extraction. We then, in well-meaning earnestness, proceed to superimpose our two-dimensional view of "enhancements" onto the actual, three-dimensional place, obliterating the deep, living complexity we never saw -- while calling ourselves "visionaries."

Multiply this "vision" exponentially, for decades and centuries of population growth and increasingly powerful equipment, and what we didn't "see" coming is here: emptying oceans, denuded forests, spreading desertification, and the ongoing mass extinction of ancient, once-in-a-universe, vital species we humans cannot create in a lab.

The wise thinkers through history had one humble aspect in common: They perceived and respected the enormity of all they could not see.

Socrates believed his own "little wisdom" lay in this very awareness of the vast unknown -- in "not thinking I know what I do not know." He was basically executed for revealing the same unknown in the "all-knowing," arrogant Athenian leaders.

Socrates' fate (and Paul's) doesn't appear to recommend such deep respect for the unknown, unseen world. But appearances are deceptive! We'll see about it, next time.