Only the wounded eye can see

I came up with this phrase while meditating yesterday. It was inspired by something my dear friend Andrew Johnstone told me recently.

At the Intentional Table, we find ourselves circling back to an important theme with a recurring and increasing frequency: Gratitude. It's an incredibly overused, misused, and, I think, sometimes misleading term. Oxford says, “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.”

In the latter part of that sentence is the key, which is ‘returning.’ There is an idea that we commonly refer to in Intentional Creativity known as ‘sacred reciprocity.’ Sacred reciprocity is like gratitude in action. It means not only being thankful for that which you do have but also for what you do not have. As the old adage goes, “Be careful what you wish for.” Once, as a younger person, for an art installation at Burning Man, I took photographs from an art collection that were taken at the festival where participants were asked to write on a card why they do what they do. Then, the participants had a photograph taken with their answers on the board. If you were asked, “Why do you do what you do?” what would your response be? May I suggest you pause here and write that down, like now, please?

Here, below, is my answer to this question. This was (I think) in 2010 or so. I had been in the desert for a month, working for the festival in telecom. This was before I knew anything about Intentional Creativity, had met Shiloh, or lived in California.

Why do you do what you do? ~ My answer

It’s amazing that I still operate soundly upon these ideas that I created on paper with a sharpie in the desert in about the space of time that it took me to write it out. They just came out that way.

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Now, here I am, 14-odd years later, and the volume of the voices in my head asking for me to pay attention to gratitude are basically yelling at me. If you know my story, you may find this interesting. In the last 2 years, I have had 2 minor strokes in my left eye. The last one separated the disk where the optic nerve enters the eye from the retina. Now I have a dark shadow behind where the disk was attached that tracks with my sight. It will never get better, so it’s my new companion. I was also diagnosed with kidney cancer last March. It was stage 3 and mean. All the cancer was located within the boundaries of the kidney, so there was no chemo or radiation, just removal. My spleen was affected, and that is what killed me on the table. (They brought me back quickly, it appears.)

So, let’s take a closer look at what in the world I may be grateful for, and perhaps there is something in here for you, too.

I once wrote a white paper that sought to prove the existence of God using improbability as the argument. Basically, it was that it is SO improbable that there is a God, AND if every equation must balance, THEN it’s so infinitesimally improbable that there is God that there MUST be one. The theory of conservation of energy underwrites this thought. “conservation of energy. : a principle in physics that states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed and that the total energy of a system by itself remains constant.” So you see, opposites attract and repel alike.

I cannot count what I am grateful for because there are too many items on the list. I am equally grateful for the other list of things that have not occurred. I am sure that if you did an exercise to write it all out, you would also find, when truly examined, that your list would wrap around the building, too.

So, I like the mindful route, the simple route, the beautiful route. Here is my conjecture: reduce all of the things that flood your mind about what you are grateful for into a word, a sentence, perhaps. Something you can write on a note card that is emblematical of the whole enchilada. You see mine at the top of this post.

“Only the wounded eye can see.”

Kind of a meme, sort of a quote, rather like a poem in one line. That is what you seek.

My wounded eye sees the world through shadow now. It’s an amazing contrast to the right eye. I see the light, and I see the shadow. I hold them both as a part of my practice, and well, it’s not like I can un-see it, right? I am being allegorical about this, and why not? It works.

I will endeavor to make my gratitude actionable within the next 2 seconds. Not tomorrow, not now, RIGHT NOW. Ready? You are already there. You already read it. This message is not just a public service announcement… it’s an invective for you to see more clearly, right through the wounds. Light and shadow mean nothing without each other. Without contrast, you have no place to make a stand as to where you are, where you want to be, and under what conditions. I am quietly adding contrast to my gratitude library.

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan