On Learning To See The Unseen

Your monthly Soul Story with Sez

Fellow Steward of the Heart,

I was once scolded for drawing a picture of a tree.

The art teacher had asked us to go outside and spend time with a plant, flower or tree. We were to study it closely and then draw it in detail in our school sketchbook. Once our time was up, we would be called back to the classroom to show our sketches to our classmates.

These drawings were to be displayed on the much-envied wall of fame for our parents to see at the end of the term.

So I drew a Jacaranda tree which was planted in the school playground. It stood short and broad - and was dressed in bright violet which reminded me of my Polish great-grandmother.

I spent most of my time studying its lilac flute flowers and its fernlike leaves. I made thick black pencil lines for the boughs and even placed a piece of bark underneath the paper so I could rub the lead over its rough skin and give texture to the sketch.

Creative use of materials; my teacher will appreciate that, I remember thinking.

I felt skilled in this particular task. I was a country child after all, who saw this tree as a friend. I spent many years playing with the Jacarandas that grew in parallel lines down our farm’s driveway.

When we eventually returned to class, I was asked to show my picture to my classmates.

From the simmerings of a few snorts, the class quickly boiled over into raucous laughter.

The teacher squinted at my paper and then asked me to turn it the other way around (because perhaps that was what was wrong with it…) But it looked the same upside down as it did downside up.

Evidently frustrated, the teacher scowled at me and asked if I had understood her simple instructions.

I nodded, confused, in a way most 7-year-olds do when they believe more nodding equals less punishment.

She held the picture up again and compared it to the others which had been neatly pinned on a line above her like newly washed dishcloths.

I still couldn’t see what was wrong with my tree…

Until she folded the paper up and cut off half the image.  

And then it matched the others perfectly.

What she had cauterized were my tree’s intricate dangling roots, its underground communication centre, its switchboard of wiry threads, its flowing veins, its water seekers, and the stability that anchored it deep into the soil.

I had made a tree whose roots matched the breadth and width of its canopy. It looked like a biological illustration of a lung on its side, which did not match what others had drawn.

“I asked you to draw what you saw, so why did you draw roots?” The teacher asked.

I had seen the roots. I had seen them crest up through the dirt and then dive back down into the ground again like a sea monster. I had felt their silky, prayer-rubbed bark through the gravel where they had been repeatedly scuffed by rubber-soled shoes.

I did not understand. Was I to lobotomize my tree to fit her requirements?

Needless to say, my picture never made it to the wall of fame. It was exiled because it had shown what was unseen.

And because life has a way of bending to these kinds of hard-handed lessons, suddenly the world began to match what I was taught about selective blindness.

I began to chop roots off pictures of flowers, planting them on horizontal lines without topsoil, and then houses were built on perfectly flush grounds without foundations, and then came the lifeless oceans and moonless day-skys, and then even absent siblings began to fall off the edge of family pictures because they weren’t in my peripheral vision.

There’s a lot we can’t see. There’s a lot that exists beneath our severed world.

And yet if we want to heal a tree, a plant, a family, a mind – we need to go to the roots. We need to learn to see the unseen.

Because what’s beneath the surface of life and unseen to most of the world, is what nourishes life.

How we are seen on the surface and what we do in the world is nothing compared to how we relate to ourselves. We can be all kinds of sweetness on the outside but deeply embittered within – and consequently, what’s on the inside has a way of eventually either rotting or blossoming what’s on the outside, so it is very much worth the patience it takes to excavate our foundational beliefs.

The within is what matters above all. The consistency of supportive self-talk, the self-love when all else is loveless, the self-kindness when all else is uncaring, the fierce resilience when all else is tempered, the self-motivation when all else is lethargic - is what nurtures our eventual bloom.

If you feed the roots of you, you land up feeding the Whole Self and when the Whole Self is being lived in the external world, you become nourishment to everything you touch.

So draw more roots. Learn to see the unseen by giving it value and by letting it be pinned up alongside the other ways of viewing life. Because our selective blindness might be what’s inhibiting us from seeing the reality of our Wholeness.

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If you would like to deepen your relationship with your inner life, join us on the Whole-Self Midwifery podcast every Monday. Converse with myself and other like-hearted souls who support the inner journey.