Changing my perspective
Our living room isn’t very big. My architect spouse would call it intimate, which, translated, means small, but I love it. It’s warm and comfortable, a room where we’ve been able to mesh the pieces of furniture that we’ve collected, refinished and repaired over the years and hung pictures we like. My favorite spot, the place where I read, is at the far end of the love seat, next to the narrow table with the cracked wooden top where the light shed from the lamp is just right. How many books, adventures, mysteries and histories have I consumed while I sat there?
From this place, my view of the living room is the fireplace with chairs on each side of it and the tiny collection of bottle brush trees that I’ve put in the window that overlooks the dogwood tree.
Last week, the cats, and you know how it is with cats, took my seat on the sofa and I had to sit elsewhere. I chose the ancient wicker chair that we bought the year we moved to Marcellus. A small collection of cedar filled pillows lives on this chair and so, after rearranging them to make myself comfortable and settling in with my book, I glanced up and, voila! I saw a whole new living room. From this chair, this viewpoint, I took in so much that had existed only as items that I knew were there rather than parts of a whole … a different living room.
I saw the sofa with the sleeping cats, the lovely deep mahogany desk which we rescued from a junk shop in Syracuse and which, with some delicate paint removal, became the lustrous beauty that it always was and is. There was the gallery of pictures, some from local artists including my husband, and some piece that we found at garage sales and such. Our multi-paned front door and the stained glass insert that our son gave us so many years ago brought different lights to that part of the room. It struck me how different the view and my reaction to it. I pleasantly spent time luxuriating in the knowledge that my living room still had the power to surprise and delight.
My sense of this room had been crafted by the place from which I viewed it. Of course I knew and have seen all that is in the room, but the comfortable constellation that I saw from the love seat was not the whole room, merely that part with which I had become imprinted by years of association with one view.
How limited did I make my world with that one view? I decided to challenge what I saw and how I felt about the rest of the house. I sat on the stool that is reserved for guests in our kitchen, in the chair reserved for the cats in the family room, viewed each bedroom from a different corner and, as with my living room epiphany, I was seeing a different house.
Ok, well, it’s not like I took a trip to Paris, the pandemic being one factor involved in both my homebody peregrinations and my options, but I think it has meaning, and actually was a way to experience the world as a traveler might when you can’t travel.
My passport expired sometime in the 90s and I haven’t been able to get one of those new Real ID driver’s licenses that will be necessary for air travel next year. I do have my sprightly little blue car. I do have a cane and, for more enthusiastic jaunts, a pair of walking sticks. Travel, new experiences, new viewpoints … for me has to take a more inventive approach. I like to think of myself as a pilgrim, a person for whom the journey is as important as the goal.
I would love to be one of the enthusiastic pilgrims that follow the routes through France and Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Campostela in Galacia. The journey, which has been undertaken thousands upon thousands of times for hundreds of years has meanings that are both spiritual and secular, meshing the conviviality of shared experiences with the legendary hospitality of the countryside. Although that is no longer a physical possibility for this gal I can still experience it vicariously through literature and film. I can craft a knowledge base, even prepare the kinds of food that a pilgrim on this path would eat, examine media depictions of what a pilgrim would see and write to those who have completed the pilgrimage. My resources for this journey? At the end of my fingers and in the multilevel resources of the library.
Despite my limitations, the library can take me anywhere on any pilgrimage that I can choose or design. A good book can bring me to places real or fictional. Other tomes can teach me a skill or help me perfect one in which I’ve only dabbled. Horizons of learning are limitless.
Just before the pandemic broke, I participated in a Wellness Discussion Group that met each month at the library. The discussions were led by a physician who specialized in urgent care. We read two rather hefty books, one about alternative treatment methods and, almost prophetically, one about the immune system. Besides the informative and energizing discussions in the group, the information was invaluable to me when the pandemic broke out
I viewed the eclipse on the library lawn, spent many hours learning at library-based classes about herbs, met and talked with a gentleman who knew the author of “All Creatures Great and Small,” a favorite book of mine. I traipsed over hill and dale along with other library-inspired hikers to come in one to one contact with wild food resources and so much more. I enjoyed the song stylings of a local barbershop group during the Christmas season.
The library is the jumping-off place for infinite numbers of pilgrimages. Others are more personal.
The change of viewpoint can be a way to re-evaluate our perception of people with whom we disagree, for whom we have crafted a picture based on one way of seeing them. What am I missing, what talents, gifts, conversations, discussions, kindnesses, if I see only that with which I find fault? I am working on this every day, hoping others will see me from a different place, too.
But, this week, I am going to investigate the concept of pilgrimage in its basic sense, gathering books and periodicals on the subject. I’ll explore what the electronic media offers, and I will happily bring the former home to sit with me at the end of the love seat where the light is right and where I will go on my next journey of discovery …. unless the cats are sleeping there.
