Looking, but not seeing

August 17, 2012

I cannot tell you how many times I have walked past the painting that hangs on the wall across from our hospital gift shop. What I can tell you is that I never saw it until two weeks ago. If you had asked me before then if I’d ever seen it, I would have said “of course,” with the same smug confidence I would have used had you asked me if I knew the sun rises in the East. But I hadn’t seen it at all.

The woman who revealed the painting to me had been a patient in our hospital a few months back. She had come to talk with me about becoming a spiritual support volunteer. She is an artist I found out and after our conversation, I walked with her toward the front entrance of the hospital to see her off. The painting caught her eye. “It’s lovely,” she said as she walked toward it. Eventually, she got so close to it that her face was almost touching it. “It’s silk!” she said, “How beautiful!”

I walked closer to investigate and was amazed. The artist had used hundreds of brightly colored bits of silk cloth to “paint” a school of Japanese koi swimming in a pond. Up close, I could see the individual pieces that I had missed so many times before. Each piece had been meticulously placed to present the whole picture in such a way that you could not tell they were separate pieces if you were more that a few inches away.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about that painting and the detail I didn’t see for the last eight years. What else and who else have I missed seeing because I haven’t looked closely enough? I don’t know the answer to that. But I’m looking.

Blessing to you all,

Jerald