Wednesday, December 19, 2007

believing is seeing

"We say, "Seeing is believing," but actually... we are all much better at believing than seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can't believe." Robert Anton Wilson
















It’s the anniversary of my father’s suicide. A year or so after, a friend was looking at our family photograph album and was aghast at this photograph. She kept repeating “oh my god, why is this in here! Oh, my god!” I couldn’t figure out why, until she pointed out the noose around my dad’s neck.

I’d never seen it before, although I knew the photograph well. It had been taken in old Tucson and the baby my father was holding was me. I had always liked the way his lower hand was snugly holding me, and the way I seemed to be looking into his heart. It startled and appalled me that I had grown up loving that picture and had never seen the noose. I showed it to my sisters and was even more shocked to find they too couldn’t see the noose until it was pointed out to them. Such is the power of denial. Such is the power of family systems. Such is the power of belief.

This week I haven’t been able to stop thinking of this photograph. How often do we not see what is right in front of us? How often do we delete from our sight what is obvious to others? A client said to me today about a situation she’d been in for years; “I drank the kool-aid. But, I’ve been realizing that the only way to stay there was to drink it.” It wasn’t an abusive situation that she was in, just one that now she was out of she found herself open to all sorts of other perceptions of the world. In order to function in the families, relationships, communities, and work situations that we find ourselves in, we have to drink a bit of kool-aid. We have to distort our wide-open perception and tune out things that we aren’t even aware we are tuning out. Or do we?

This is what I have been mulling over for the past week. Is it at all possible to truly see outside of our beliefs? And what do we give up when we choose seeing over believing?

My father’s suicide gave me my spirituality. It sent me to the coast of Oregon and it directed me to tune into the rhythm of moon and tides. I eventually came to San Francisco and found people I began to call family. We formed covens together, did political actions and risked arrest and even bought land in the country together. I spent seventeen years with my blood family and had my father in my life for twenty two years. I stayed in my chosen family for almost a decade more than that.

Besides the actual people, I attached and committed myself to the traditions that we were building and clung to the beliefs we held true. Reclaiming and Feri – both ecstatic traditions of magic – have been just as formative to my being as my original family. And so too, my coven sisters, in both shadow and light. As a child of a suicidal parent, I found comfort and joy in wedding myself to the life force and committing myself to serve it. I know that I’m a better human and a better therapist for it. I'm better for what I have believed in.

And. There’s a noose in the picture that the last few months have opened my eyes to. Like my blood family, I’ve known that there were things amiss well before I could see the noose. And like my family, I’d already separated myself quite a bit. But something changes upon seeing things outside of beliefs.

The photograph of my father holding me is well worth a thousand words. I am forever grateful for the ways in which my father held me and the ways in which my chosen family held me. Both, also, have broken my heart. Hearts can mend, and mine seems remarkably resilient, but there were many things I couldn’t see until I got some separation, until I was willing and able to let go of beliefs I had formerly cherished. Isn’t this true for just about everything and everybody?

This solstice, may the light return and be gentle with us. Sometimes it’s painful to see things clearly. Liberation is, in fact, difficult to adjust to. It means seeing, rather than believing. And who, really, can do that?

7 comments:

Aquila ka Hecate said...

I can hardly believe I'm reading this - just now, when I have opened myself to letting go of beliefs and trying to sort out that which is from that which I wish wre so.
I've just finished my latest blog post on a subject so similar to yours that I'm overwhelmed, again.
Love,
Terri in Joburg

Anonymous said...

"We have to distort our wide-open perception and tune out things that we aren’t even aware we are tuning out. Or do we?"

My vote is yes, and I think it is because that is how perception works. For the eye to focus on one thing makes the rest of the picture blur a bit. For us to say one thing means that an infinite number of other things are left unsaid.

And humans change slowly. Glacially sometimes, if at all. Above all, may we have compassion for ourselves and the many potions we drink in order to get by. May they fall away effortlessly, one by one, as we tap more deeply into the heart of the world that is a salve for all wounds, fresh and ancient.

Anne

Aquila ka Hecate said...

I also didn't see the noose in the photgraph until I read your friend's reaction- then I looked again and saw it.
But what is it doing there?
I used to have many photos from about the same time period, and I can't think of a reason why a man would pose with his daughter in his arms with a noose around his neck.
That's really strange.

Love,
Terri in Joburg

Anonymous said...

We can see more. We can. But it takes a lot of healing and a lot of time.

Love to you in the time of light entering darkness once again.

Mercury Redbone said...

What an unusual legacy that photo is. I didn't see the noose until I read... and then it was glaringly obvious. I can't imagine what it felt like for you to see it after having not seen it all those years.

My mother died in a car accident when I was four. She left letters three days before, indicating a strong foreknowledge. This has been a complex legacy, and one tied deeply to my spirituality.

My mother was fetishized after her death, and it's only in adulthood that I can see her as a human being, and one with much less life experience than I now have. It has been strange to go from seeing her as a God-like figure--post-death--to a human being increasingly younger and more naive than I am.

Parents... that work seems to be recurrent and ever-unfolding.

Anonymous said...

Reading this was a revelation in itself; the notion that we can see without seeing is one with which many of us think we're familiar, but until a specific veil is lifted we don't truly know what it means.

I sometimes think seeing without seeing is a survival instinct now going wrong more often than right; it's certainly the case in relationships where honesty isn't happening on both sides, thus enabling individuals to keep going down a certain path, or when people don't see themselves as they really are, say in disorders such as body dysmorphia.

Reality is far more malleable than most people choose to believe, it being more comforting to think of things as evermore, fixed, unchanging. But of course, change is the only constant and perhaps sometimes we like to blind ourselves to things in order to obtain some security, no matter how false it might be.

This entry certainly provides much food for thought. Thank you for sharing. x

We Takurosu said...

Thoughtful blog, thanks for posting