Wondering at Weasels

I used to work at Brighton Ski Resort in Utah. I spent a little bit of my time actually working and a whole lot of it snowboarding. For several months I enjoyed my time in the mountains. One day, late in the season, I was riding up the lift with my friend, Danny. He said, "I love those weird little weasel things that are always in the trees around here."

"What weasel things?"

"You know, those white weasels or ermines or whatever they are. Look, there's one right there." He pointed to a passing pine tree.

I saw nothing. "What are you talking about?" I asked.

"Seriously? You don't see it? It's looking right at us."

"I don't see anything. Where?"

"Well, it's too late now." We had passed the tree by this point. He seemed impatient that I couldn't see what was clearly obvious to him. "I'll show you the next time we ride up."

We got off the lift and snowboarded down the mountain. On the next ride up, Danny was watchful and ready. About halfway up the mountain, he said, "There's one. Eye level. On that little branch just left of the trunk of the tree. Do you see it?"

And I did! A little white weasel was perched on a tree branch watching us go by. It was quite possibly the cutest thing I had ever seen. If you don't believe me, just look at this photo of one from "Fur and Feathers 500":

Long-Tailed Weasel photographed by Brian at "Fur and Feathers 500"

It turns out, they're called a long-tailed weasel, and they're quite common. I hadn't noticed a single one the entire time I had been working at Brighton (or in all the prior years I'd been going there), but from that day on, I saw them everywhere. It was such a strange experience to realize that this amazing creature had been in plain sight all along, and I had never noticed it. I needed my friend, Danny, to see it for me and then patiently point it out when I was too blind to see it for myself.

In my last post, "Creating Spaces", I stated that the highest goal of the writer and artist is to create spaces in the minds of readers/viewers where they can meditate on the most important and sacred things. Just like the long-tailed weasels up at Brighton, these sacred and important things are often hiding in plain sight, but "...[our] ears are dull of hearing, and [our] eyes have [we] closed" (Acts 28:27). We sometimes need someone to lend us their eyes, so we can see and their ears so we can hear.

In Bishop Gérald Caussé's April 2015 L.D.S. conference talk, he said, "There are so many wonders in this world. However, sometimes when we have them constantly before our eyes, we take them for granted. We look, but we don’t really see; we hear, but we don’t really listen." He points out that "Our ability to marvel is fragile" and that we can easily become "insensitive to even the most remarkable signs and miracles..."

The poet William Meredith said, "The worst that can be said of a man is that he did not pay attention.” So how do we start paying attention to the miracles all around us? How do we reawaken our higher senses so that we don't lose our ability to marvel?  How do we open our eyes and ears so we can use our talents to help others to see and hear? Well, musician Brandon Heath might be able to offer some insight with his song "Give Me Your Eyes". Listen to it and watch the video on YouTube here. Some of the lyrics are below:

"Give Me Your Eyes" by Brandon Heath

Looked down from a broken sky

Traced out by the city lights

My world from a mile high

Best seat in the house tonight

Touched down on the cold black top

Hold on for the sudden stop

Breathe in the familiar shock

Of confusion

And chaos

All those people goin' somewhere

Why have I never cared?

Give me Your eyes for just one second

Give me Your eyes so I can see

Everything that I keep missing

Give me Your love for humanity

Give me Your arms for the broken-hearted

The ones that are far beyond my reach

Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten

Give me Your eyes so I can see

Step out on a busy street

See a girl and our eyes meet

Does her best to smile at me

To hide what's underneath

There's a man just to her right

Black suit and a bright red tie

Too ashamed to tell his wife

He's out of work, he's buyin' time

All those people goin' somewhere

Why have I never cared?

[Chorus]

I've been there a million times

A couple of million eyes

Just move and pass me by

I swear I never thought that I was wrong

Well I want a second glance

So give me a second chance

To see the way You've seen the people all along

[Chorus]

Both Bishop Gérald Caussé and Brandon Heath are telling us that we need the help of the Holy Spirit if we hope to stay sensitive to the beauty, truth, and miracles hiding in plain sight all around. In his talk, Bishop Gérald Caussé went on to say, "When we have the Spirit with us, our spiritual senses are sharpened and our memory is kindled so we cannot forget the miracles and signs we have witnessed."

There are beautiful little long-tailed weasels all around us (figuratively speaking, of course, unless your reading this on your phone while riding the lift up the mountain at Brighton). We only need ask the Lord to help us to see them and then actively go out looking. Only then will we have something worth creating in our art and writing.

Creating Spaces

Hemingway wrote in his essay The Art of the Short Story that "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood." He called this the "iceberg theory" or the "theory of omission". Hemingway very intentionally left out what was often the most important part of the story leaving it up to the reader to fill the empty niche. The effect on the reader is sometimes a sense of the surreal, mystical, or mysterious or sometimes a sense of longing or, for lack of better words, a kind of aching hunger.

Christopher Terry, an art professor at Utah State University, illustrates this concept perfectly in his painting "Interior with a Niche". When I first stumbled onto this painting, it made me crazy because I couldn't explain why I liked it so much. It has everything that I generally dislike in a painting: realism, symmetrical composition, and mundane subject matter. Why then did it haunt me? Certainly the quality of the light is alluring (it makes me sigh and grow pleasantly sleepy every time I look at it). But that wasn't enough to explain why I couldn't stop thinking about it. Finally, I realized it was that darn niche. Everything in the painting draws the eye to the niche. It's at the center of the composition, the lines in the ceiling all point right at it, and it's directly above the table almost as if the table were only there to support it. Then, after Terry does all that work to draw your eye to the niche, he leaves it empty! I love it! If there were anything at all in the niche, I wouldn't have given this painting a second glance, but by leaving it empty, Terry creates tension in the mind of the viewer. Maybe we even ask ourselves, what would I put in that niche? What belongs there? Terry, like Hemingway, seems to have very intentionally left out the most important part to make us "feel something more than we understand". There are quiet, peaceful places in the interiors of our minds, "clean, well-lighted places", that feel remarkably like this. Do we have anything important there to meditate on?

"Interior with a Niche" by Christopher Terry

It makes me think of Mary shortly after the birth of Jesus. Imagine her in a quiet moment, finally alone in the stable with her sleeping baby. A few dust motes float in the crisp morning light angling in through the door. In the distance can be heard the commotion of waking patrons in the inn, the clop of hooves in the street, a vendor calling out to passing travelers, but, despite these sounds, for Mary, the moment is quiet. Luke writes, "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." Mary had a peaceful niche in the interior of her mind where she could meditate on the most important thing of all: our Savior.

"Mary's Heart" by Liz Lemon Swindle

The highest goal of the writer and artist is to create spaces like these in the minds of our readers/viewers. Places where they can meditate on the most important and sacred things. These things are so often what's right in front of people, but "...their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed" (Acts 28:27). This is the most beautiful service a writer or artist can do: lend them our eyes so they can see and our ears so they can hear!










  

There is a Crack in Everything

I once got the idea to write my wife a series of texts throughout the day to show her how much I loved and appreciated her. I started by stealing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's line "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Then, every hour or so throughout the day I sent her texts that listed all the things I loved about her. Not the most original idea, I know, but it was just a whim of mine that I thought she might enjoy. I decided the way to really show her how much I loved her was to list all the little idiosyncrasies that I adore about her. Just the funny little things, unique to only her, that someone who didn't know her as well as me might never notice. All day long I sent them to her, and all day long I patted myself on the back thinking what a romantic genius I was. When I got home, I found her a little bit upset. How could she possibly be upset when she was married to a Casanova like me? I wondered. She handed me her phone and let me read through the texts. It read like a long, detailed list of all her flaws and shortcomings. Though I certainly didn't mean it that way, I couldn't deny that was exactly how it sounded.

In his song "Anthem", Leonard Cohen sings,

Leonard Cohen

"Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in."

I suppose that's what I was trying to say to my wife in my misbegotten texts: It's her perfect little "flaws" that I love so much about her; that they aren't really flaws at all to me. 

Despite my good intentions, my attempt to woo my wife through my texts was an absolute failure. However, Cohen's lyrics remind us all that we need to accept our creative failures. It's through our "cracks" that we get the opportunity to progress and grow. It's through the very things we consider to be our weaknesses, Cohen tells us, that we gain enlightenment.

In a recent article in the L.D.S. magazine, Ensign, Wendy Ulrich echos Cohen's idea. She writes, "...it is crucial to understand that while sin inevitably leads us away from God, weakness, ironically, can lead us toward Him." Just as Cohen's cracks allow the light to get in, so too do our weaknesses allow God to enlighten us.

Why wouldn't this idea also apply to our creative weaknesses? Of course, how we respond to our weaknesses makes all the difference. Later in the Ensign article, Ulrich explains, "...we also do not grow spiritually unless we accept our state of human weakness, respond to it with humility and faith, and learn through our weakness to trust in God." I feel that you can very easily replace the word "spiritually" in this sentence with "creatively" or "artistically" and it would still hold true. In other words, if we will respond to our creative weaknesses with humility and faith, they will teach us to trust in God. By trusting in God, we will create the work that He always intended us to create. After all, "the Lord has more in mind for [us] than [we] have in mind for [ourselves]." (-Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles).