In-seeing

“Have your binoculars ready!

My neighbor called to me just after I had turned away from my bird-watching window, after I had finished my breakfast with the birds: the sprightly chickadees, hungry finches and the upsidedown feeder-feeding nuthatch. Right after I had turned on the computer to start writing.

“Have your binoculars ready.” He meant, I know, the eagles; to be watchful for the pair of eagles nesting downstream.  Be ready for their fly-by outside my window. But It was time to write my post about early February; the season of the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolg, a Druid agricultural lunar sabbath welcoming returning warmth to the earth. Melded into the Christian Candlemas, or St.Brigit’s Day, the feast day honors the Druid Abbess Brigid of Kildare, goddess of the hearth and fertility. Definitely more than enough material for an article!

But I couldn’t settle, couldn’t start putting words on the screen.  Something about his message wouldn’t let me go.  It was in that word: “binoculars.”  Bi-ocular, two eyes: an eye to see, yes, perhaps even eagles, and then a second eye, to see with the heart.  Sometimes called in-seeing, one looks beneath, beyond the surface and into the heart. Into your heart, into my own.  The kind of seeing that, paradoxically, calls not only on that metaphorical “second eye” but also doesn’t need to rely on sight.

“Have your binoculars ready.”  Keep eyes open to all that passes by the window, yes, the beauty of it. And the eyes of my heart? Keep them ready, alert and aware of all that passes in and through and out.  Imagine that downstream something else, far beyond the eagles’ nest something waits. Trust that my in-seeing heart-eye will be cast downstream so that I will one day know what is not yet known.

For it could fly by anytime.

I’ll have my binoculars ready.