Gazing is not seeing....

 "The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most of life.... How to extract its honey from the flower of the world."

(Henry David Thoreau)

 

Often we look at scenery by sweeping the landscape with our eyes commenting on its beauty but without really seeing the objects in front of us.  We tend to glance at things, even other people’s faces, and are unable later to recall the colour of their eyes.  To really see something means taking a little time to stop, be still, and look closely rather than merely forming an impression.  Gaze at a mountain, follow its lines and contours with your eyes, the gashes and chasms cut deep into it flanks, the becks trickling down is side, the rocks and scree strewn at its base, the tree of two bent by the prevailing winds, the grassy knolls, the sheep-folds, the play of the clouds across the top and the changing light and the individual character of the place will make itself known to the seer.  It is only by taking our time and letting the scenery unfold  that we can begin to see it as it is.  Then it will not simply be a fleeting impression but an understanding of the character of the place.  

Happiness is....

      "The more childish and unworldly a person’s disposition is, the more happiness he gets from such simple things as air, water, sun, earth-mould, sand, leaves, bread, butter, honey, or the still more primeval sensation of a certain delicious drowsiness in his own limbs.  

This is what I mean by my recurrent image of the ichthyosaurus. What I am trying to indicate by “the ichthyosaurus-sensation” is nothing less than this simple primeval happiness in the immediate experience of being alive. 

To blink at that mysterious god, the sun; to stare at that equivocal goddess, the moon ; to watch the incredible shapes of the clouds, as they pile up above the horizon ; to observe in early afternoon, a certain yellowish light upon a brick wall; to note a certain dark-blue wave of colour, as it sinks down upon the roofs of a city after sunset; to catch the ink- black silhouettes of bare branches against a November sky, just before the windows are lamp-lit in a roadside village ; to feel the ploughed-up earth under your feet, and a cold wet wind upon your face ; to sit over a fire of wood or of red, coals, thinking the long thoughts of vague race-memories—all these things, belonging to a world of psychic-physical sensations that go back to the beginnings of consciousness, are the stuff of which the secret of life is made."

John Cowper Powys

In Defense of Sensuality