On my first day at Richard Rohr’s Living School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I sat in a circle of strangers (soon friends) as everyone described his or her contemplative practice. We had yoga, Centering Prayer, chanting, sitting meditation, surfing, even drinking coffee, but when we came to John from New Zealand, he said that when he does a walking meditation he tries to look at the space between the branches instead of the branches themselves. That was it. One sentence. Ah, thought I, what we called in art school the “negative space.”
So, out I was on my daily walk near my home in Northern California and I snapped a cellphone photo of an old favorite dog-walking path to send to our daughters in New York City. It was an ordinary photo of an ordinary, if beautiful, day, meant only to document a place and time.
As I walked on, I decided to try John’s method of looking at the space between the objects. I peered at the patterns between the branches. I inhaled the air I shared with the shrubby landscape. I gazed deeply into, well, what I usually think of as “nothing.”
And suddenly I was drinking a deeper world. I had tumbled into a liminal space. The earth was connected to me and I to it in a profoundly new way. I was on a different walk. I had found my practice.
I wanted to see if I still saw what I thought I had seen once I was off the trail, so I took a few pictures on the way back.
Do you see it?
Contemplative Seeing 