I Spy

We dragged our little trailer down a dirt road and up on a hill overlooking the Trona Pinnacles, an ancient lakebed covered with grotesque calcium spires called tufa, rising 140 feet in the air. It is as close as you can get to being on another planet without leaving this one and a favorite setting for science fiction. 

I was up early, squeezed behind our tiny table, trying to reassemble the pieces of my Christian faith. Mae Mobley, our cat companion, was sitting on a shelf stuck to the back window with suction cups. 

She stared at me, sphinx-like, as if she knew all the stuff I was trying to figure out but wasn’t about to tell me. I stared into her eyes, wondering what she saw through the vertical pupils. I went online and found pictures that were supposed to represent the world as a cat would see it, fuzzy with washed out color. I wasn’t convinced. These pictures were missing a critical piece—the mind of the cat. They assumed a cat’s brain processed optics like mine.  What did Mae Mobley’s mind make of what it saw? The only way to know that would be to become Mae Mobley.

I sat outside that evening watching bats zoom around, plucking insects out of the air, using sonar to guide them. I was astounded. But who knows? Sound frequencies might register to a bat as color. Picking insects out of the air might  be as easy for them as plucking a donut off a tray is for me. I thought of Brute, my childhood hunting dog. He could follow the path of a pheasant through the brush as easily as I drove down the Interstate. What might Brute see with his nose?

The assumption that human beings see things as they are is the kind of thing you would expect from a species that labels itself homo sapiens. (Sapiens means wise.) If there is any sense in which we deserve the label sapiens, it is not because we see but because we know that we do not. We perceive only 0.0035 percent of the color spectrum and hear a similar tiny sliver of the full range of sound. Images from the James Webb Space Telescope raise far more questions than they answer and at the quantum level, reality is as elusive as Schrödinger’s cat.

But just because I don’t see everything doesn’t mean I don’t see anything. My partial view is false only if it makes a claim to be complete. When I admire a sunset or thrill to music or feel love, or joy, or pain, the experience is as real as a drop of water in the ocean. 

If I arrogantly assume that what I see is all there is, then what I see is all I get. If I confess my ignorance, the door to the infinity swings open and I am in awe, immersed in the Whole.

Telling stories is our superpower. Believing them is our Achilles heel. Stories are an essential expression of our humanity but when we proclaim them to be eternal foundations they create conflict. Every war boils down to a clash of stories. As a Christian, I devoted my life to such stories. Whether I liked this or not (I didn’t), this always left me at odds with those who didn’t agree.

Coming together on the ground of shared perception offers better way to be together. Birds of a feather flock together, not because of a common creed, but because of shared perception. If we can hold our stories loosely and find our bond in shared perception, maybe we can become more like children on a playground and less like warriors on a battlefield. 

When my foundation shook, I did my best to repair it. When that didn’t work, I searched for another. In the end I accepted that all stories are human fabrications. A new question took center stage: “What do I see?” 

I began to sketch what I saw—not just the physical world, but also my inner world, my human experience. These sketches were crude at first, like an explorer’s early map. In time, they became more reliable and a useful tool to navigate my existence.