By Olivia Dugenet
Cover photo courtesy of Olivia Dugenet
We met up at a grocery store parking lot near the base of Mount Spokane on a winter afternoon. The ladies all hugged and transferred their snowshoes and backpacks into my car. On the drive up, after some small talk, I was surprised at how quickly a ribbon of sadness worked its way through our stories. Death, day jobs, marriage, divorce, midlife, wasted time. Just the pain of living, I suppose.
While the conversation grew darker, so did the landscape. The winding road took us deep into heavy forests, green turning to black. Daylight faded. Just when I thought we would all break apart and cry, my car emerged from the trees on a wide-open ridgeline above a valley of burning light. I pulled the car over. We clambered up a steep snowbank and there it all was—endless congregations of evergreens lit with snow and alpenglow, the sky a complicated pattern of light and mist, and the sun falling into its own pool of liquid fire. Other people stopped their cars and stood along the snowbank. Some started to sing. What a feast of gratitude. An antidote.
But why? What was it about that particular visual configuration that pulled all those random people together into a state of collective reverence?
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed the act of seeing involves more than just resting our gaze on a thing, but that it brings us into communication with the world, each visual experience “… a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances.”
Pour your gaze all over some earthly thing and see that you are also a shape, a visible object, standing across from the thing, its gaze pouring all over you, too. Your inner experience and the external world are both spilling away through their opposite horizons, disappearing into the unknowable. The unknowable spills back into the visible world between you, into the straits you are sailing, your body the vessel. The wonder you feel is the wonder you are.
We drove away feeling unburdened, almost floating. We couldn’t stop laughing. We snowshoed up the mountain and joyfully froze our asses off at a full-moon picnic on that cold indigo night, every snow-laden tree a pillar of light and the world shining beneath us.
