I Don't Know What Happens There

“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

The future home of sunflowers.

At the heart of who I am becoming is a desire to learn to see. And like Rilke notes, I feel that the desire alone tills a little of the hard soil that might grow new eyes. This is an act of prayer, maybe not prayer as I always thought of it in early stages of life, but to make attempts at learning to see is to say to Creator: Help me see. A prayer.

And this act of release is as unassuming as pushing a sunflower seed a half an inch below the ground. With the tip of my right pointer finger I pressed, gentle, a seed into the earth, right by the gray water release of our 1982 Airstream. This is what it means to desire new eyes. Following Rilke’s words I find it is true, in desiring to learn to see, that the world I encounter in every living thing enters me in a space so deep it is like roots pushing beyond the point in which they used to stop, or the point I made them stop, even if I didn’t mean to create such an impediment. The breaking through, the becoming, if you will, seems to be unfurling with unhurried tenderness.

Below the ground of my interior is, as Rilke puts it, one that “I never knew of.” And I’m finding that words I’ve spoken in the past to groups of people who I loved and cared for are circling back to speak to me. A woman who used to be part of the church I co-pastored sent me a text message asking about the origin of some words I’d shared before. I must’ve spoken these words with the soft pressure of my pointer finger and as I pressed the soil received the words, and now a couple years after I last saw her it seems they’ve bloomed like a sunflower.

She told me she was being trained in spiritual direction. She told me these words had stayed with her and she wanted to acknowledge the way in which they grew in her after I spoke them and she was curious where they originated. Her assumption was correct. They belonged to Howard Thurman and she remembered them just as he had written them and just as I had spoken them. Thurman wrote,

“The human spirit has to be explored gently and with unhurried tenderness.”

And so each morning I take a watering can and sprinkle water on the seeds we planted behind our Airstream. There beneath the surface of the earth, like the interior of my learning-to-see self, water and light pass into it, even as a reality remains in the underground:

I don’t know what happens there.