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
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see
• From suffering can come growth, joy

I recently pulled a T-shirt dress off a hanger as the quickest garment to yank over my head and run out the door to school.

"They still make those?" wondered another teacher. Several of us were gathered as usual around the copier like a campfire, waiting for printouts. "Where'd you find it?" inquired someone else.

"Oh!" I realized those pronouns referred to what I was wearing, so I looked down to remember what that was and where it had come from. An ancient memory lit up inside.

"When I was a teenager, I worked in this dress shop in a Roanoke mall. It didn't have windows," I regretted aloud, then realized they were staring.

"You've had that since you were a teenager?"

Squinting, I noticed for the first time how the black stripes had faded to a kind of charcoal. But after all, it occurred to me, "This dress is going toward three decades old!"

Struck by this thought, I exited the circle of disbelieving stares and headed toward my class, wondering if I should tell the students they were observing a historic artifact (not just me but the dress).

How things look

Here I should say (in case you haven't figured it out), I'm not very focused on appearances.

My house -- full of pine cones, turkey feathers, open books, scribbled-on index cards -- is a feng shui nightmare.

My refrigerator, rolling with acorns and hickory nuts to plant, my serving bowls perched way up on Pine Ridge to hold rainwater for birds, my sink full of canteens and rocks, the dish rack clumped with tin camping plates and jars for water glasses -- would give Martha Stewart a heart attack.

Then there's the yard full of trees, pokeweed, raggedy blue asters, dead leaves for the soil, a clothesline around back draped with army blankets and undershirts. From every angle, it's clear: I'm not clever with looks.

This is regrettable, because I know appearances matter, to put it mildly. These days, "image" creation and promotion fuel entire industries, making up vital components of politics, economics, education, social networking, even religious life.

Thanks to mass communication of these images, even little backwoods, mountain-hollow pockets of appearance-diversity are few; we all know how things ought to look. So just cultivating a woodland instead of a lawn can create a mild trauma for others, confusing the entire neighborhood and throwing off the local sense of order and propriety.

I tell myself that being appearance-oblivious at least provides comic relief to others. Each Halloween, while neighbors are blowing leaves off the lawn into the street, I'm raking them from the street back into my yard. I even go door-to-door, asking for bags of leaves, a few stray pine needles piercing my stocking cap, like a weird wood-elf out to trick-or-treat.

But I know it's uncivilized, my nonparticipation in creating the standard look. In December, for example, from the only yard in town dark as a Black Forest, I go out for night hikes through glittering fairy-tale displays that light up the road and fire the imagination. My passive enjoyment, I realize, is surely unjust to the people who put in all that effort, as they're usually inside working at computers or watching TV, unable to see the effect.

Being appearance-challenged is in that way akin to poor citizenship. But it does offer one perk. The focus my oblivion frees up allows me time to observe things from a different angle.

Under the surface

It's like attending a pool party -- the grown-up sort where people aren't actually supposed to swim.

Only after 40 minutes of happily churning laps, foggy-goggled and surging like a dolphin out of the deep, will I realize nobody else is diving in. Gazing up at the concrete surface, the hard heels and semiformal wear and twinkling cocktail glasses, I realize much of human society operates at a level over my head.

But a subsurface altitude does let me think about the world beneath and beyond appearances -- the "invisible world" this current column series aims to explore.

For I often feel that in the ramped-up appearance-focus of our time, we've forgotten this unseen realm -- whether of soil organisms, aquifers, wild species and habitats far from view, glaciers and deep oceans we affect in our everyday surface choices -- or the vast, invisible landscape within ourselves.

It bothers me, not just because we can lose sight, between all our walls, of the unseen "big picture" that needs our attention; we also can lose connection with the deeper, unobvious realm of the soul, which shies away from appearances and can't thrive in the surface glare.

I even think that this increased disconnect of our time might help explain many of our common, contemporary disorders -- stress-related illness, hypertension, insomnia, addictions and the incredible unhappiness of so many teens.

And so I'll scan three decades back, to my own adolescence, to pursue the topic via the little-black-shirt-dress, next time.